Our Resident Artist

Emily Raubenheimer lives on the Campaspe River in Northern Victoria in Dja Dja Wurrung country.  Her work reflects this wild bush place and her relationship to it. She explores the Australian landscape, its botanical forms, and our memories and feelings about them.   Central to her work is fluidity and spontaneity of form and line and exuberant colour combinations.  She enjoys painting flora in situ in nature and then again as still life, switching from the grandeur of landscape to the more intimate home setting.  She studied Fine Arts Painting at Monash University and has taught Art for over 15 years. Emily lives in Redesdale with her two young children, partner, scruffy dog and a menagerie of chickens and guinea fowl.

Name of collection: Outside and In

Artist statement about the collection: 

I’m always foraging for wildflowers on bush walks or pillaging flowers from friend’s gardens. Sometimes these flowers are painted in situ in nature and other times I like to bring them back to paint them in my home setting.  My painting is a form of daily meditation, a way of slowing down and appreciating the small things in life, a peach, a bending leaf or a luscious grapes.

The two large pieces in this exhibition depict a special wattle bush that I have visited for three years near my home on the Campaspe River. When I first moved here just as the world closed down during the pandemic, I picked little sprigs to paint in still-life arrangements. It was a way of grounding myself in the chaos. Over the years, the bush, flowering first,  became a touchstone or marker of the coming of spring. Last year our river flooded.  The devastating fury of the water swallowed the wattle bush.  And I grieved when I found the force of the water had uprooted it. Despite being partly uprooted, over time it slowly came back to life, and this winter, it bloomed. So I sat and painted it. Nature and creativity are a cycle, a process of waiting, working, nourishing, recovering, resting and discovering. This collection is my way of documenting that.