Rendered in painstaking detail, the lithographs of Jacqui Driver depict tangles of tree limbs and other elements of the natural landscape, reflecting the turbulent mind states of the artist herself. “I invite my audiences to acknowledge my work as an encounter with discomfort and non-conformity, but also as a place of transformation and healing,” she says. Funnelling her experiences of living with anxiety, chronic pain, and disability into her practice, Driver’s prints are pervaded with a sense of disquiet and volatility, heightened through an at times gothic interplay between light and shadow. Driver is a casual academic, teaching printmaking across three tertiary institutions while she studies for a Masters by Research at The University of New South Wales in Sydney. 2021 saw the artist selected as a finalist in the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award, the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, the Waverley Art Prize, and the Burnie Print Prize. Driver’s solo exhibition Periphery showed at Alternating Current Art Space, Melbourne, in late 2021.
Featured image: Jacqui Driver, Intangible, 2021. Lithography, 8 panels, 168 x 114cm. Courtesy: the artist.