ARTIST PROFILE: Lyn Nixon

Earlier this year, ART ON THE MOVE visited The Alternative Archive artist Lyn Nixon where she lives in Falcon, on Bindjareb Noongar Boodjar.

Lyn’s backyard shed-studio was expansive and bespoke, kitted out with woodworking tools, a large printing press, pottery supplies and her own kiln. In it, Lyn can nurture the many facets of her art practice and continue the experimentation and learning that is foundational to her process.

Lyn took us through the space, explaining, “I love making things. I build all my own installation stuff, create all my own plinths and everything. Dead easy. I just put in this sink. I made it with a shelving unit and plumbed it with a hose so that I can do my alternative processing in the dark. I’ve got a UV light box over there for exposure, which I made too. I can do exact timing on it and know exactly what the exposure is.”

The shed-studio is also home for Lyn’s Long-billed Corella that she nicknames ‘the vultch’. “I’ve had her since I was ten. She’s about 60 to 70 years old. She even learnt to drive a car with me. She’s a beautiful girl. Yes, you are a beautiful girl” she said to the bird, with a loving ruffle of her feathers.

Photography by Aaron Claringbold.

Lyn works mostly with photography, printmaking and ceramics, often combining them together. “I like exploring different processes. At the moment I’m really into ceramics, but I love photography and print. I just try to find the material that suits what I want to say.”

“As you can see, I read a lot. I’m forever researching things” said Lyn, surrounded by her many books with titles such as The Reader’s Digest Family Book of Things to Make and Do, Making Handmade Books, The Craft and Art of Clay, A Printmaker’s Cookbook: Images in Relief, Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art, and 500 prints on clay. “I’m currently researching how to develop my own formula for silkscreen transfers onto paper, that I can transfer onto clay. I’m always investigating and trying new things. I like to be challenged.”

We soon learn that Lyn has always loved a good challenge. Mounted on a wall in her studio are two framed images; a map of the 2012 Tour de France route, and a photograph of cyclists racing through the picturesque French Alps. “I was a cyclist for Australia. I cycled around the world for three years in Italy, France, Austria, Switzerland and America. You’ll have to google me. Wikipedia has it a little bit wrong, but anyway, I did the Tour de France a few times and I competed in the World Championships in San Sebastien, Spain. I was also the first Australian to win a stage of the Tour de Feminin. Those were the days” Lyn reflected.

All the travel began to place pressure on her young family, so eventually Lyn hung up her Lycra. She knew that once she stopped cycling, she would need to find something else. “I have a lot of energy and my brain constantly likes to think and be challenged. So, I started a woodworking course at the Fremantle School of Wood, which I also became part owner of. We’ve sold it off now, but that’s how obsessive I get.” Like the beautiful Italian road bike that she sold to buy a printing press, Lyn traded one passion in for another.

She further honed her woodworking skills at the Australian School of Wood in Dwellingup, which is where she met artist and furniture designer Megan Christie and daughter Anna Louise Richardson. “One day, Anna said to me, ‘You should do art, Lyn’. So here I am.” Lyn went on to study Fine Arts at Curtin University and began to exhibit her installation and photography work, enthralled in her new passion.

As well as a world champion cyclist and a furniture designer, Lyn has been a scientist. “I am a mega has-been” she joked. “I did a Bachelor of Applied Science and Biology, so I still refer to science in my work. I love it, my journals are full of that kind of stuff”. Lyn is equally inspired by philosophy. Tacked up on her studio walls are printed quotes like ‘Drawing is not what one sees, but what one must make others see’ by Edgar Degas and ‘We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves’ by Francois de la Rochefoucauld.

Reappearing across Lyn’s work is the subject of the home. “I grew up in a post-war, state housing kind of house, so I’m interested in the post-war era and that whole idea of trying to create ‘the great Australian dream’. I’ve used these photographs a lot in my work” she said, gesturing to a pin-up board covered in photos and drawings by her grandchildren.

“I took these photos in Panania in Sydney when I was looking after my friend’s home for three weeks. I treated it like an artist residency and walked the neighbourhood taking photographs of the great Australian home.”

“It’s about the uncertainty around the home, as well” she said. “And it comes back to my personal experience. I was a kid when the Meckering earthquake hit, and it really surprised me as a child. Our whole house moved, our entire laundry sunk! I remember how Dad threw us under the table, so we’d be safe. It intrigued me how, even when you think you’re safe in your home, it’s never constant. I love that whole uncertainty thing, how uncertainty is at the core of human existence.”

“I’m trying to push these ideas further in my experiments with clay” said Lyn. “I’ve been wrapping small porcelain houses with copper wire, firing them and seeing what happens. I like that idea of entanglement, and that things aren’t perfect. The idea that you might look at a house and think it looks happy and perfect, but nothing ever is.”

Lyn’s quirky sense of humour informs her creative projects, too, such as her photographs of the ‘ridiculous things’ that humans purchase. “It started off with these objects I found in the Salvos” Lyn said. “I just went, who designed it!? Who thought it was good enough to produce and who thought it was nice enough to purchase? Like those dollies they used to put on toilet rolls, or salt and pepper shakers. It’s that thing you’ve got at home, that is so ugly, but you can’t get rid of it because it’s got some association with Gran or Auntie Lou. I want to fill an entire gallery full of these photos. That’s a project I’m slowly working on, because I get distracted by all the other things!”

2024 has been a busy year for Lyn with several projects in development, her technician role at North Metropolitan TAFE Art & Design School where she assists students in the ceramics and sculpture departments, and two overseas residencies. At the time of our visit, she had just returned from a residency-retreat in India with the UK ceramicist Kate Malone, and has since travelled to Meteora Greece to partake in a ceramics symposium, facilitated by Eutopia Art Residency.

It was Bunuru season and warming up in the shed-studio, so Lyn went inside the house to fetch us some refreshments. She returned with sparkling water and sliced watermelon that we ate as we listened in, intently, to her story of winning gold in the Sydney Paralympics. “I rode with another Lyn, a vision impaired rider who was looking for a front rider. So I had to learn how to ride a tandem, which is not easy, because the front rider has to hold up 130 kilos… But we did it, we won gold, silver and bronze. You should have seen our coach when we were winning. He was jumping in the air, with his legs out and his head almost wobbling off his neck, screaming ‘Go for gold, Lynnies! Go for gold!’”

You can see Lyn’s work in the upcoming exhibition Codes of Peel from September 7 – October 13 at Contemporary Art Spaces Mandurah, as part of the 2024 Indian Ocean Craft Triennial.

Story written by Kristen Brownfield