Artist's statement
Annie Trevillian is an artist, textile designer and screenprinter. Annie's work is inspired by her surroundings and the textile designs of the 1950s. The latest design, The Park, is be made up of drawings, paintings and handprinted designs. Annie uses multiple digital techniques to form repeat imagery and most recently using a digital printer with fibre reactive dyes on silk to create new work.
Annie continually moves between many different ways of working - painting, drawing, screenprinting and computer work - in manipulating her imagery. However, despite extensive use of photographic and digital techniques, she says "I still keep coming back to something more personal, more physical, like the handprint."
In 2006 she presented an extensive exhibition, Annie Trevillian Handprint, capturing work from 1983 - 2006 including screenprints on both fabric and paper and featuring a specially produced tufted rug created as a result of research into new mediums for her work. This overview exhibition was presented at Megalo Gallery in Canberra in 2006. In conjunction with the exhibition Annie was Printmaker in Residence at Megalo, where she trained artists Emma Rees and Rachel Fields in multicolour repeat printing on the Megalo fabric table as the cover of the catalogue for the exhibition.
Annie has taught printing on fabric with pigments, dyes, resists and chemical treatments in the Australian National University School of Art Textiles workshop since 1992. She has been associated with Megalo Access Print Workshop for 24 of its 27 years as a printmaker, project artist and board member. She received the Capital Arts Patrons Organisation (CAPO) 2006 Fellowship, artsACT project funding (to assist in production costs of the catalogue) and assistance from the Australian National University in the Outside Studies Program.
Biography
My first contact with Megalo Access Arts was in 1984 at the Ainslie Village workshop. I was asked to design a poster. I did the design and Megalo Access Arts did the separations and the printing. I then went on to do a weekend workshop in fabric printing and the rest is my screenprinting history.
I know we are in a unique situation here in Canberra Australia with purpose built equipment in the Textiles Workshop at the Australian National University School of Art and upgraded facilities in dye printing at Megalo Access Arts which Jill Pettier and I have contributed to with our ongoing research into Chemical Treatments of Fabrics.
I have earned recognition for a place in the history and practice of printed textiles in Canberra from my continued involvement in all aspects of fabric printing both as a practitioner and as an educator in Textiles.
Printed cloth can be seen as a decorative art form but it has as its basis a strong technological foundation. As a medium printing on cloth has encompassed new processes with constant research and development and progressed from simple hand cut stencils printed by hand in pigments to dyes to highly sophisticated direct digital printers which can reproduce thousands of colours.
I have strong technical skills and years of experience in stencil preparation and application, colour research and application and computer generated design. My 2006 Residency at the Centre for Design and Printed Textiles, Montreal, Canada sparked my interest in digital prints on cloth with fibre reactive dyes.