Meet The Team
Bronwen
Photographer & artist
Graeme
crazy COHORT & HUSBAND
​Creating mixed media works that draw from a significant time in my life, where healing from seizures and creating art has gone hand in hand is what I am addicted to doing. Through my artwork, I highlight how the beauty of wildlife and the natural world, in particular New Zealand, can make you smile and change the way you are feeling at any time.
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When I experience something that makes me feel good whether it is standing still and listening to the sound of the ‘silence’ on a crisp winter’s day or sharing a pathway with a frenzy of playful fantails, I want to share it with everyone. I get excited. Being surrounded by breath-taking natural beauty at every turn and with the chaos that is life, I can just stop and literally inhale my surroundings to feel great. I am a sponge for sights, sounds and even aromas and I want people through my art, to experience what I have and even remember something from their past that makes them smile and brings back happy memories when they see it.
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After developing epilepsy in my 30’s, I lost a lot of my independence and everything changed. Using the challenges that come with seizures, I have learned to live in the moment and enjoy what nature and our surroundings have to offer on nature’s timetable and not on mine!
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Graeme, my husband loves driving, and I love photography. Over the years when health allows, we take impromptu road trips, no fixed agenda, rain or shine and leave the chaos that is often life behind to simply enjoy and explore our surroundings.
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Originally a botanical photographer with international awards under my belt, my challenge has been how to stay creative when travelling at will for me has been so limited. I needed to do something different that still made me ‘tick’ and as I saw life through a different ‘lens’ - I wanted to share that and put a day spent hunting for waterfalls, or simply exploring down backroads, into a single piece of art that someone else can enjoy every time they walk past it on their own wall.
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I began to create compositions of the wildlife and landscapes, but it wasn’t fulfilling enough for me and over the years I have developed my own style by taking images of our experiences, blending them together, digitally repainting them and adding a multitude of textures and splashes of colour to share an experience with the viewer that sometimes merges 30+ photographs into a single scene to recreate an experience that every time the viewer looks at it, they often see something they had not seen before.
I have heard that people viewing my artwork have had full-on debates as to if it is a painting or photography. I have people who have emailed me to thank me for the memories that a composition has brought back for them or track me down because their boat has featured in a scene.
It is then that I know I have succeeded!
Crafting artwork that blurs the boundary between fine art and photography is what I thrive on and stirring intrigue and emotion with compositions using photography from our road trips has, and still is
one of the most fulfilling and healing experiences for me.