Award winning artist, Anna Glynn is the creator of a stunning new exhibition coming to the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery.  

Promiscuous Provenance explores colonial artworks by reimagining antipodean landscapes. In this solo exhibition, Glynn combines watercolour and ink works, 3D printed sculptures, a sound work and installation pieces, to explore our relationship with the colonial past, re-imagining early settlers’ depictions of the flora and fauna they encountered.

By combining the longstanding tradition of copying from artists and the colonial method of copying as a way of disseminating information, Glynn brings colonial works into a new focus.  Executive Director, Library and Information Services State Library of NSW, Louise Anemaat writes ‘Glynn’s sometimes surprising and disorientating combinations of historical and contemporary subjects insert history into the present.  And the present into history.  They remind us of just how wondrous and alienating the Australian landscape was…’

During the exhibition development process, Glynn worked with Indigenous Elder, Anthropologist and Archaeologist Les Bursill OAM. Bursill provided context for some of the images, offering a new layer of interpretation, and helped to identify local places Glynn discovered in colonial documentation.

This new body of work encourages us to question the notions of our ‘alien’ beginnings and demonstrates that our hybrid Australian identity has a ‘promiscuous provenance.’

Showing within the exhibition is a film by documentary producer Anna Thompson, who followed the exhibition process over 18 months.  The documentary Anna Glynn - The Artist behind Promiscuous Provenance was funded by the Shoalhaven Arts Board and provides insight into the making process, and the artistic intent of the exhibition.

Promiscuous Provenance is touring nationally over three years with the support of Visions of Australia.

About the artist

Anna Glynn is an award-winning multimedia artist who works with sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, film making, digital animation, photography, writing, music, and theatre. In 2016 her moving image work Cane won the Noosa Art Prize, with another of her works Above and Below recently acquired by the Parliament House collection.

Growing up on a farm on the banks of the Yarra River in Victoria and now living on the edge of the rainforest in NSW, her daily encounters with the Australian landscape and its creatures continually influence her work. Through multiple international residencies, Glynn has developed her practice and explored her unique take on the Australian landscape with an international perspective.

Image: Anna Glynn,‘Colonial Hybrid Reimagined from Joseph Lycett - View of the Female Orphan School, near Parramatta, 1824’, Ink, watercolour & pencil Arches paper  44cm X 57cm  2017