Anne-Marie Jean | Connection and interconnection in multi-sensory nature-environment painting.

Painting has its own peculiar capacities to invite embodied connection to nature. Using practice-led research, evolving from Western landscape painting conventions, Anne-Marie Jean''s PhD work has explored combinations of pictorial and formal language which create multi-sensory nature-based painting. In articulating human interactions with nature through painting, she has responded to a contemporary imperative to take pro-environmental action. Through material investigations in nature, the studio and the gallery, Jean's research developed interactions of pictorial and formal painting language through painting as an expanded field, articulated through movement, and vertical and horizontal orientations. In disrupting landscape conventions which distance the audience from nature, and developing fresh configurations of sensory stimulating language, she has created manifestations of painting that foster a culture of embodied consciousness and connection.    Jean's doctoral research has demonstrated how particular combinations of painterly language can articulate a complex range of inter-relations and shown how an artist's embodied experience with nature-environments and with child rearing, can generate innovation within painting practice. The material outcomes and exegetical writing highlight painting's capacity to embody orientations to nature-environments, derived from cultural and societal attitudes, painterly traditions, material manifestations and personal bodily encounters. Jean proposes that this awareness can be of value in contemporary art practice, to society and to our environment. 

Anne-Marie Jean grew up in Canberra and completed her undergraduate study in painting at the ANU School of Art in the 1990's. She moved to New Zealand in 2000, pursuing her career as an artist and her passion for the outdoors. She returned to Canberra in 2013 to extend her painting practice through PhD research, to reconnect with family and friends, and the nature environments of her childhood. She acknowledges with respect and gratitude Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, traditional owners of the unceded lands on which she has worked and studied. Anne-Marie lives in Canberra with her wife Dana and her daughter Camille and works at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery as Communications and Outreach Coordinator.

Anne-Marie is a Higher Degree by Research Candidate, completing her Doctor of Philosphy at the ANU School of Art & Design.