Grace Batho_DreamBelieve

Marie Larkin has a Bachelor of Art Education and has been a visual artist and art teacher since 1980. She first gained national recognition and success as an embroiderer in the 1990's. She now works in painting, drawing, mixed media and sculpture from her loft studio in her home near Tamworth. Her work is unashamedly feminine and careful executed. She creates richly coloured, finely detailed, alternate worlds inhabited by beautiful girls who at first glance are strange, yet delightful, with expressive eyes and dark natures. Marie's recent work has been inspired by fairytale and nursery rhyme narratives, popular culture and the female figure. She has a naturally illustrative style and over the past twelve months her artworks have become increasingly more stylised while still retaining that convincing rendering of form and detail. Marie enjoys slipping away to her alternate world where she can create images that only exist in her imagination. Marie's design process starts of with an idea which she thinks about for a while before making art. She then moves on to making very rough sketches and researching some of the objects she plans on using within the work, from real life, photos or searching the internet. As detail is such an important aspect of Marie's work, she always completes a full finished sketch before starting to paint the larger work. It is not unusual for Marie to paint every part of her works more than four times before she is happy with the tones and depth and intensity of colour. Her paintings take many hours to produce as she is quite painstaking in her approach and attention to detail. Marie believes the nursery rhymes and fairytales give her the opportunity to play with accessible, already familiar narrative and then surprise the audience with a different interpretation. The use of fairytales allow her to use her illustrative style and use quirky female characters. She has used, ‘Jack and Jill’, ‘Mis Muffet’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘The Little Mermaid’, ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, ‘The Farmer’s Wife’, ‘Mary Mary Quite Contrary’ and finished the series with ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. Many of her works use sickly sweet candy colours, but have a great cruelty and dark humour behind them. Marie says that 'the audience appreciate the humour, imagination and detail behind her works. I finds there is an admiration for the rendering of objects and physical features such as skin and eyes and hair.' As a marketing idea, Marie started creating accompanying pieces for her works. She creates stationary, mugs, jewellery, snow globes, compacts and coin purses to connect with the audience on a more affordable level. She is always looking for new and exciting ways to bring in the audience and market her work. “the narrative is very important for me.” “the narrative is already there and people know it. So all you have to do is play around with it and thats entertains people, its amusing. You can watch them in gallery and they will have a giggle, see the twist and poke the person next to them and whisper...'oh look, Jill's put Jack down the well.” http://www.marielarkin.com.au and find her on facebook

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