About

Penny Brooshooft is a Perth-based artist creating sculptural paintings from recycled paper and cardboard.

 

Artist Statement

I create sculptural forms that feel like they have existed long before now. I’m interested in the effect time has on objects; how something new can be transformed into something that has character and personality. I want my work to carry that feeling of transformation; how old frescoed walls feel worn and lived in, and beautiful because of how time has transformed them and given them perfect imperfection. My figures are imagined, and I think they are metaphors for emotion, introspection, dreams and metamorphosis. As humans we start new, and with time we evolve and our beauty is slowly revealed; just like my work transforms raw material and newness through a process of building and taking away until it feels like something that already existed. In a way, this reflects the idea that perhaps we already exist, and life is about uncovering what was already there.

- Penny Brooshooft, Artist

Artist Bio

Penny Brooshooft is a Perth-based artist creating sculptural paintings from recycled paper and cardboard. She is drawn to surfaces that suggest a history; worn walls, faded colour, accumulated layers and imperfections that develop over time and give objects a sense of character.

Her practice centres on the reimagining of paper and cardboard waste into tactile, relievo artworks that sit between painting and sculpture. Penny builds each work using her handmade Cardcrete, a clay-like medium developed from paper and cardboard waste, allowing her to sculpt and shape richly textured surfaces that echo time-worn objects. Her process is archaeological; she builds and layers, then removes and uncovers, allowing earlier surfaces and textures to emerge as the work develops. In this sense, she thinks of her process as creating in reverse: rather than simply adding to make something new, she works towards revealing something that feels as though it was already there.

Her imagined figures sit within architectural and geological forms and act as vessels for emotion, dreams, introspection and imagined internal worlds. Across her practice, Penny is interested in transformation, of materials, surfaces and people, and in the possibility that something can become more itself through the passage of time.

 

Studio Eclette

eclette
noun \ e-KLET \

1. A personal collection of influences, colours, textures and ideas.
2. The bringing together of fragments from different times, places and sources to create something new.

Etymology: Blend of palette (a range of colours used by an artist) and eclectic (selecting from a wide range of sources).

Studio Eclette is the studio behind Penny Brooshooft’s practice - a place for collecting, experimenting and bringing together disparate influences, materials and ideas. It is rooted in a fascination with texture, antiquity, colour and the traces that time leaves behind.