From the Artist: Karenne Ann chats with Gallery Director, Jo Duke.

Karenne Ann: Photographer
Heather Horrocks : Mask Maker
'Effacement: She the Empiricist'
Artist statement: Effacement is an anthropological study of women in crocheted masks. It records the texture and reflective qualities of once-ubiquitous, now redundant VHS tape, sculpted into faux-historical, completely ineffective face coverings. The photographer has used close-focus and desaturated colour to craft a portal through which one reality distorts to another: a frightened old woman becomes fearsome, mortal threats are defeated by immortal dead tech threads, an old friend is magicked into a faceless relic.
These works address a triple whammy of 21st century worrisome issues: the war on a virus, the war on climate change, and the war on women. Karenne Ann is a multidisciplinary artist whose narratives address themes - feminism, nature, fragility - by documenting historical change, rescuing memory, and interrogating the spaces inhabited by incomplete, effects of wrapping, exposing, swaddling, scanning, hiding, modelling, and setting fire to objects.
Heather Horrocks is an old craftivist, activist and writer who left it very late to develop an arts practice. She has exhibited regularly over the past 15 years in Melbourne and Ballarat. Her work, grounded in a ‘make-do-and-mend’ ethos, leads her to gather unloved materials to re-use, repurpose and revivify. Her current obsession is dead tech tape which she crochets into masks, vessels, female forms and very large spider webs.
Karenne Ann is a finalists in the Sunshine Coast Art Prize 2022 for her work 'Effacement: She the Empiricist' 2022 | Pigment ink jet print; 1230cm x 83cm