47th Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award Exhibition runs from Sat 16 Aug 2025 — Sun 21 Sep 2025 | 10:00am — 5:00pm

 

47th Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award

I'm a Finalist - Jo Lankester

Location: Walyalup I Fremantle Arts Centre

Celebrating its 47th edition, the Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award stands as Australia's most prestigious print competition and the Centre's longest-running exhibition series of its kind. Each year, artists from varying stages of their careers submit their work, creating a rich and diverse selection that allows the Print Award to thrive as a contemporary exhibition. This showcase highlights both the time-honoured traditions and the innovative experiments happening in printmaking today. The work I entered and selected is one of my most ambitious multi-plate coloured prints. 

The artwork, titled Chatter, explores the significance of community, place, memory, and interconnectedness, symbolised through the presence of the Black Cockatoo, often seen amongst the beach almond trees of Townsville and Magnetic Island. Our conversations shape the memories that bind us, just as these trees adapt and flourish in their coastal environment, demonstrating resilience and adaptability. The vibrant life represented by the Black Cockatoo inspires dialogue about our connections to nature and one another. Chatter highlights that our shared experiences and relationships are woven into the fabric of our community and are essential in shaping our sense of place and belonging.

Jo Lankester
Chatter, 2025
Unique state multi-plate colour intaglio, planographic, collage, polyptych
Image size: 200 x 225cm
Image: Louis Lim. Courtesy of the artist and Onespace

The 2025 WFAC Print Award will feature 68 selected pieces, chosen by a distinguished panel that includes Dr. Jessyca Hutchens (Co-Director at the Berndt Museum, UWA), Hannah Mathews (Director/CEO of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art), and Trent Walter, an artist, printer, and publisher from Negative Press in Naarm Melbourne.

2025 Print Award Finalists:

Studio 29B, Eero Almeida, Kelsey Ashe, Benjamin Bannan, Julie Barratt, Ange Bateman, Rebecca Beardmore, Alexander Beetle, Sam Bloor, Trevor Bly & Patrick Doherty, Ron Bradfield Jnr, Michael Bullock, Johnathon World Peace Bush, Emma Buswell, Mitch Cairns, Jon Campbell, Ruby Cason, Jacky Cheng, Matthew Clarke, Dominique Coiffait, Jo Darbyshire, Annabel Dixon, Mauretta Drage, Troy Drill, Jacqui Driver, Lesley Duxbury, Robert Fielding, Freyja Fristad, Caroline Goodlet, Freya Hall, Angela Hayson, Deanna Hitti, Dwayne Jessell, Martin King, Hiroshi Kobayashi, Jo Lankester, Eric Lobbecke, Frances Malcomson, Tim McLaughlin, Tim Meakins, Mimili Wati Group, Louise Monte, Zali Morgan, Sally Mumford, Brett Nannup, Kate O'Shea, Jana Papantoniou, Emily Parker, April Phillips, Perdita Phillips, Maree Purnell, Alethea Richter, Brian Robinson, Joshua Searle, Mervyn Street, Ella Sutherland, Bill Taylor, Jacinta Taylor-Foster, Carine Thevenau, Peter Gooloou Thomas, Samantha Thompson, Richard Trang, Justin Trendall, Lois Waters, Kylie Watson, Noah Williams, Evangeline Wilson & Prita Tina Yeganeh

Glide Artist Statement

Glide      

Robert Crispe, Michelle Hall, Jo Lankester
Mixed Media Installation, Dimensions Variable, 2014

Edmund Burke wrote; the sublime and the beautiful are not the same thing. An experience does not have to be pleasant in order for it to illicit an emotional response or to cause the viewer to feel something.

Combining shapes, smells and sounds of birds and aircrafts used in war, Glide is a project which aims to be aesthetically sublime.  Sublime in the way Burke thought of it; moving imagination, creating a sense of uncertainty, but still producing pleasure, while drawing to our attention the transfiguration of society as we react to the relentless trauma of war and endless natural catastrophe.
Robert Crispe’s video art provides a beautiful yet apocalyptic sky for the drone-birds to glide in.  Michelle Hall’s sculptures become the drone-birds flying in the chaos of the apocalypse.
 Jo Lankester’s prints create the rugged, worn texture of the gliders as they negotiate a terrain fraught with danger.
Glide is the second collaborative project between the three Townsville-based artists. The choice to work collaboratively pushes boundaries and comfort zones within their individual practices, diversifying techniques and processes when working on obscure sub-straights. Sharing the experience of creation and presentation, acts to shield the individual artist from the normal anxieties of a creative practice and in turn facilitates innovation.
Showing at Pinnacles Gallery, Townsville

Exhibition Dates: 7 February - 30 March 2014

Robert Crispe, Michelle Hall & Jo Lankester, Glide, Print Assemblage & Video Art, 2014

Glide by Robert Crispe, Michelle Hall & Jo Lankester - Artist Statement / Additional information

Glide

Robert Crispe, Michelle Hall & Jo Lankester
7 February - 30 March  2014, Pinnacles Gallery, Townsville

In our statement we talk about creating an experience where people can think about the trauma of war and natural catastrophe. In their paper 'The New Normal' published in Art Asia Pacific Masters, Lee & Zhang identify how in this decade words like 'crisis' have been used at a significantly higher rate in the media than ever before, crises has become normal.We have become numb to crises.  They go on to talk about how artists respond to the crises. Glide is our response, a response in the context of a garrison town surrounded by world heritage qualilty,  natural beauty. Glide is a combination of birds and planes, which illustrate the rich mixture of crises in our region. An army  making war and a dwindling number of bird species.  We draw on the sublime to attempt a feeling of vulnerability in the viewer to draw attention to how this situation of crises, is glossed over or ignored, but momentarily trapped in the gallery the viewer becomes confronted with an abstracted version of the everyday.  This is precisely the point of engaging the sublime. Just as Damien Hirst once did when he made 'The physical Impossibility of death in the mind of someone living.

