Maryann Mussared is a full-time practicing artist based in Canberra, Australia.  She studied textiles, printmaking and papermaking at the Canberra School of Art for three years before completing her Bachelor of Applied Arts at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales in 1997.   She has a studio in an old farm cottage located in the gardens of  the homestead at Strathnairn Arts Association in north-west rural Canberra.  

Her practice combines mixed media and applied techniques, including gilding and collage with handmade paper, most often combined with spontaneous and repetitive mark making such as subliminal writing and Pitman’s shorthand.  She explores a number of ideas through her work, such as the pressures of the fast pace of modern life and the lost stories of the millions of people who have died in global conflict in the past century.

 

Explaining her limited palette and dedication to the repetitive mark, Mussared says that during the early 1990s she was training as a textile designer and screen-printer at East Sydney Tech.  This came to an abrupt but welcome halt when she was offered a place at the Canberra School of Art in 1994.

 

 

 

 

 

“I started producing mono-tonal works in a variety of media about ten years ago as a reaction to the previous years producing richly coloured and decorative textiles in multiple colourways.  So it has been a bit of a ‘love/hate’ relationship with colour as I have tried to avoid letting it get in the way of what I was trying to express.

 

“I have dallied with pure white (More Swanky Hankies, 1996), the many tones of blue obtained with indigo dyeing (Tomodachi, 1998) as well as a range of tones in the process of dyeing both paper and fabric with oxidizing rust (New Ground 1994, Putting it in Print 2000 and Still Cryptal Orchard in 2002). This in turn has led me to work in a minimalist style with a limited use of colour.  Spontaneous and repetitive mark-making has also become an important focus for recent work.  These refer to a former life as a formally trained stenographer and use of Pitman's shorthand, my long-time interest and earlier professional training in the screenprinting on fabric process and the unique and spontaneous marks created through the process of shibori and studying the writing of the Japanese language using hingara and kangi” says Mussared.

 

She has recently completed a series of 20 works titled Archive.  She says about this work:  “Personal memory and a large collection of artefacts in my studio are important stimulus to my practice.  As I look at my hopelessly congested workspace, boxes overflowing with textiles and shelves containing old journals, postcards and objects collected from all over the world and inherited from my family, I often ask myself why I have amassed so many objects and scraps over the past decades?    What are their relationships to each other?  Why have I spent so much time carefully sorting and archiving all these pieces?  What is the internal mechanism that urges me to save these scraps of memories, now safely physically archived in a picture frame but also in the archive of my heart.   Is sorting them so meticulously a way of making sense of the past or is it providing me with a way to create order in the present?  Or maybe I am clearing away unfinished business and preparing myself for the way forward – new ideas and all that waits in the future".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mussared is now preparing for her solo exhibitions Re(a)d in 2008 and "Recent Works" in July at Artespresso in Canberra as well as the exhibition "Vantage Points" with Lorna Crane and Catherine Tamou-Sloane at ANCA and the Moruya Mechanics Institute in April-June 2008.

 

Mussared has spent extended period living overseas including UK, USA, Germany and France.  While a student at the Canberra School of Art, she was part of the Canberra School of Art’s cultural ambassadors program to the Kyoto Seika University.