For over three decades, alongside a career in arts education and exhibition development, Paula Payne has been expanding her painting and drawing practice. In 2021, this journey culminated in the completion of a Doctorate of Visual Arts, with a focus on history and environmental themes, specifically semi-abstract landscapes.
Payne’s fascination with these themes can be traced back to her childhood, when she embarked on long sea journeys with her mother to and from England, visiting lands she had only imagined. These experiences continued to shape her artistic vision, manifesting as memory-maps that trace the contours of global environmental anxiety. She is particularly drawn to expansive views of land and water, as well as the infinity of the night sky.
Her father’s engineering works also played a significant role in shaping her artistic perspective. Regular exposure to hand-rendered technical drawings led her to study technical drawing herself, and fine-line graphic renderings have become integral to many of her landscape works. Payne sees these linear components as a dialogue with historical methods of capturing landscapes and as a contemporary form of mapping that reflects humanity’s growing environmental anxieties. Her work incorporates cartographic elements, including lines of latitude and longitude, exploring how humans have named, claimed, and defined the land, sea, and sky through exploration and expansive ways of viewing the world.
