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. Aitken has worked professionally as a full-time artist since 2020 after establishing a 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), 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 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 analog and digital photography with etching, lithography and woodcut, and incorporates graphite illustration, film and videography, paper collage, assemblage, and archival historical ephemera in her work.

The artist’s hand is clearly 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’s work 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 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 Western Australian art awards, has 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 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 Melville art awards.

A new body of work is currently in development for Aitken’s first major solo exhibition in Perth. In this 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 a member of Artsource WA.

Portrait by Paul Skillen.