Artist: Nici Cumpston

Nici Cumpston (1963) is known as one of famous photographers who create many significant images about Indigenous cultural landscape of the Murray/Darling river system. Cumpston used to work at the Photographics Department of the South Australian Police Force in the role of a photographic visual artist, a curator as well as former academic between 1990 and 1996. She had to work and process slide films which contain image about the crime scenes, road accidents even forensic investigations. This is the reason why viewers can the forensic approach sense from images of Nici Cumpston even from the images about the natural beauty. The mediums that she mostly uses when create her art work are pencil and watercolour on black and white images. This technique of Cumpston, in fact, is influenced by Kate Breakey, her teachers at the North Adelaide School of Art. With this technique, she change the ugly images about the environmental wreckage in reality into aesthetical images with the haunting beauty.



Nici Cumpston, Ringbarked, Nookamka Lake, 2008, inkjet archival print on canvas, hand coloured with watercolours and pencils, 75 x 205cm.

This art-work of Cumpston really attracted my attention at the first time when I saw it. I can see the effect of the pollution to the river and I also can feel the sense of death throughout the images of trees. However, Cumpston somehow create the aesthetic as well as haunting beauty with portrait of dead and dying trees in distorted shapes.

Sources

Craftsouth 2011, Nici Cumpston: Photographer, viewed on 4 Ausgust 2012.<http://www.craftsouth.org.au/article-details/profiles/77/25>

Image source:

http://www.craftsouth.org.au/article-details/profiles/77/25
http://www.cumpston.org.uk/#/nici-cumpston-australia/4533320152