Annika Romeyn: Art is informed by, and responds to, everything.

You don’t get to the next idea without everything that came before, Annika says.

Annika Romeyn is the Canberra-based artist who was awarded the inaugural Threads of Belonging bursary in February this year. In May, Annika spent two weeks working in the Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Gallery, leading workshops and classes, speaking with students, staff and families about her life and practice, meeting with our primary school students and sharing her monotype printmaking process; a technique in which ink is worked and reworked on a surface like glass or Perspex before being transferred through a print press onto paper.

Annika’s most extensive body of work to date has evolved through her long-term, slow-paced interest with place - ranging from the globally significant Antarctic Peninsula to sites of personal significance like Guerilla Bay on the NSW surf coast. This work has developed over the years from a wide base of interests, ideas and adventures. Spending time in a place, she says, is not a singular experience because how could it be? It reveals itself gradually through revisiting, observation and time. ‘I see it as a way of living. It’s a lifetime pursuit, with no locked-down endpoint, just a willingness to keep seeing, thinking, responding as life and work unfold over time and meaning accumulates gradually.’

On a research trip to the Antarctic Peninsula, she recalls being asked what she could possibly draw during the days at sea. Annika says that fellow passengers even laughed, ‘There’s nothing here.’ But for her, the vast empty space was an ever-changing subject of distance, light, weather and movement. Plenty to see. 

As a working artist, Romeyn spoke about her ‘success’. As a younger person, she was encouraged toward law or medicine – an academic pathway – because she could. And she might have, but there wasn’t the sense of fulfilment she could recognise. Instead, she said yes to other opportunities, creative and academic, which took her to unexpected places, including a softball scholarship to Baltimore of all places, as an ‘in’ to an Arts Program she wanted to be part of. One experience led to another, and her work now spans roles as an artist, educator and researcher as it continues to evolve.

So how do you teach this way of moving through the world? It begins by building the human-paced muscles that resist the want for quick answers. Annika’s work is built slowly, through mark-making, hands to surface, allowing a piece to unfold partly from reference, but mostly from memory, feeling and a technique that can, and does, go rogue. With experience, she can predict what might emerge from the press, but not always. It's not always the good bit, she says, because it leads to the next thing. Each unexpected moment becomes generative. ‘Every time you make something, something unexpected happens…and that takes you to the next possibility.’

On the ground at Woodleigh, Annika says that the works that gave students the most satisfaction were from moments where the process went a bit sideways; water spread through their print further than they wanted it to, marks didn’t move how they thought they might, and streetscapes didn’t look like ‘the real thing’ so much as an imaginative version. Perfection sometimes felt boring to them because if they were willing to let go – even for a second – they sometimes found something better than they had planned.

Annika observed that Woodleigh students moved easily into this space. Students, not just in the art room, took an interest in what she was making, asking ethical questions that had no simple answers: What does it mean to work with a landscape? When does 

observation for your own purpose become extraction? How do we make sense of places shaped by histories not immediately visible to us? These were questions put to Annika by Outdoor Ed students less interested in technique and more in perspective.

If humans can predict anything about the future, it’s that we can predict very little. Rather than certainty, the capacity to be comfortable with what cannot be anticipated is as important as any other skill. Building adaptive thinkers who can move within the unknown rather than avoid it is something we value enormously at Woodleigh, and something that extends well beyond the Art Room.

‘Art is informed by, and responds to, everything: history, environment, technology and culture,’ says Annika. If art is sidelined in education, as it has recently been in many schools, if cuts to funding continue to weaken arts communities and culture, what is lost is a subject but also a way of seeing, thinking and responding. When The Arts are not valued in education environments, it is often a sense of possibility that disappears first.

Art is not for everyone, just as maths or cross-country is not for everyone. But it resists a narrowing of thinking. The effects appear gradually: in a student willing to take longer with a question; in a readiness to approach something without a predictable outcome; being responsive rather than closed. 

Art is a practice, but also a way of moving through the world. It requires patience, openness and a willingness to not be in control. To respond to uncertainty, not avoid it, is a kind of superstrength. Because, as Annika puts it, ‘you don’t get to the next idea without everything that came before.’