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IMBI DAVIDSON
born. 1978. Tarndanya | Adelaide, SA lives. Widjabul Wia-bul Country | NSW Imbi Davidson is a visual artist living in the Northern Rivers region, New South Wales. Her work explores the interstices between painting, landscape, plants, textiles, abstraction and mark making. Imbi's work is largely inspired by the experience and memory of the Australian landscape, finding expression in its myriad forms, patterns, patinas, contours and colours. Her abstract paintings are intuitive responses to these multiple elements, overlaid with juxtapositions of opaque and translucent layers, interspersed with expressive marks of wild colours. Working with a range of mixed media from blood, rock, earth, pigment, paint, water and plants, Imbi is fascinated with found objects and paints on recycled objects, canvases, boards and surfaces. Imbi was awarded an Australian Post Graduate Award to complete her Masters of Visual Arts, researching the art of native plants in Australia, with a focus on Indigenous and abstract representations of plants and the landscape. Her MA Thesis, The Casuarina Tree - Visual Translations of Native Plants and Art in Australia (2012), is catalogued in the National Library of Australia. Imbi was awarded an Australia Council Emerging Artist Mentorship Grant and has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants. Imbi is currently employed as Project Manager by Arts Northern Rivers, working across the creative industries to deliver a range of arts based programs and quality arts administration. Key projects include: Rappville Creative Recovery Project, Art on Bundjalung Market, Weavers of the Bundjalung Nation and supporting a range of other projects. As an arts administrator, Imbi has worked as Creative Producer and Professional Artis Facilitator for Northern Rivers Community Gallery and as coordinator for the Links to Learning Program for at-risk youth with Social Futures. As a qualified visual arts specialist teacher, Imbi has organised exhibitions for youth in regional areas of Darwin (Yr 10 Rascals Exhibition), worked with refugee/migrant communities (Trees of Life Project, Refugee Week Community Celebration) and co-facilitated holiday arts programs in Arnhem Land. She has run a range of youth art programs, taught as an artist-in-residence across the Northern Rivers (Arakwal Art Project, Mullumbimby High School, Doroughby Environmental Art Camp) and currently teaches arts based programs throughout Northern NSW. Throughout her time living in Arnhem Land, Imbi was adopted into the Marragnu Djineng Clan from Wulkabimirri, near Raminginging, Central Arnhem Land. She is a speaker of the Djineng language and worked with senior traditional owners to record ethnobotanical, cultural and ancestral stories and learned traditional basket weaving techniques, dye plants and bush medicines from her 'auntie' Mary Milngurr. In 2009, Imbi was awarded an Australia Council Emerging Artist Mentorship Grant, working with artist/mentor India Flint. The 6 month 'apprenticeship' focused on mark-making, the abstract line, natural dyes, story telling in stitch, mapping country and repurposing fabric/textiles/canvas into new or re-imagined works. Imbi has travelled extensively throughout New Zealand, South-East Asia, India, Canada and Australia.
Imbi's work is inspired by the landscape in its myriad forms; its patterning, patina, history, contour, story and bones. Her paintings are an intuitive or inner response to landscape, giving resonance to its deeper, untold form. Her work explores a mythopoetic landscape of colour, shape and motion; unravelling mountainous stories embedded in the folds, depths and boundaries raging against storming skies. The works range over geometric contours of the landscape in juxtaposition with wild, emotional sky-scapes. Imbi's works capture the tensions between earth and sky, inner and outer, whilst finding linear points of intersection and connection.
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