Background

Marie Larkin is an Australian artist working from her loft studio overlooking the plains and hills on the outskirts of Tamworth NSW. She graduated in 1979 with a BA Visual Art Education from Alexander Mackie and has over 30 years experience as an Art Educator at both public and private schools, TAFE and the Regional Galleries of Australia.

In the 1990’s she began her career as an artist, making fine embroidered pieces revealing aspects of her daily life as a mother. She won both The Dame Nancy Buttfield Embroidery Prize and The Namoi Valley Cotton Fibre Acquisitive Award for her work. Her exhibition ‘Revealing Threads’ was the recipient of a 10,000 AUD Arts Grant and toured regional galleries in three states. More recently she has been a finalist in the Blackstone Works on Paper Prize and the Lethbridge Small Works Prize and a semi finalist in the Doug Moran National Portraiture Prize. 

From 2010 to 2020, Marie earned her place as one of Australia’s most successful Lowbrow artists with a substantial global following of fans and collectors. She has exhibited with galleries such as Corey Helford Gallery and Copro Nason in Los Angeles, Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco , AFA Gallery in New York and Urban Nation in Berlin.

Marie’s embroidery and Pop Surrealist artwork has been published in leading art journals, magazines and books, in Australia and worldwide. Her works are held in private and public collections in Australia and overseas, including The National Textile Collection.

Artist Statement

In 2020, determined to pursue a more intuitive and risk taking approach to my artmaking, I shifted back to non figurative directions in my art making practice. Having been a representational artist for over twelve years, removing the recognisable object or subject from my work has allowed me to explore surface and the ways it can be developed and manipulated. My work is now firmly underpinned by a process of tactile discovery and imaginative exchange between place and paint. I’ve always been drawn to things aged or weathered. In the rust of tin sheds and faded paint of neglected fences, in the peeling bark and pitted stones and rocks where we live in rural Australia, a history is sensed. The works come from a deep connection to land and place, and the way experiences of place are written into memory. My abstractions gesture at the interplay of landscape forms, textures and colours in the spaces that shape my world. The monumentality of open space and the horizon line are an important presence in my recent paintings. The land that surrounds me endures, yet it is transient in its constant cycle of growth, change and decay. Wind, rain, the dry, fire, alter the land around me constantly. Through a complex mix of textured mediums and many layers of washed glazes and marks, the surfaces I build uphold a balance between freedom and intent. I seek to find the nuance and transience of those surfaces.