Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2024 - Student interview - 09. Zoe Streckeisen

ZOE STRECKEISEN: Hi, I'm Zoe Streckeisen, and I studied visual arts at Northern Beaches Secondary College, Mackellar Girls Campus.

[upbeat music playing]

My artwork is about the creation and the removal of fish in the natural landscape and how humans and the preservation of our natural world-- the intersection has become delicate, and it's become off balance.

In my body of work, there was a lot of techniques that I used, and the first technique that I found that I wanted to really get done was coloured pencil and creating a really refined drawing that was very lifelike and made audiences kind of look at it and give it a second glance. And this was layers upon layers of coloured pencil. And I used a white gel pen to bring back the sheen and the shine of the fish to create a lifelike texture to the fish. And there is a quite big blank white space at the top of the composition. And I purposely did not finish the composition, to leave this negative space for the viewer to respond to and to see the depletion, to not see the full image that was intended to be drawn.

I found that the snapper, the size of the snapper, the fins of the snapper would leave really nice indentations and marks on the page. And I used rice paper to print these fish images. And I basically covered a fish in water-based ink, and I'd lay the paper on the surface. I used my mum's clean hands. And then I would rub on the back side of the fish to leave these marks. And it was very trial and error and multiple prints.

Firstly, I had to dye all the paper. I folded the paper multiple times and inserted netting and hooks. And I smushed it between 2 towels and clamped them together and put it in a boiling vat of water with ink. And I wanted to get the indents of the netting. Now the prints have become very overlaid. You can't really see these, but that's the whole point because I'm trying to overlay and overlay and overwork it to kind of show how it's progressing.

And on top of this paper that I had dyed, I printed with a lino block. I printed one fish multiple times coming in and out of the paper. And I also made a zinc plate of fish, and I printed that over the lino fish to create layers upon layers.

As you can see in my smaller-scaled artworks, the etchings of the boats, I wanted to create a series of photo-like images, maybe taken with a Polaroid. And I wanted to capture them in little frames to kind of bring back the history aspect of fishing and the connection to myself and my family in fishing.

My body of work, as you can see, is quite large. And I have to say, I think I spent a hundred hours on that drawing. But originally, I just wanted to do one drawing, one really, really detailed drawing. But it was my teacher who pushed me, and she said, 'You can't just have one drawing. You need to have something else.' And it made me think more about, 'Well, what else can I add then?' In the end, I had too many works. This is only the final selection, the things that I thought were worth seeing.

And artists that I actually looked at while I was creating my drawings and creating my prints to try and tie in the printing and drawing again was I looked at Lucienne Rickard, a Tasmanian artist that studies-- her big work is the 'Extinction' series. And it was a series of drawings that she'd spend hours drawing and detail. But she would rub them out, and it would be the process of her rubbing them out and then redrawing another species on top that really made me think about the layering and not just creating one final thing for people to look at, creating something that people can look at differently.

If I could give any advice to a HSC art student, I'd say, don't think about the end product. Think about the journey it takes you to get there and the artmaking that happens between now and when it's due.

[upbeat music playing]