Annette Peterson

In Residence on the verandahs at Donnelly River Village

13-20 June 2023

Annette Peterson was born in Norway and grew up in Whadjuk Boodja. Peterson first completed a Bachelor of Arts with majors in Psychology and English Literature at UWA in 1997. In 2016, she completed a Graduate Diploma for Art and Design and began Masters of Applied Design. Peterson received a commendation from the Head of School for Art and Design and won the Art Award for her Master’s degree 2017.

In 2018, Peterson won the Celebrating Joondalup Award at the Joondalup Community Art Awards and was awarded the Overall Emerging Artist for the City of South Perth. In 2019, Peterson was the overall winner of the Joondalup Community Art Award and was selected to exhibit at the 2019 Bunbury Biennale, Minnawarra Art Award and the Perth Royal Show Art Prize for Landscape, amongst other exhibitions. In 2019, after she graduated Honours in Fine Art, she completed a Fine Art Residency at Curtin University and held her third solo exhibition, at Orangery Gallery, Shenton Park.

In 2020, Peterson completed an Artist Residency at Fremantle Arts Centre to develop a new project that combined painting with digital animation to replicate an iOS “Live” stop-motion films. Peterson was able to premier her works at a solo exhibition at the Bunbury Regional Art Gallery, was selected for the City of Joondalup 2020 Invitation Art Award and the Minnewarra Art Award.

In 2021, Peterson began writing for The Artist Chronicle Magazine, WA. She was again selected for the City of Joondalup 2021 Invitation Art Award, Minnewarra Art Award and the inaugural Lethbridge Landscape Art Award, Qld. She was also a finalist in the LA Animation Awards.

In 2022, Peterson two solo exhibitions at Gallery Central NM TAFE, and Mundaring Art Centre respectively, Perth. She was a finalist at the Minnawarra Art Award and was also the 2022 Cossack Art Award Artist in residence. Peterson also began a new project trauma and memory instigated from artist residencies at Midland Art Centre and Parkerville Children’s Home in 2021. The success of the project led to a solo exhibition for Mundaring Art Centre and an art residency with Fish Factory in UK.

Peterson is a practice-led oil painter who has both studio and plein air approaches to her practice. She utilises photography and painting techniques to facilitate both realistic and impressionistic style landscape paintings. Having worked at a journalist, she is interested in how these media are perceived and experienced. She is motivated to document movement through painting phenomenal experiences. She believes the “touch” painting offers a better connection to our humanity than the digital format.

The suburban driving experience has become a central theme in Peterson’s painting oeuvre. Previous research projects have embodied this subject using Impressionistic and Phenomenological approaches.

One project involved painting ten-minute sketches in her car on the side of the road to best capture the sensory affects of driving. Another explored the remediation of digital and analogue formats of the moving image and how they are perceived. More recently, Peterson created digital animations based on “live” iOS photos. More recently, Peterson has begun to draw form her Psychology background investigating onsite trauma paintings and how it affects memory.