Indigo Dreaming 2, mixed media on paper with hand-sewn elements

Brisbane artist Tiel Seivl-Keevers creates work with a focus on texture and form, often incorporating multiple ideas and colour schemes into a single surface for a patchwork abstraction. Tiel’s works often feature bits of line-art and half-formed figures that come to the surface in a storm of colour and pattern.

Planting Succulents, mixed media on canvas

There’s an illustrative quality to Tiel’s works that I really enjoy, particularly in the way that artist utilizes line art. Rather than creating a definitive figure, she paints the suggestion of a figure, allowing the audience to form their own visual and conceptual opinions. It seems like the plant-like forms present I many of Tiel’s artworks could also be representational of concepts more difficult to render.

I also like Tiel’s recent Paper Garden series. In these works she continues to utilize plant and leaf motifs, but instead of peeking out from behind large brush marks, the plant forms float on warm-toned negative space, giving them the appearance of natural specimens collected for a catalogue. 

Paper Garden 1, hand-cut paper shapes cut from painted imagery, archival paper