2025 New work
2024 Glimmers
2022 Inside Water
2020 Fragile States
2019 Quadern de Pedra
2017 True North Far South
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2025 New work
This current series of work has risen organically from a ceramics residency I undertook at Burnt Dirt at the start of 2025. Working in ceramics opened up many opportunities within my practice with respect to working in 3D forms and especially with the world of glazes and applying colour and texture to the ceramic works I am still creating. Painting with oxides on some pieces resulted in a range of earthy greens and browns, both colours I do not regularly deal with in my printed works. This opened my eyes to the play of new colour which in turn set the tone for this series of watercolours in development. I am enjoying how the process of working with new media influences my approach to drawing and print work, more to come...
Exhibition Australian Galleries Melbourne 22 October - 9 November 2024
Glimmers captures moments in time during my bushwalks to discover waterfalls on Dharawal and Gundungurra land in Australia.
The alchemy of rock and cascades forge the passage of time and the inevitability of change. Transience, inevitability and loss. Turbulence, beauty and reflection. And a new vocabulary of marks and new approaches to print emerge. Drawing, lithography, mokulito and etching all transpire as media used to articulate my ideas.
Watch Glimmers video
Emerging from the deep and enduring journey through land and country in my art making, Inside Water is an expression of a new passage which attempts to capture the nuances and meaning of water.
From chance meanderings in the Illawarra landscape exploring waterfalls and creeks and experiencing the life-force and impact of water on me as a person and as an artist, water became the central element for me to explore in these works. With a small flowing creek outside my workshop, the sound and movement after rain led me to explore the connection of being part of something much greater but right on my doorstep – a green corridor connecting the escarpment to the sea.
Working across the mediums of traditional lithography, mokulito, woodcut and watercolour enabled me to explore the different qualities of water – movement, light, strength, fluidity, substance, flow. The visual language this created became more dramatic with strength and character taking the forefront with painterly and more intuitive marks following the fall and flow of water. Many times I felt the incidental flow of marks beyond my control, echoing the real life movement of water.
Exhibited at Australian Galleries Sydney March 2022
Fragile States describes a parallel notion of fragility with respect to the state of our current natural environment and my own personal experience during a period of relocating to Australia after almost two decades abroad.
These works address the duality experienced both in a cultural and linguistic sense, and also within the landscape I inhabit. In this time of displacement and dislocation, my experiences were charged with sentiment, vulnerability, and a sensitivity to change. It was a period of introspection, weighing up what would be lost and gained and bearing witness to the closure of a chapter in my life. Now, in Australia I am challenged by new places of personal significance in my local area such as wide coastal perspectives and waterfalls. My work is concerned with the rhythms in nature and the importance of treading lightly on this borrowed land.
In this exhibition, I work in the techniques of Stone Lithography and Mokulito, because there is a flow between the process, materials and image making. Lithography offers me a very direct way of making painterly marks within printmaking and carries with it a rich gamut of tones and textures such as reticulated washes and wood textures which mirror forms also present in nature. I walk and observe places while making quick sketches that later serve to situate myself back there with the movement, sounds and sensibilities. Back in the studio, I work on the matrix of stone or wood in a visceral manner creating a new landscape which taps into the feeling of being in that place. Danielle Creenaune, Nov 2020
Exhibited at Australian Galleries Melbourne November 2020 download catalogue
Quadern de Pedra by Danielle Creenaune is a series created over the duration of 2018 – 2020. A Quadern in Catalan is a booklet and Pedra means stone. Thus translating to a booklet of stone. This series presents landscapes as pages in stone; each page exists as a poem of our human experience with nature, history and geology.
‘I began working on this series before leaving Barcelona, taking visual notes from my last journeys into the Catalan Pyrenees, a pivotal place and inspiration for my work over the last 18 years. In this landscape, I feel a sense of meditation and also intense energy. As with many of my works I feel there are opposing forces at play, balancing the complex and the simple, the sensitive and the bold, intimacy and grandeur, the inside world of personal sentiments and the outside world of nature’s rawness. I hope to continue the series based on Australian landscapes and in a way chart the transition back to this familiar landscape.’
The technique is chine collé and stone lithography. Chine collé is a technique whereby the image is printed onto a thin Japanese paper and pasted to a heavier backing paper. In stone lithography, the image is drawn onto a piece of Bavarian limestone. Lithography is based on the principle that the drawn image is grease-loving and the limestone is stone is water-loving, hence they repel each other. The drawing is created directly onto the stone, processed and then when printing, the stone is kept damp. The drawn areas accept ink while the humid non-image areas repel it. The image is printed by hand and run through a manual Lithography printing press. The delicate wash effects are called ‘reticulation’ and this is created by the lithographic drawing ink called tusche. It contains grease and when mixed with water it dries producing this effect.
There are currently 8 works in the series 2020 Quadern de Pedra 5 was selected for the 251st Royal Academy Summer Exhibition London 2019.
Exhibited at Post Jackson Press Melbourne 2017
True North Far South Catalogue Essay
by Marguerite Brown MA ArtCur, General Manager Print Council of Australia Inc.
Danielle Creenaune’s work occupies a liminal zone between abstraction and representation, where the experience of a place, rather than a literal rendition of landscape feeds her creative practice. Wind-swept and gestural, the artist distills the essence of her subject through reductive marks made confidently on lithographic plates, which through the alchemy of printmaking are released onto paper.
