Anna Priluka is a painter and printmaker based on the rugged West Coast of Te Wai Pounamu, South Island, Aotearoa New Zealand. She works in a range of media from small and intricate watercolour studies to complex organic ecosystems painted with acrylic on canvas or panel, to large scale UV light reactive murals. Meticulously rendered flora and fauna combine with unusual species juxtapositions, unexpected scale manipulations and geometric mirroring. Her art is a celebration of native ecology in all its diversity and abundance, and an exploration into the ways we perceive the natural world, weaving scientific information together with a sense of the sacred.
My Approach
Simple ideas
Through every step, we've focused on staying true to our values and making space for thoughtful, lasting work.
Artist Statement
My work explores themes that are deeply rooted in the natural world, with all its wild abundance and incomprehensible complexity. Inspired by traditional botanical illustration, conversations with scientists and my own adventures into the hills, what started out as attempts to celebrate ecological diversity have taken on a deeper layer of enquiry into different ways of perceiving the more than human world. Lists of scientific names become visual, the rare and the overlooked are illuminated, the familiar and the weird evolve together and perhaps, a shrine or portal is created: a doorway through which we can enter into conversation with this magnificent, animate web of existence, in which we are but tiny strands.