Bronwyn Aitken is an emerging contemporary visual artist based in Perth, Western Australia with an interdisciplinary practice encompassing photography, printmaking, drawing, moving images and creative writing. She has worked professionally as a full-time artist since 2020 after establishing her studio and registering an art business.

Aitken has a diverse academic background in the Arts, completing tertiary studies in Fine Art, Media, Theatre & Drama, and Creative Writing. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Arts from Murdoch University (1999), has since studied within the discipline at postgraduate level at Curtin University and UWA, and will undertake a Master of Research (Fine Arts) next year.

With the Australian landscape setting as protagonist, Aitken’s methodology is fundamentally embedded in storytelling. The familiar becomes strange in her reimagined elsewhere-worlds, calling into question the very act of seeing.

By adopting a practice-led research approach to making, Aitken has developed a unique visual style blending traditional and contemporary creative processes, particularly at the intersection of photography and printmaking. She rigorously experiments with materiality, interlacing analogue and digital photography with etching, lithography and woodcut, as well as incorporating graphite illustration, film and videography, paper collage, assemblage and archival historical ephemera into her work.

The artist’s hand is clearly evident in Aitken’s conceptual photographic work, and the essential component giving her imagery it’s unique ambient quality. The digital matrix is treated as a substrate whereupon Aitken edits and refines her initial captures. Through manipulations in assemblage and composition, colour palette, scale and perspective, layering and blending, and the ever-crucial placement of light, Aitken unveils paradoxical settings imbued with allegory and symbolism.

Her repeated reimaginings of the Australian landscape setting are the consequence of gently traversing shades of obscurity in the natural environment and taking visual cues from nature. The results weave a blanket of captivating, provocative narratives and enriched visual storytelling. Relationships between form and composition are especially significant and reveal carefully considered cues to meaning.

Aitken’s work offers a subversive narrative, proposing ‘things are not always as they seem’ within the strange and elusive beauty of the Australian landscape. There’s a macabre undercurrent in her storytelling, a gothic aesthetic that is uniquely antipodean. Aitken’s imagery often acts as a theatre backdrop, a mise-en-scene for an entirely new set of myths and folktales. The surreal and sublime fuse with subtle abstraction, creating a delicate conversation between light and dark, form and texture, the seen and the unseen.

Since 2020 Aitken has been an award-winner and numerous finalist in Australian and international art awards, has exhibited widely in group exhibitions and gained a growing following with a significant number of pieces now held in private collections.  In 2022 she won the Best Photography prize at the City of Bayswater Art Awards and was a semi-finalist with two works in the prestigious international biennial Contemporary Landscapes in Photography (CLIP) award. In 2023 she was chosen as a finalist in the highly selective Minnawarra and City of Melville art awards.

A new body of work is currently in development for Aitken’s first major solo exhibition in Perth. In this new collection, Aitken investigates the fated and forgotten histories of the young women migrants shipped out from England to the Australian colonies to work as governesses during the 1800s. Aitken aims to reinstate the lives of these ‘surplus’ and ‘redundant’ women in a showcase of haunting daguerreotype portraits accompanied by printmaking works, paper sculpture and audio-visual installation elements.

Aitken is a committee member of the Printmakers’ Association of Western Australia and holds memberships with Artsource WA, Perth Centre for Photography, Print Council of Australia, Centre for Contemporary Photography (Australia) and the National Association for the Visual Arts.

Portrait by Paul Skillen.