Gelli Frottage Mono mash up collage for ANZAC Day

Dr Jazmina Cininasst week, just before I packed up the studio I'd made at the family farm so I could move it back to the city, I made a mash up. I used the ghosted mountain and war memorial images from my mono print backing sheet and layered my torn gelli print experiments. I added frottage using the military symbology stencils. I found the thinnest stencils worked best over the Japanese paper with my graphite block.

I have enjoyed looking at Katrin von Maltzahn's work for inspiration. Her 'model drawings' gave me the idea of adding a more technical aspect to the natural look of the mountains through the stencilling. The darkness she creates in her frottages was also something I wanted to replicate in the foreground of my piece as I tried to add depth.

Loosely based on Afghan mountains, this piece talks to the layering of meanings and memory a landscape can have. Military symbology stencils are used to mark a map to plan an operation. The shapes and colours represent capability, location and intended actions. It is a specific way to look at an environment, which overlooks the ancient beauty of landscape, and what it means as a place. The faint abstract Australian War Memorial in the left foreground is a nod to the resting place of many in this war.

Lest we forget.

You can see more veteran art at https://research.greysen.com.au/

PS: My lecturer Jazmina Cininas suggested it would be interesting to take photos of this work in different contexts.

I took some photos of this work: indoors, as a nod to the interior world we live in during COVID-19, but also in our minds; and outdoors: representing the mountains of my childhood home meshed with those of the Afghan War.

I decided to add my dog tags with my new surname, Rae, as a kind of extra signature block to this piece.