Matilda Kate Mourant is a multi media artist with a focus in printmaking. Her work examines printmaking, using various types of copperplate etching. Past explorations have involved screen printing, monotype, cyanotype, and frottage, also experimenting with drawing, written word, collage, and painting. Matilda’s work examines grief, love, and belonging through the examination of landscapes that are significant personal sites, carrying and shaping memories and exploring grounded existence. She explores the interconnectedness of the subconscious and the conscious state through interaction with landscapes en plein air as well as the interpretation of memory.

The experience of a single moment immersed in landscape weaves a complex web of intersecting felt interactions and associations highlighting nuanced emotional, physical, psychological relations with environments that are primal as well as deeply socially and politically current in nature.

The work draws poetic connections between ‘layers of perception’ and the layering used in the process and production of pulling a print.

Matilda has focused her practice through observational drawing and narratives around the Merri-Merri Creek area and is developing a folio of work around this exploration.

Observational study of the Merri Creek (close up of one section of the study), 2023.
Matilda Kate Mourant, Observational study of the Merri Creek, 2023 [detail]
Observational study of a Gum Tree, 2023.
Matilda Kate Mourant, Observational study of a Gum Tree, 2023

These studies are part of a ritualistic exercise in observational drawing. Materialised through practices of walking, observing, remembering, drawing, and writing to examine the relationship between internalised imagery and actual landscape.  Drawing upon past experience, present experience and the subconscious in order to materialise deep observational depictions of the multifaceted experience of drawing ‘what one sees’. They are then covirted onto a copper matrix using soft ground, hard ground, dry-point and photographic etching techniques.      

Observational study of the Merri Creek (close up of one section of the study), 2023.
Matilda Kate Mourant, Observational study of the Merri Creek, 2023. [detail]

Printing in red…

Artists hands preparing to ink up a plate, 2023.
Matilda Kate Mourant, Artist’s hands preparing to ink up a plate, 2023
Prints fresh of the press, 2023.
Matilda Kate Mourant, Prints fresh of the press, 2023.

Red is the colour you see when you close your eyes, inside your eyelids you see red in the light and black in the dark. To Matilda, these colours symbolise introspection.

Observational study of a spindly tree (top), 2023.
Matilda Kate Mourant, Observational study of a spindly tree (top), 2023
Observational study of a spindly tree (bottom), 2023.
Matilda Kate Mourant, Observational study of a spindly tree (bottom), 2023
Matilda Kate Mourant, Process film (inking up the plate), 2023
Photographic and dry point copperplate print, 2023.
Matilda Kate Mourant, Photographic and dry-point copperplate print, 2023
Typewriter experimentation.

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Matilda Kate Mourant