Rebecca Pierce

b.1963 Sydney, Australia

BIOGRAPHY

Rebecca Pierce is a practicing Artist and Designer. 

In 2001, after nearly twenty years involved in the fashion, design and licensing fields, Rebecca started painting and exhibiting on a full time basis. Rebecca has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia and overseas. She has been a finalist in major art prizes including the Glencore Percival Portrait Painting Prize, the Mosman Art Prize, the Heysen Prize, the Fishers Ghost Art Prize, the Hawkesbury Art Prize, the Hunters Hill Art Prize, the ANL Maritime Art Prize and the Willoughby Art Prize. Rebecca’s work is represented in corporate and private collections in Australia and Internationally.

Rebecca primarily works with paint, inks and fine points on canvas and paper. Her work initially with a design and finely detailed orientation harnesses these elements whilst exploring aspects of the natural and urban landscape. The interpretation of the human face and the reading of the landscape, effects of cyclical, emotional and climatic changes to ourselves and others responses to these are often drawn upon. The unpredictability of Rebecca’s subject, frequently rendered to create a third dimension, can often simultaneously create tension laced with elements of playfulness.

Rebecca currently lives and works in Sydney, balancing art making with her roles of running an art gallery and her design practice. The design work extends to corporate commissions as well as not-for-profit projects and charity work.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The forms in my work are often in the act of becoming, changing, evolving or resisting. The diversity of medium, colour and texture is in an attempt to heighten these states of flux. Tapping into the ever flowing and sparking subconscious, where movement and change is a constant, primal and sometimes tribal inferences come to the fore. 

Frequently I reference the frenetic pace we place upon ourselves, conscious or subconscious, and the suggestion of what we impose, berate and complain of, but do not always acknowledge, amend, rectify or accept. Technically, I am interested in making inks, sections of paper, aqua enamels and impasto paints more visceral and physical, with a body and texture of their own. The conscious choice of this diversity of medium within a single work is in anticipation that the contrasts will translate and heighten the ever changing. Luminous colours shouldering sections of print, nestled against washes of colour, bordering swathes of texture are there to drive this message further, the tension of these differing mediums and placement of pulsating colour to communicate friction and movement.

The process of painting is for me a metaphor for life and creation. As we are a part of nature our energies flow through what we do and often the materials we use. For me the paint is often imbued with a sense of the Artist themselves. Applying and moving the medium around the canvas, offering the medium its own flow and path, and at other times controlling and orchestrating its position and presence, manipulating its lead, creates a tension, being again another state of flux. These random movements, both innate and subliminal, engendering form and structure, can often provide a sense of verity and validity.

Rebecca Pierce CV