Miranda Skoczek

Posted: 02 Feb 2012  |  By: Prue Gibson

In recent years, as our younger artists welcome elements of design into their visual concepts, young designers are also allowing theories of art to enhance their designs. The recent Love Lace (2011) exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum was a combination of craft and visual art and its artworks would have sat comfortably among the Biennale of Sydney installations out at Cockatoo Island.

In 2010, the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council decried the lack of craft artists applying for their visual arts and craft grants and encouraged craft artists to throw their hats in the ring next time around. This is a shift away from the condescension of craft as a lesser medium of creativity but also a paradigm change that reflects the larger world. Literary hybrids are popular among academics and general readers alike. Musical fusions abound, ‘foodie’ composites are becoming more acceptable, too. The same goes for art.

With this antisupercilious mentality, a new breed of artists are opening up their hearts and imaginations to borderland imagery. Miranda Skoczek, who exhibits with Edwina Corlette Gallery in Brisbane, is an artist who blurs the line between painting, stencilling and gathering imagery from the worlds of both aesthetic design and conceptual art. Her imagery comprises the animal kingdom, designer chairs, rare birds, harlequin diamond-shaped colour patches and folk art.

There is a hand-made, hand-touched quality to her work that results from her technique of pouring, spraying, throwing and rubbing the paint onto the canvas. Like many artists influenced by design, her visual leaning is towards a northern and eastern European landscape vision rather than an Australian one. This is particularly important because of Skoczek’s heritage. She says, “I am of Polish descent and the folk art hailing from that region is a major influence on my practice, especially paper cut-outs and the embroideries of traditional dress. Cloth from nearly every corner of the world is of interest to me; there is something so appealing about the way embroidery can convey everything from ancestral traditions to innermost secrets.”

This nostalgic reference to eastern European scenery (the odd reindeer) and culture introduces the idea of a utopia. Skoczek is sentimental in her approach. She dreams of a perfect world: “a return to more romantic values. There is so much today that places the self at risk, I want to offer an escape where beauty is a religion.”

However, she is also attuned to outsider art and street art. This sensibility of ‘street graffiti-style art’ is strong in Brisbane where artists like Anthony Bennett and Anthony Lister have been so successful. The key is a combination of escapist subject matter (superheroes and objects of farcical beauty) combined with areas of unfinished canvas ... much like a city wall, where illegal work must be ended quickly, unfinished. This creates a dynamism and immediacy to the work.

Visual art and craft, the old and the new, the street and the studio: these combinations are the new language of emerging artists here and worldwide and invite careful scrutiny.

Images from top:

Miranda Skoczek, The Young and Colourful Doe, 2010, oil and acrylic on canvas, 168 x 137cm.

Miranda Skoczek, Mr Ramalama Bangbang, 2010, oil, acrylic and enamel on canvas, 90 x 153cm.
 
Miranda Skoczek, Road to Goodness, 2010, oil, acrylic and enamel on canvas, 168 x 137cm.