Paula Payne Bio

Through painted landscapes I respond to specific sites that I have walked, and visited, places from my memory, geological epochs, and geographical sites. I work on a level of intellectual and sensory responses to information that includes engaging metaphor to imply the presence of the Anthropocene, and space envisioned as semi abstract, abstract and sublime form. I view landscape and the environment as the spaces and systems that human lives depend upon.

Throughout my life, I have been influenced by my father’s engineering work and workshop inventions. Part of this included my constant exposure to technical drawings rendered by hand. I studied technical drawing with my father’s help as well as at school, and these elements of fine line graphic renderings are integrated into many of my landscape works, identifiable as a personal style. I feel that this linear component of the work is a reflection on both historical ways of capturing the landscape and a form of contemporary mapping that reflects the anxious world humans now inhabit. The line renderings extend to cartography, including lines of latitude and longitude, and refer to ways that humans have named and claimed the globe through physical explorations and world travel.

My own interest in mapping expanded in my youth during two trips by sea too and from England with my mother, one in my early childhood and one in my teenage years. I realise that from these experiences I learnt about mappings of lines of latitude and longitude, the equator, Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer, and expansive ways of viewing the world by defining the land, sea, and sky.

My particular interest in visions informed by large spaces suggesting the infinity of the night sky, are of particular interest and were formed during this time.