Name

Pippa Lightfoot

Other names

Hegvold, Pippa.

Walker, Pippa.

Culture

Australian

Gender

Female

Birth date

7 October 1944

Birth place

Bunbury, Western Australia, Australia View on map Close map

Occupations

Artist (painter) | Book artist (book arts) | Printmaker

Summary

Worked: Australia (WA, ACT).

NGA IRN

22258

Context

Australia

Biography

ARTIST STATEMENT 

PIPPA LIGHTFOOT 

I have been a practising artist ever since graduating in 1965 and my work is represented in many private and public collections, notably AGWA, NGA, National Library Canberra, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice.

 I work in a variety of media and have a preference for oil painting and stone lithography. 

Questions of belonging, a sense of place and the passage of time are recurrent concerns in my art. Living on the fragile coastal edge of an ancient desert landscape that was once the ocean floor, I have an emotional, cultural and spiritual awareness of the edge and a sense that our existence is both physical and abstract, embracing both the real and the imagined. 

The images I make are inspired by reflections on these ideas. My work evolves through a process-of-making in which I test and resolve emerging images, juxtaposing ideas and layering photo-elements through solvent-transfer processes. The developing and refining of ideas, adding to and subtracting from colour and balance, leads me to produce one image out of another in a related series of works. To achieve richness of colour and suggest layers of memory and experience, I use processes like glazing to create subtle, glowing transparency. 

I find enjoyment and meaning in continual variation and the flow of detail from one piece to the next, as I attempt to adapt elements in my work, to reveal complexity through simplicity. This is an on-going process which is reflected in the development of new work inspired by my time in the Venice residencies I undertook in 2016 and 2019. We define ourselves by the stories we tell, connecting ourselves to familiar shorelines, wildernesses and riverbanks, where we tell our stories and share memories. At this point in time my concern is to work skilfully with the play of materials and enjoy their character and eloquence. I have been deliberately considered in arriving at this point, moving from more simple work, gathering experience which helps me to make instinctive judgements at the point of conceiving new work.

Last Updated

06 Apr 2023