Mahala Magins undertook a residency in Iceland at the Baer Arts Center in Skagafjordur in 2013. The experience changed her practice as she tried to capture something of the essence of that place, without being seduced into illusionistic representations of it.
Magins describes; “One thing Iceland taught me was to utilise the environment I am immersed in, to allow anything and everything to influence me. I might see a photograph and will respond to this by thinking of a memory of travel, write this experience down, then respond to this moment in time visually, even as simply as a clipping of colour. I will then establish the work from that one simple experience.”
Applying this logic to her painting when she returned, she found her work was not of a single place. Her painterly language was informed by flickers from the landscape of her memory, of source material, and her immediate surroundings.
Mahala Magins is an emerging artist based in Bangalow. She completed her completed a Bachelor of Visual Art at Southern Cross University in 2006.