Born in Australia and raised in the Illawarra region of the NSW coast, Creenaune has spent the better part of two decades living abroad, and is now based in Barcelona – heart of the Catalunya region. She first visited this part of the world 17 years ago, having heard about the Centre D’Art I Natura deep in the Catalan Pyrenees. Embarking on the then difficult journey to this remote art studio and residence in the small town of Farrera, she experienced an immediate and all encompassing connection to the place when she arrived. She decided to undertake an artist residency at the Centre, and has returned regularly ever since.
When the European summer heats up the continent, Creenaune travels to this lofty spot to teach a course in printmaking on an almost annual basis. She walks the highland tracks, the same paths that she discovered so many years ago, and much of the current exhibition interprets this location and the sensory impressions and emotive connotations it holds for the artist. Making fast drawings of her surrounding environment, Creenaune observes the changes that have occurred to the landscape and its people over the passage of time – just as the countryside has borne silent witness to the changes that have occurred in the artist and her personal world over the stretch of years. For Creenaune, life’s vicissitudes, relationships and experiences have been mentally charted along those meandering tracks. Woven into a rich internal tapestry of thought and memory that is revisited and expanded upon each time she goes back, and is physically immersed in the landscape. It has become a place that exists as much in the artist’s psyche as it does in physical reality.
Creenaune works quickly in the landscape, often sitting low in the vegetation. Returning to her studio certain sketches become the basis of ink drawings, which are then translated into works in print media. The freedom of expression that lithography engenders make it the perfect medium for Creenaune’s bold, spontaneous style. Unlike intaglio or relief printing it is not necessary to cut or scratch the surface of the plate, thus her supremely confident line-work finds fluid expression.
This exhibition includes prints where Creenaune has combined traditional lithography with a wood-based version of the process known as Mokulito.The wooden printing surface used in Mokulito is responsible for the wood-grain seen in broad areas of colour or tone that appear in some works, creating evocative atmospheric effects that marry well with her heavier marks.The wooden plate slowly breaks down through the printing process – it’s changeable, unstable matrix mirroring the physical mutability of her landscape subject.
As the title of this exhibition suggests, Creenaune has not forgotten her Australian roots. Like many of Australia’s iconic contemporary and twentieth century artists, she chooses to upend conventional picturesque traditions of depicting the landscape, inventing her own visual language to convey its immensity, space and primordial essence. Some of the works in this exhibition are derived from walking trips the artist has made with family in Australia – and again the landscape becomes a vehicle to express a personal dimension. While she may have built a life in Spain, always the South sings its homeward lament. On an aesthetic level this exhibition reveals Creenaune’s skill in tempering fearless gesture with restraint, and immediacy with control. In doing so she visions the landscape in flux, and evokes a dynamic space for both personal and universal considerations to unfold.
Marguerite Brown MA ArtCur, General Manager Print Council of Australia Inc. October 2017
Since 2013, I have been incorporating Mokulito into my own practice, adapting the process, combining it with elements of the traditional Japanese method, traditional stone lithography and also those stemming from my own discoveries. At the time, when I discovered the technique via Ewa Budka’s video, I had been printing wood textured backgrounds and overprinting with traditional lithography plates. It was exciting then to discover a technique which in essence combines elements of both and also the possibility to carve the wood and achieve the effects of relief printing. At the time, there was nowhere in Europe to learn the technique and I found no critical studies published, so I embarked upon self-initiated research.
I reached out to other artists who were working in the technique around the world and we started a dialogue regarding our approaches, materials, techniques and sharing our findings. It took me some years to develop the technique to the point where I considered the results of a quality to stand by my other works in lithography and intaglio. Mokulito can be very sensitive but also can appear crude at times, so my aim was to refine this and achieve the delicacy and range of marks to best show the subtle nuances of the wood within my images.
To give a simplistic description of the technical process, a sanded plywood surface is drawn on with lithographic drawing materials such as tusche and paint markers. I use a range of woods depending on the visual effects I want to achieve, such as Tilia Japonica, Birch, Maple and Marine Ply. Once the drawing is dry, the plate is dusted with talc and a layer of gum arabic is applied to the surface which serves as an etch to protect non-image areas. The plate is left to dry to be printed another day. The same lithographic principle that oil and water don’t mix applies. The gum arabic is washed off before printing and the matrix is ready to be printed in a similar way to traditional lithography keeping the surface damp, applying ink using a roller and running through the press. Any type of printmaking or japanese paper can be used either damp or dry.
Some unique characteristics of Mokulito are that it produces small editions usually of under 15 prints, each of which have slight variations. The image provides a wood texture which can also be combined with woodcut. As the editioning progresses, the wood texture generally becomes more prevalent and tones are altered until the image gradually deteriorates. The image matrix is somewhat unstable in contrast to traditional lithography and is generally not reused, washed out or reprinted at a later stage. When thinking in terms of traditionally-editioned forms of printmaking, some of these elements may be viewed as disadvantages however, I find them liberating as they allow for surprising results. The temperamental nature of Mokulito with it’s many variables, paves the way for innovation and endless possibility.
I believe the characteristic of variability is central to Mokulito. Each piece of wood is different and has its own unique properties, resins, growth rings and grain. Although the wood is treated, it is an organic material and will have different characteristics from piece to piece and from region to region.
© Danielle Creenaune 2024
Danielle has been guest artist imparting workshops in Mokulito/Wood Lithography at the University of Barcelona Facultat de Belles Arts, KHiO Oslo National Academy of Fine Arts Norway and institutions in the UK and Australia.