Susanna Freymark
Eight years ago, Kyogle artist Rebecca Tapscott started using dead animals in a cyanotype process to create artworks.
“I started doing it after I got cancer,” Rebecca said.
Her eight year journey has resulted in an ambitious artwork made up of 70 pieces called Echoes of Absence.
After her operation, Rebecca said she could feel the absence of her breast.
“When you have an amputation – you still feel it,” she said.
Her search for meaning in life and death led to the artwork featuring 60 animals.
“This is my language of healing,’ she said.
The animals she uses are already dead, found in the bush or roadkill. She sees a power in representing them after they are gone.
A long time ago, Rebecca had a ‘tiny’ artwork in the Traces exhibition at Belconnen Arts Centre in Canberra.
That work won People’s Choice, which Rebecca believes helped her much larger work Echoes of Absence be chosen for an exhibition at the arts centre.
Before going to Canberra, Rebecca laid out the artworks on the floor of the KMI Hall in Kyogle so she could go up to the mezzanine floor and view and photograph it from above.
“There are 70 bits of paper,” she said.
Once she knew the composition and went to Canberra, it took eight hours to hang Echoes of Absence in the front window of the Belconnen Arts Centre.
People viewing the work ask – “Are they real animals?”
The exhibition in Canberra finishes in February and then Rebecca would like to see Echoes of Absence go somewhere else.
“I’d like it at the Roxy,” she said, Kyogle’s own gallery.
Rebecca has had her work in an exhibition every year for the past 25 years, since she graduated from art school.
She has enjoyed creating art from the cyanotype process and catching the detail of the animals – the whiskers on a bird (yes, some birds have them) and the scales of a lizard.
“I cyanotype to keep a record of the absence,” she said.
When she paints the animal with its cyanotype absence such as the phascogale below, she writes a poem about it too.
A Phascogale lay still, tail raised to the sky.
Though his body was flat, his spirit did soar,
An echo of absence, lost forevermore.
Animals and nature always feature heavily in Rebecca’s work often painted on recycled wood and doors.
In 2023 she painted a self-portrait titled Where there is life, there is hope and entered it in the Doyle Art Prize.
It feels like Rebecca is moving into a new realm with her art – we can’t wait to see what she explores next.
Find out more about Rebecca’s work at her website.