Audio Transcript
So my name’s Tamika Grant-Iramu, I’ve been practising art since I was a young child. I was originally drawn to doing more drawing and painting disciplines but when I got to my university degree at the Queensland College of Art that’s when I really started to pursue the discipline of printmaking. I really felt like the printmaking discipline was a way for me to explore all different kinds of mediums combined into one. And it also, like art being quite a physical practice as well, my body felt quite connected with the methods and styles that I was doing there. A lot of my works are more about my visceral impressions of place so that might also just be wanting to capture through printmaking methods, how I felt that day, how the wind was blowing through the air, or also how the weather felt.
So the artwork that’s been collected by the Moreton Bay Regional Council is one of my older works from 2018 Carving memories: a new dialect, I really wanted to push myself into really exploring the carved line as a way to represent like, stories or memories. So that was really kind of a starting point and with ‘a new dialect’ in the title it kind of represents how I wanted to create a new language that was particular to me that could express my story.
I had one of my teachers at university ask during the process of my final semester critique if I had Islander heritage as well, because he was noticing that a lot of the mark making that I was using was quite similar to those practices. And it was true, I had a Papua New Guinean, Torres Strait Islander heritage and I realised this connection to my heritage that I hadn’t before which was the process of how I was carving. It was almost second nature to carve in that way.
To be able to connect in this way through a method of printmaking that I felt quite confident in, it ended up bringing me to communities of people that I now am able to share and learn from today. I would hope that when viewers are looking at my work they can see these smaller organic patterns and forms becoming a larger picture. I really enjoy using linocut carving, or relief print carving, to create works that are quite strong and bold, and have a sense of fluidity to them where I try to break away from the more geometric style that often linocut carving creates. So I hope that some people can come and see this relief print and see a work that’s quite bold and fluid and a bit unexpected by how it’s presented.