Bronwyn Aitken is an emerging visual artist based in Perth, Western Australia with an interdisciplinary practice encompassing photography, printmaking, drawing, moving images, and creative writing.

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) and is now preparing to undertake a Master of Research in Fine Arts.

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 act of seeing.

Through 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 cyanotype, lithography, and etching methods, and incorporates drawing, videography, paper sculpture, and archival historical ephemera in her work.

The artist’s hand is evident in Aitken’s conceptual photography, and the essential component giving her imagery its unique ambient quality. The digital matrix is treated as a substrate whereupon Aitken edits and refines her initial captures. Through manipulations in 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 offers a subversive narrative, proposing that ‘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 a new set of myths and folktales. The surreal and sublime fuse with subtle abstraction, creating delicate conversations between light and dark, form and texture, the seen and the unseen.

Since establishing herself as a full-time artist in 2020, Aitken has been an award-winner and finalist in Western Australian art awards, exhibited 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 Bayswater Art Awards and was a semi-finalist with two works in the Contemporary Landscapes in Photography (CLIP) international biennale. In 2023 Aitken was chosen as a finalist in the highly selective Minnawarra and Melville Art Awards, and was recently named a finalist in the 2025 Rockingham Art Prize.

Portrait by Paul Skillen.