Inside-Out Billboard Project
Image: Still Life on my Studio Table, 2023, by Katie Gordon. Artwork photo by FoxLab Fine Art. Installation photo by Aaron Claringbold.
The Inside-Out Billboard Project is a commission program for West Australian visual artists to create a large outdoor billboard at Joondalup Library and Joondalup Courthouse. The project offers artists an opportunity to play with scale and site, and consider how their practice may translate into a large-scale digital print in the public realm.
Artists are invited to the commission by exhibiting in one of the City’s annual art awards, the Community Art Exhibition (held in June) and the Invitation Art Prize (held in October).
The Inside Out Billboard Project aims to add vibrancy to the City Centre, providing a chance for the community to discover new artworks by West Australian artists.
The latest artworks on display are: Still Life on my Studio Table, 2023, by Katie Gordon at the Joondalup Library; and Lake Joondalup, 2021 by Naomi Grant at the Joondalup Courthouse.
New Commission at Joondalup Library
Image: Still Life on my Studio Table, 2023, by Katie Gordon. Artwork photo by FoxLab Fine Art.
Katie Gordon’s artworks aim to elevate the everyday, and her latest work Still Life on my Studio Table takes the intimate, small and familiar – in this case the items bathed in light on her studio table – and places them into the context of the exposed, large and foreign – the 6 x 3 metre billboard outside Joondalup Library.
Gordon’s subject is a quotidian moment of serenity – a shell, a vase, and a banksia branch. It is one that could easily be overlooked, and yet is soothing in its simplicity and familiarity. Each item of ordinary beauty is rendered in warm tones that reflect the surrounding Joondalup buildings and bushland. Bathed in balmy sunshine filtering through the window blinds, and casting long and striking shadows, the scene offers a meditative moment for a public busily engaged in their daily lives.
Gordon began this artwork by arranging a photographic composition, utilizing light and shadow as a key element of the design. After a selection and editing process, she then started a drawing process to translate the photograph. Key outlines of the design were drawn onto plywood and etched out using a powered rotary instrument, before larger infill areas of shadow were hand-carved away using linoleum cutting tools. The result is a form of relief carving that provides subtle depth to the artwork and further exposes the texture of the wood grain. Gordon completed the work with a painted layer via an interpretative process, rather than holding fast to the reality of the photograph.
The presented work at the Inside-Out Billboard site is a digital print of Gordon’s original acrylic painting on carved wood. In considering the billboard site she says, “I have chosen to create an image that is dynamic and easily recognizable, and able to be understood and appreciated quickly in passing. My intention is for the billboard to be visually soothing by conveying a fleeting moment of stillness and serenity amidst the busyness of the everyday.”
In this subtle way, Still Life on my Studio Table is an anti-hype invitation to simply notice the significance of the present. Regardless of how mundane, Gordon asks viewers to look at the old in new ways, with heightened sensitivity that life is here, right now, and not elsewhere.
Gordon has created this 18th Inside-Out Billboard commission, which was awarded through the 2023 Community Art Exhibition, and will be on display from Saturday 17 February 2024 – Saturday 22 February 2025.
About the Artist
Born in 1989, Katie Gordon spent her formative years living in Zimbabwe, before immigrating to Perth in 2001. Her dual strengths in both art and math, saw Katie study theatre design at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, before going on to graduate with a Bachelor of Business from Edith Cowan University in 2012.
Following 3 years working as an accountant, Katie began creating art in earnest again in 2016. Working mostly in coloured pencil and depicting flowers from her garden in hyper-realistic detail, Katie began to exhibit and sell her work locally. Alongside her art practice, Katie worked as gallery coordinator at the Joondalup Art Gallery before the birth of her son in late 2018.
Recently, the subject matter of Katie’s work has expanded to include portraits and landscapes alongside still-life and interior depictions of her immediate home environment. Katie particularly enjoys juxtaposing natural and human-made objects of familiar beauty into visually dynamic arrangements. She photographs these from varying angles to capture fleeting shadows as a key element of the composition. The most impacting images are edited and then either delicately rendered into photorealist drawings or carved onto plywood and painted in a looser and more graphic style.
Katie has regularly participated in the City of Joondalup’s Community Art Exhibition, winning the Celebrating Joondalup Award in 2022 and the Inside-Out Billboard Commission in 2023.
Rotated Commission at Joondalup Courthouse
Image: Lake Joondalup, 2021, Naomi Grant.
Naomi Grant is a contemporary indigenous artist and was the 14th artist commissioned to produce an artwork for display as part of the Inside-Out Billboard project. Lake Joondalup is based on a setting at Picnic Cove. For this commission, Grant explored her interests in the landscapes and waterscapes of Australia. Her intention was to capture the beauty, tranquility and regeneration of the lake that so many people, animals and plants rely on. With a background in textiles, Grant often relays the beauty, pattern and colour she sees in the environment and creates her artwork by painting in acrylic and incorporating collage, layering coloured tissue paper over the painted surface. Grant was selected for the commission through the City’s 2020 Invitation Art Prize.
About the Artist
Naomi Grant is a descendant of the Wiradjuri people of central New South Wales and was born in Sydney. She previously lived in Perth and now resides in Queensland. Her successful career as a practicing artist and designer spans the past 40 years, including a Bachelor of Art in Design from W.A.I.T. (now Curtin University).
Grant’s works are held in private and public collections in Australia and overseas, including Bunbury Regional Art Gallery, Tourism Australia, Oxfam Australia and Ronald McDonald House. Her many awards include the inaugural Hawkesbury Art Award in Sydney, as well as awards and purchases from City of Belmont, City of Bayswater, City of Midland, Town of Victoria Park, and City of Blacktown in New South Wales.
Inside-Out Billboard Commissions
