Marie Larkin

Marie Larkin stands as a notable contemporary Australian artist, whose creative path has traversed a diverse range of artistic expressions, originating from her home in Tamworth, New South Wales. Her career, spanning several decades, showcases a remarkable evolution from the intricate world of embroidery to the vibrant realm of Pop Surrealism, and most recently, into the nuanced language of abstract painting. Her formal art education culminated in 1979 with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Art Education from Alexander Mackie. This foundational training likely equipped her with a broad understanding of artistic principles and techniques that would serve her well across the various mediums she later explored. While her professional artistic career formally began in the 1990s, her background in art education suggests a long-standing engagement with the discipline. For over three decades, Larkin dedicated herself to teaching visual arts across a range of institutions, including public and private schools, TAFE colleges, and Regional Galleries. This extensive experience as an educator likely provided her with a deep understanding of art history, theory, and diverse artistic practices, potentially enriching her own creative development. Furthermore, her work as an Education Officer for The Regional Galleries of NSW indicates an early commitment to the broader Australian art community and a desire to engage with art beyond her personal studio practice. This early immersion in the art world, both as a student and an educator, laid the groundwork for her subsequent artistic pursuits.

Larkin's professional artistic career took root in the 1990s with a focus on the delicate art of fine embroidery. This choice of medium, often associated with domesticity and intricate detail, saw her creating pieces that offered personal glimpses into her experiences as a mother. This early exploration of personal narratives and the domestic sphere as artistic subject matter reveals a consistent thread in her work, where her art often reflects her immediate surroundings and lived experiences,

Larkin began to paint seriously after 2008 and also experimenting with mixed media. This exploration culminated in her first exhibition of paintings in 2010. This marked a bold transition, and between 2010 and 2020, Larkin established herself as a highly successful Lowbrow artist, amassing a substantial global following of devoted fans and collectors. Her work during this period firmly positioned her within the realm of Pop Surrealism , a contemporary art movement known for its fusion of pop culture aesthetics with dreamlike, often whimsical or unsettling, imagery. This style allowed her to tap into a different visual language and engage with contemporary cultural references in a new way. Her Pop Surrealist artwork garnered significant attention, being published in leading art journals, magazines, and books both in Australia and internationally , signifying its impact and appeal within the global art community. The inspiration for her paintings, drawings, and sculptures during this time drew from a diverse range of sources, including fairytales, nursery rhymes, pop culture, and explorations of beauty and the feminine persona. From 2010 to 2020, Marie earned her place as one of Australia’s most successful Lowbrow artists with a substantial global following of fans and collectors. She has exhibited with galleries such as Corey Helford Gallery and Copro Nason in Los Angeles, Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco , AFA Gallery in New York and Urban Nation in Berlin.

In 2020, driven by a desire for a more intuitive and experimental approach to her art-making, Larkin embarked on yet another significant stylistic shift, returning to non-figurative art. Having dedicated over a decade to the representational style of Pop Surrealism, this transition allowed her to focus on the fundamental elements of art, such as surface, texture, and color, without the constraints of depicting recognizable objects. Her current abstract style is deeply rooted in a "process of tactile discovery and imaginative exchange between place and paint". This emphasizes the importance of her physical engagement with her materials and her profound connection to her immediate environment. She finds inspiration in the aged and weathered textures that characterize the rural Australian landscape surrounding her home in Tamworth, such as the rust on tin sheds, the faded paint on fences, and the intricate patterns found in bark and stones. This strong connection to her local environment marks a return to a different form of personal narrative, where the landscape itself becomes the primary subject and a wellspring of creative inspiration. Her abstract paintings evoke the forms, textures, and colors of this landscape, often emphasizing the expansive nature of open spaces and the prominent horizon line. This recurring motif of the horizon line could be interpreted as a visual metaphor for space, time, and the enduring human connection to the land.

Marie’s embroidery and Pop Surrealist artwork has been published in leading art journals, magazines and books, in Australia and worldwide. Her works are held in private and public collections in Australia and overseas, including The National Textile Collection.

My artistic career spans several decades and I have allowed it to evolve and change according to my inner voice and creative circumstance. Artistically, I’m always reaching for greater levels of understanding, vision and skill. I strive for a higher level of excellence with each work and series. It is so easy to fall into the trap of wishing for and seeking greater ‘acclaim’, gallery representation, popularity, followers and sales...but it is always important to me to make the art itself and to focus on the goals within my own artistic practice more than the external ‘markers of success. In 2020, determined to pursue a more intuitive and risk taking approach to my artmaking, I shifted back to non figurative directions in my art making practice. Having been a representational artist for over twelve years, removing the recognisable object or subject from my work has allowed me to explore surface and the ways it can be developed and manipulated. My work is now firmly underpinned by a process of tactile discovery and imaginative exchange between place and paint. Through a complex mix of textured mediums and many layers of washed glazes and marks, the surfaces I build uphold a balance between freedom and intent. I seek to find the nuance and transience of those surfaces and the changing nature of the landscape itself.