Cosmographia 5, 2024

Working on canvas, linen and paper in oil and water-based media, my work is grounded in a long engagement with drawing and abstraction. My painted works engage with the history of landscape painting; atmospheric skies are overlaid with interventions of geometric motifs borrowed from the fields of navigation, astronomy and surveying that suggest alertness to 21st-century perspectives and constructs. These ‘atmoscapes’ highlight the Western preoccupation with plotting, measuring, and evaluating the potential utility of land, sea, and skies to our own ends, overlooking the intrinsic wealth and fragility of nature itself. A layering of objective and subjective modes of seeing points to the human tradition of taking aesthetic gratification in the affective forces of nature, while simultaneously appraising its potential worth to our colonising and consumptive tendencies. The elevated viewpoint evokes our habit of placing ourselves outside and above nature, when we in fact belong to and within it.

Naomi McCann is an emerging artist working in the fields of painting and drawing.

After completing a Bachelor of Design (Visual Communication) in 1991, Naomi worked as a designer, copywriter and studio manager for eight years. She then began studying visual art at Adelaide Central School of Art, increasing her study load in 2021 to complete the Bachelor of Visual Art (Hons) in 2023. Naomi was awarded the Hill Smith Art Advisory Certificate of Commendation and in 2024 was a Finalist in the Fleurieu Biennale.

Naomi lives and works on Kaurna land, South Australia with her family of five.