Sound & Smell

The sound and smell is an important element to the installation taking the viewer on a sensory journey whilst walking amongst the installation and viewing the work. Melanie Pocock wrote sound and smells ’are intended to bombard visitors’ sensors, causing them to wonder about their intended effects.’

Donna Foley Artist Statement for XXX+WHY Group Exhibition 1 May - 27 June 2010

Hello, thank you for reading my blog on printmaking.

The following artist statement is of fellow printmaking artist Donna Foley exhibiting in XXX+WHY at Pinnacles Art Gallery, Townsville, Australia. Her work is not too removed from my objective of working with a site that is scarred from commercialization with disregard to the use and functionality of the site once productivity has ceased.
CTRL  x CTRL v   

The image and symbol of x are explored in two series of works in this exhibition.  Though quite dissimilar in appearance and treatment of traditional and contemporary print-media, both explore various levels of communicative action through materials and process. 

On a superficial level "Ctrl x Ctrl v" (Cut and paste) explicitly underscores  the social protest ethic as it relates to the logging of old growth forests in Tasmania.  The implicit theme explored is unexpected complicity, the level of one's own involvement expressed through the use of vinyl as opposed to paper, and through one's own actions, for example, as a tourist, home decorator,  printmaker and user of technologies and even as gardener.   Many of us are often quick to adopt the high moral ground in protest against numerous cultural and environmental practices; however, we fail to acknowledge our own part in such practices.  The production (and use) of paper sustains forestry practice.  As a printmaker, paper is intrinsic to practice, particularly in traditional approaches to making prints. 

X FACTOR SERIES

The second series," The X Factor", explicitly represents communicative action through gesture. Implicitly, the works are informed by the theories of the Humanist/Scientist/ Mathematician /Philosopher,  Douglas Hoffstadter (GEB (1945), I am a strange loop (2007)).  In addition to other forms of interaction, these works explore his ideas, for example, of recursion and figure-ground (negative/positive).

Happy Printmaking,

Warmly,

Jo Lankester

© Jo Lankester 2010




P.S. Discover how to turn your passion of printmaking into a sustainable business go to www.howtogetstartedinprintmaking.com

P.P.S. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sail. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain

P.P.P.S Contact me directly at jo.lankester@gmail.com to purchase my recent print pictured in this blog which is currently on display in XXX+WHY, Jo Lankester, +X, 2010, Collagraph, 80 x 60 $200.00 AU

Printed Images by Australian Artists 1885-1955 (v. 2)

Jo Lankester Artist Statement for XXX+Why Group Exhibition 1 May - 27 June 2010

Welcome to my blog on printmaking.                                   © Jo Lankester 2010

Echlin Street Quarry, West End, Townsville      

I create prints depicting the landscape, not just from a representational view, but also an emotional response to the landscape. When I use the combination of drawing and mark making mixed with emotion my works shifts to abstraction, hinting towards landscape but allowing the viewer to read other possibilities in the work.

My work is site specific. In each project or group of prints that I create for exhibition there is an intent to tell a story and give a true sense of place and ideas explored whilst on location, in this case the Echlin Street Quarry, West End, Townsville.

My interest in producing large scale abstract works was developed in my last year of University at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 1994, during a field trip to country Victoria. My inspiration was found in the surface of rocks, and in particular the patterns and colours of lichen. I felt compelled to portray the patterned surfaces in the printmaking medium which took on characteristics of abstract landscape. Working on a large scale enabled me to convey the enormity of what I see and feel on location and fit the whole translation onto the plate without restrictions.

My intention is to capture the elements I am exposed to and translate them through mark making directly on the plate, often using rocks or sticks from the environment in the act of creation; to scratch and paint sugarlift on to the surface of the printmaking plates. Connecting with the site on this level is an integral part of my artistic process and engages me on a very powerful level.

I get great satisfaction from preparing the plates, packing a back pack of materials and taking a hike, even if it means carting heavy and often hot aluminium or copper plates up steep hills, through high grasses, or, as was the case at Echlin Street, up a washed out quarry road that had water rushing over it. A beautiful element when working on location is the action of working directly onto the printmaking plate. I can select and delete visual information easily, as opposed to working in my studio from a photograph. While photographs can depict the physical appearance of the landscape, they omit the energy of the site, my reaction to this energy being central to my visual practice.

Unsettling feelings and self doubt can sometimes creep in once I get back to my printmaking studio to prepare the plates for etching. There is a moment in time when I reflect on what I have created and ponder if it is right, if I have succeeded in creating art worthy of exhibition. Ultimately, I have faith and trust in my judgements and move forward.

I enjoy the magic of washing out a sugar-lift and seeing the wild marks I have created using found objects on location, then trusting in those marks to etch and aquatint the way I intended. It is an inconsistent process, one that can deliver brilliant results first go, or be very lengthy to achieve the desired aesthetic.

I am very much in love with the printing process; getting to know the plate intimately as I ink and wipe the plate, familiarising myself with the intricacy of different sections, choosing the colour inks and trying different variations until the print demonstrates my intentions.

Happy printing.

Warmly,

Jo Lankester

P.S. For your fee printmaking expert interview series go to www.howtogetstartedinprintmaking.com

P.P.S. To purchase my print pictured above, Jo Lankester, Echlin St Quarry Juxtaposition 1b, 2010, Etching Aquatint, 80 x 60 cm $270.00 Edition 10 I can be contacted on jo.lankester@gmail.com or +61400626313
Fortune favours the brave.

Publius Terence

Printmaking in the Sun