Annalise Bosnjak - APW/JNHAT Lithography Scholarship recipient 2017 

“This scholarship not only provided me with the financial freedom to continue making lithographs, but the incredible opportunity to further develop my technical abilities within my lithographic practice under the guidance and support of the skilled technicians and staff at APW…In addition to this support, I very much valued the opportunity to work alongside the diversity of talented artists currently printing at APW. This allowed for an exchange of ideas and printing methods, which I have found incredibly valuable…During my scholarship, I embarked on creating a series of large lithographs, employing the technique of Maniere Noire that allows one to work in reverse – starting on a dark surface and removing areas with tools to reveal the light. This is a technique that takes a significant amount of time, with my second print taking over 100 hours to translate onto the stone. My stone lithographic practice is something that is extremely important to me…I can only hope going into the future that incredible opportunities such as the one that this scholarship brings, can be afforded to other female lithographers.”

Melbourne-based artist Annalise Bosnjak, obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts. Majoring in printmaking in her undergraduate degree, Bosnjak's works primarily exist as prints, drawings and paintings that often manifest themselves as installation. Bosnjak's works demonstrate a particular interest in the human subject, drawing on accounts of urban life to address a growing apprehension of technology’s impact on our social and psychological experience of time. Informed by literary writings and theory about the contemporary experience of time, Bosnjak seeks to produce a visual counterpoint to current understandings of temporality that appear to focus on speed and nonlinearity. With her work commonly engaging in the contemporary debate that society’s engagement with technology (particularly within an urban context) promotes a void in real life communicative interaction, leading to feelings of isolation. She endeavours to explore such ideas through the employment of traditional mediums and processes embedded in poetic associations of time, such as stone lithography, naturalistic drawings and traditional oil painting. Working predominantly with portraiture of both the person and of the object, she intends to form personal and intimate relations with the onlooker through an empathetic and tender representation of individuals. In doing so, Bosnjak engages with the effort to reinstate a humanist connection and linear order debatably lost within contemporary experiences of social and technological time.