Collection: BRONWEN GIBBS

Bronwen Gibbs studied art and design at Prahran CAE in the mid 70’s. She has lived for more than 40 years on Western Port Bay and works principally with images from the environment around her, hoping to open the eyes of others to the beauty that is close at hand but often goes unnoticed.

Gibbs worked for many years as a textile artist creating scarves in the corporate world for organisations such as Tennis Australia, Tourism Victoria and Australian Geographic. Alongside this her creative work was exhibited widely and is held in collections in Europe and America as well as Australia.

Gibbs had been working on large-scale pieces, however serious injuries that she sustained in 2014 meant that she had to change both the medium and scale of her work.

“I had previously worked with colour, line and texture in textiles, but now printing, dying and drawing on paper enabled me to build complex pictures to later hand-colour with dye and embellish with stitch.

Moving to paper and etching was not a difficult transition. Etching in non-conventional ways suited my limited strength and movement, and the lines of the plate edges became an integral part of the design. I derive enormous pleasure from the simple layering of images to produce a complex whole.”

Bronwen Gibbs, 2021