Zella Casey Brown
Zella Casey Brown is a multidisciplinary artist working on Kuringgai and Gadigal Land, who works primarily in printmaking and photography with drawing and sculpture also as ongoing practices. Her performative method of monotype printing reflects the paramount connection between body, mind, and material. She views the practice as a dialogue of cyclical action and gesture, working interchangeably to unearth abstract disclosures of sensory experience in collaboration with the mechanical body. For Zella, a shosin approach — the Zen Buddhist term for a ‘beginner’s mind’ is central, as opposed to the pursuit of mastery. As a way of being in the studio, shoshin creates a discourse of forgetting and remembering, between tacit knowledge of the body and explicit knowledge of the mind. She uses this contradiction to produce automatic marks born simultaneously from intuition and muscle memory. Zella's startling sensitivity to nuances of location reflect bodily relations in her work to both place and broader human/environment entanglements. Her practice seeks balance in movement and quietude, form and void, sensation and rhythm, to translate her visual language.
Zella holds a BA in Fine Arts and a Masters in Fine Arts, both from the National Art School, Sydney. Prior to this, she spent three years studying Architecture at Sydney University. Zella’s background in design and architecture, informs her current research practice where formal relations are developed with and through the landscape. Zella grew up on a small beach called Mackerel, tucked into the mouth of the Hawkesbury River. Only accessed by boat, living by the tide and changing weather patterns has led to an intuitive and rhythmic way of living that now threads through her ways of making. The isolated upbringing, far from the city’s pull, offered a ritualistic freedom and space for deep connections to place to form, connections that fuel every facet of her work today. Audiences are often drawn in by the mystery of her art, uncertain if they’re encountering a drawing, a painting, or a print. Zella’s photographic practice deepens this engagement, serving as both documentation and a window into her mind. Following a highly successful graduate show, Zella’s first solo exhibition held in Sydney sold out, featuring 25 works. Since then, she has exhibited in Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmania.