Cressida Campbell – at "Know My Name", Mornington

I recently went to the Know My Name exhibition at the Mornington Regional Gallery with fellow blog writers, Jane and Caroline. This Gallery was hosting a subset exhibition of a larger exhibition in Canberra, Australia.

The Know My Name initiative is part of an ongoing series of gender equity displays which seeks to raise the profile of women artists who have previously been omitted from published histories and public collections.¹

This travelling exhibition draws from a two-part exhibition which was held over 2020- 2022. Caroline and I wrote about that, and you can read our posts if you click the links in the footnotes below. The initiative especially focuses on moments in which women created new forms of art and cultural commentary through time, dating back to the 19th century, right up to modern times. ¹

A number of artists that we have featured on the blog previously were represented, such as Margaret Preston, Dorrit Black, Grace Cossington Smith, Dorothy Braund and Hermia Boyd, just to name a few.

But today I would like to focus on the one example that there was in the exhibition by Cressida Campbell, because I think it is just an extraordinary wood block print.

Briefly, Cressida creates watercoloured, incised woodblocks and then takes (usually) just a single print from that woodblock, which is a mirror image.
I wrote about Cressida when I went to her solo exhibition in Canberra in October 2022. You can read those posts for background about Cressida and more examples of her work if you click here and here..

Here is the woodblock print on display at the Mornington Regional Gallery, called Bedroom Nocturne, and completed in 2022. I’ve included the description plate that was beside it below as well.

It was quite large, (perhaps a metre or so in diameter), and the detail within in it was just extraordinary. I took some additional photos of the detail, so you can hopefully get an appreciation of the meticulous sharpness of the incisions in the plywood, as well as the clever watercolouring of the components of the room to create folds in fabrics, light and shadows on walls etc .......

Footnotes

1. With thanks to Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery in Victoria (MPRG) and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

2. You can read our previous posts about the Know My Name initiative if you click here, here, and here.