Lex Palmer Bull

www.lexpalmerbull.com

Lex Palmer Bull is an emerging Australian printmaker/artist based in Launceston, Tasmania.

Following a Bachelor degree in Fine Arts majoring in Printmaking at the Victorian College of the Arts from 2008-2011, her artistic studies continued in 2018 in the form of an Honours degree at the University of Tasmania.

Lex’s work is preoccupied with the notion of uncertainty, and in particular the precipice of uncertainty as expressed through structural imagery. Inspired by modernist and visionary architecture, Lex’s work explores an uncertain future that references the past through abstracted forms and the medium of printmaking.

Combining traditional printmaking methodology with digital printmaking, her work’s material expression is symbiotic to its conceptual underpinnings.

In addition to a love of architecture, she is inspired by the structurally inclined works of artists such as Sol Lewitt, Agnes Martin and Isa Gensken – whose linear and grid aesthetics inform her minimalist, linear abstractions.

She has participated in multiple group exhibitions in Victoria, Tasmania and Japan and in 2019 had solo exhibitions at Meeniyan Art Gallery and Sawtooth ARI gallery. In August of 2018 she undertook an Artist residency at Cradle Mountain in conjunction with the Wilderness Gallery. In 2018, she won the Powerhouse Gallery Art Prize and the Sawtooth Art Prize. With a continued desire to exhibit more extensively, pursue her printmaking further and continuing her studies, she wishes to focus on her art in a full-time capacity, alongside gaining experience in curating, gallery operations and her work with Sculpture Tasmania Inc.

“Coming from a background of works on paper/printmaking I’ve been really looking for opportunities to expand upon how that practice relates to my sculptural works. Specifically working on concepts and practice that have substantial component of site-responsiveness. This is an area that I’ve not only had limited experience with but also an area, I feel, I have struggled with most when I have had this opportunity in the past. So to work with space, to respond to site, to environmental factors has been a real focal point in my most recent works at Sawtooth. I often come at work from a process driven engagement but embracing a more instinctual and reactive approach has been invaluable and freeing. 

I find with residency opportunities I always experience an initial period of adjusted expectations. It’s so easy for me to fall into the trap of feeling obligated (by self) to be prolific and to make sure I come out the end of it with a large body of work and conclusive concepts or I’ve somehow ‘wasted’ the opportunity that I’ve been given. But Increasingly, and through continual experience, the knowledge that that is not how I work is becoming solidified and I’m learning more about my own methodologies, practice and habits; this is an area I feel that residencies are ideal for, especially in early career artist. 

I love that the Sawtooth site has such a variety of spaces and that in large areas of the gallery/studio there is a diffusion and removal of the parameters of inside/outside. Becoming familiar with these has been something I’ve wanted to incorporate into how I am working. Knowing where the ‘piercings’ in the corrugated walls allow constellations of light specs to fall within the gallery means you can capture them and hold still the time of day as a mark of something temporal that has been trapped, isolated, if you will, from its own trajectory and daily movements. Everyday, new pools of tiny little seeds/leaf matter appear as a thin blanket across the gallery floor (depending on the wind the nights before) and although I haven’t incorporated this in an active way into my residency thoughts, it is a nice reminder of the continuation of the world and the movements and rhythms that continue. 

Recently I’ve begun to use materials that I often gravitate towards: paper, steel and concrete. The concrete I’m using is, in fact, the floor of the gallery space which reads so many different tales in areas of damage, rust and erosion - injecting the relationship of steel and paper into this space that offers an environmental temperamental-ness (not a word) is exciting as each day new impacts are made on the work that are completely out of my control. Control and preciousness is additionally something I have been working on relinquishing a bit of in my practice - working with paper often means that I feel beholden to its delicate materiality, which is not at all a bad thing, but relaxing my expectations of materials is an area I’m keen to evolve. 

Geometry and architectural forms are recurrent in my works and referencing the geometries and architectural shapes of the Sawtooth space has been really rewarding. Mimicking skylights, creating cut outs in paper that frame deliberate snaps of the space and also embracing the non-deliberate - the droplets of water, meeting rust and bleeding into the paper (the building becomes participatory in the works themselves). Handing over a sense of authorship to the actual building has been an active relinquishing of control while also being a conceptual direction that is opening up some theories of interest to be pursued.” - Lex Palmer Bull