Anna Small :   Artist's Statement

I am a visual artist working from my shed in Moana, a beachside suburb of South Australia. I have been into art since childhood and started my technical training at North Adelaide School of Art, graduating in 1996 with an Advanced Diploma.

Since this time I have taken a few years to travel and live overseas, pursue other studies in the area of the environment, and have children. I have consistently exhibited every one or two years during this time. However 3 years ago I made a decision to pursue art as my vocation. I have worked in full-time professional practice since this time in a close working relationship with my husband Warren Pickering.

The ongoing delight that my work gives people who place it on their walls has inspired me to develop my ideas further. At first my designs were exclusively small reflecting the littleness of the stuff that life is ultimately made of.  As I have progressed I have found that the events that make meaning may be small but the cumulative life effect is big and so it has been a natural move towards creating larger steel pieces.

My current sculptures are derived from sketches of flowering shapes from the natural world. I use laser cutting technology with traditional hand forming techniques to push the flower until it finds its chosen form.

Warren Pickerin :  Artist’s Statement

My artistic background is from pencil drawing as a child and studying building design with a technical drawing based career in architecture. The introduction of CAD into the workplace however, caused a shift into the practical side of the building trade and interior design for a more hands on approach.

A visual journal of world travels for six years inspired my place of residence shift from London to Adelaide and a desire to follow the more free-form approach to my artistic endeavours.

Working closely with my wife Anna Small and her own designs was fundamental in the desire to experiment with metal. The challenge for me was to couple the free-form style of the influential pencil drawings with the structural and design aspects of my background. Using laser technology I am able to re-create these drawings and bring them to life in a three dimensional format and produce work that is both engineered and organic, represented by the physical hand forming aspect and the movement within the piece respectively.

The current works are influenced by walking along the local beach with my family and the seaweed washed up on the shore and floating in the shallows.