Angela Vozzo

Born 1959, Sydney
Bachelor of Visual Arts
Graduation show: 1989
Graduation ceremony: 1990

Artwork in Space YZ

Glenn and Lucy, 1989
Lithograph
65 x 58 cm (framed)

This work is a moment in time and space, while at UWS at the Peachtree Studios. I was sketching, fellow students in my class, Lucy Bagala and Glenn Morris, while they were listening to a lecture at the studios in Kingswood, without them knowing, and I developed it later from a drawing in my sketchbook and into a more resolved lithograph print. They both liked the drawing of them later when I showed them.

In my art practice at UWS Nepean, I used to draw my surroundings and with my imagination that included the random moments of students in their art practices, documenting it quickly in my art journals. My fellow students and lecturers would be moving about the studios and I would catch their transitory, fleeting movements with quick pencil or biro sketches while they were studying around the Peachtree Studios or at ‘The Factory’ in Kingwood, as we use to call it. I would also sketch around the print rooms, at lectures and on various excursions organised by the university.

We had the best times of our lives practicing art with freedom and joy at ‘The Factory’. It was a very different concept to practice art at the studios. Learning was enjoyable and exciting in this creative environment.

On reflection, the Peachtree Studios times at Kingswood UWS were the best times of our lives. We were given a real artist studio framework where we could paint, draw, sculpt, print, perform, etc and also mingle and see what others students were doing in their art practices and in their individual spaces. It was the first of its kind, innovative and pioneering within an Australia university creative space.

It was a Bauhaus-like atmosphere that inspired a true, inventive and imaginative buzz, where visual arts, performing arts, music came together and inspired and informed each other, we all mixed under the one roof. We would work on tasks and come away with creative ideas to fulfil the investigative briefs that each student would complete in their own style; that inspired a unique vision and ground-breaking way of learning the crafts and skills of different art practices such as ceramics, printmaking, painting, drawing, sculpture. We all interacted, communicated and through improvisation and perseverance made our artworks together yet distinctly different.

Selections from Angela Vozzo’s handmade sketchbooks from her time at the School of Visual and Performing Arts at UWS Nepean, 1987-1989