Artist statement

“I take inspiration from whatever my immediate surroundings are – my context – and I often go for exploratory walks to find objects and places to paint. My artworks usually revolve around the vision of a ‘safe-cave’, a context for dwelling, a kind of material ‘lair’. I often return to when I was a child playing alone in my garden, where I would use what was around me to form nests and coves. In my child’s mind the earth and twigs and stones formed a little universe, a complete vision.

"My work now is similarly something of a self-fashioned escape from the realities and anxieties of everyday life, where I can live in an artificial and eclectic kingdom, self-designed so as to allow for my own boundless inclusion, a personal utopia, you could say.”

About the artist

Lorna Quinn is a Melbourne-based artist born in East Melbourne in 1995. She is a recent graduate of Victorian College of the Arts, where she majored in drawing and printmaking, and graduated with honours in 2018.

She works predominantly in oil paints, but is also a prolific drawer and sometimes sculptor. The artwork on this hoarding is based on an original oil painting of Lorna’s.