Anna Priluka
Resides Fox River, Te Waipounamu South Island
In her studio nestled in the forest on the rugged West Coast of Te Wai Pounamu South Island, Anna Priluka creates vibrant paintings and bold linocut prints. Meticulously rendering flora and fauna and combining with unusual juxtapositions of species; unexpected scale manipulations; and geometric mirroring. Anna’s art is a celebration of native ecology in all its diversity and abundance, an exploration into the ways we perceive the natural world, weaving scientific information together with a sense of the sacred.
Anna’s painting, Southern Ocean Scavenger (Antipodes Islands Ecosystem), in the Southward exhibition is a celebration of the plethora of thriving plant and wildlife in the Subantarctic Islands. She extends her ‘thanks to conservation biologist Robin Long, who worked on the Antipodes Islands earlier this year as part of the Tawaki Project, and kindly shared her on-the-ground experience, ideas and many excellent reference photos, especially close-ups of plants and insects.’
‘My work explores themes that are deeply rooted in the natural world, with all its wild abundance and incomprehensible complexity. Inspired by traditional botanical illustration, conversations with scientists and my own adventures into the hills, what began as attempts to celebrate ecological diversity have taken on a deeper layer of enquiry into different ways of perceiving the more-than-human world. Lists of scientific names become visual, the rare and the overlooked are illuminated, the familiar and the weird evolve together and perhaps, a shrine or portal is created; a doorway through which we can enter into conversation with this magnificent and animate web of existence, in which we are but tiny strands.’