Rosslynd Piggott is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. Her work explores the material thresholds of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, glasswork and installation, enlisting a sophisticated technique and acute sense of colour. Recalling the fragile and ephemeral qualities observable in the natural world, Piggott signals the inner realm of emotion, memory and imagination. Slow and deliberate, her work makes palpable that which lies just beyond our tangible reality.

Her interdisciplinary and process-driven practice generates meditative compositions that consistently evoke metaphysical, spatial and perceptual considerations. The pared-back nature of much of Piggott’s recent aesthetics elicit multi-sensorial phenomena through a seamless invocation of environmental factors such as air and light. Often resistant to discrete categorisation, her unique approach to materiality captures the mutability of paint, sculpture, glass and photography.

Born in Frankston, VIC, 1958, Piggott has maintained a prolific studio practice for over four decades. Her first solo exhibition at the artist-run space 200 Gertrude Street (now Gertrude Contemporary) in 1987 marked her arrival in the burgeoning arts scene in Melbourne’s inner-north. Since then, Piggott has regularly shown across Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Europe, completing her PhD in Fine Art practice at Monash University in 2017.

Influenced greatly by time spent collaborating with artisans and master craftspeople in Japan, Italy and France, Piggott has undertaken residencies in London, Rome, Tokyo, Paris, Venice and Saitama, JP. Works completed during these stays often reflect the specific region’s sensitivities to a given material or approach to medium. Throughout her career, Piggott has explored the interstitial and generative spaces between the personal and universal, ancient and contemporary, local and global.

Piggott has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions in Australia and overseas, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2019 and 1998); Museo del Vetro, Venice, IT (2017); The Johnston Collection, Melbourne (2013); TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, VIC (2011); Art Gallery of Ballarat, Ballarat (2009); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2008) and the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane (1992), among others. Her work is found in significant institutional and state collections across Australia, Europe and the USA, including the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney; Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), Perth; Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), Adelaide; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery (QAGOMA), Brisbane; University of Melbourne, Melbourne and the British School at Rome (BSR), Rome, IT; among others.