KATIE CLEMSON - GONE FISHING

Katie Clemson is an Australian painter-printmaker who specialises in linocuts. She is a member of the Australian Print Council and of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers here in the UK. With Rosemary Simmonds she co-wrote “The Complete Manual of Relief Printmaking”.

“Objects of destruction can be very beautiful. By radically changing the scale of something as small as a fishing fly, I can change it into an alien still life, something with a new meaning. In this set of mixed media images on paper I try to show flies with individual personalities.

When I learnt to cast a line some years ago in the UK, I was fascinated by the unspoken rules of fishing, the thrill of the chase always outweighed by respect for the fish! I've always fantasised about the ancient wise fish, hiding in his pond, watching the flies with disdain, and occasionally teasing the fisherman by surfacing.

Anne Bell has written a wonderful poem where she demonstrates these reversed roles. "Another Angle" is presented here as a digital loose leaf set, mingling her words with my images.

The habitats of trout and salmon are enormously varied. My memories are of the dark water holes in the New Forest in Southern England where the fish outfoxed me every time I visited. The image of water's reflective surface and the imagination of visual depth are of ongoing interest, shown here in some of the "habitat" prints in the exhibition, especially the linocut images from the Shoalhaven River in NSW.

Another series of linocuts, Pittwater Boatsheds, show the collection of much used boatsheds, from ancient to modern, on Scotland Island and Pittwater shores north of Sydney NSW, where some owners will sit for hours on a lazy evening with fishing line dangling and beer in hand...”