HERE are many words that could be used to describe Narrabri’s Nancy Hunt – painter, sculptor, mother, partner, daughter – and its her life and her experiences that fuel her work as an artist.
Nancy will be bringing a wealth of life experience to her solo exhibition “New Works, Old Pony”, which is on at the Moree Plains Regional Gallery until January 11, 2014.
The collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures and collages are heavily influenced by Nancy’s experiences living in rural and metropolitan NSW, as well as her time spent travelling overseas.
Nancy (pictured with one of the sculptures which is part of her solo exhibition at Moree) owes a lot of her life’s passions to her mother, who not only taught her and her siblings to ride horses when they were young but also introduced Nancy to some of Australia’s most iconic artworks early in her life.
“I remember mum taking me to the Art Gallery of NSW when I was about seven years old,” Nancy said.
“I was particularly taken with George Lambert’s ‘Across The Black Soil Plains’ (1899) and ‘Spring Frost’ by Elioth Gruner from 1919.”
Nancy completed most of her primary school education via correspondence on the family farm at Spring Plains before completing school at Calrossy in Tamworth.
At the beginning, riding took place over art and after finishing school she worked for her father between competing in dressage and one-day eventing.
“We were always big on campdrafting but during the drought in the ‘80s I took up dressage more because there were no cattle around to draft,” Nancy said.
“I was riding from the age of four or five but I remember I first wanted to do dressage when I was about nine years old, after seeing Judy Mackay perform at Gunnedah.”
She also spent some time working as a travel agent and travelled overseas to Africa and Asia before deciding to study art at TAFE.
In 1995 she placed in the Blake Prize for Religious Art with her sculpture “Ameliorate” and the following year began studying for a Bachelor of Visual Arts and Diploma of Education at the University of Western Sydney, which she used to teach at regional TAFE campuses in North West NSW when she returned to live in Narrabri in 1998.
During her time in Sydney, Nancy won Campbelltown’s Fisher’s Ghost Contemporary Art Prize and has exhibited as part of the Willoughby and Mosman Art Prize exhibitions, among others.
Nancy has also done numerous works for institutions in northern NSW, including two works for the Narrabri hospital and more recently a sculpture titled “Certain Uncertainty” at the University of New England in Armidale. She has also entered regional art exhibitions, such as those held in Nundle and Currububula.
But 2001 saw her heading overseas once again, this time to the UK and Europe, after she was granted the McGregor Fellowship through the University of Southern Queensland.
“This was an incredible opportunity – I ended up spending 10 months there visiting every art gallery I could find in Europe,” she said.
Some of the works Nancy is exhibiting at Moree have been influenced by Etruscan and Celtic artefacts she saw while overseas; others by horses her family had when she was growing up.
From an educational perspective, Nancy said she would love to do more work on art therapy, which she said was big in Europe and the US but not as widespread in Australia.
“I think there’s a huge need for something like that – people sometimes need somewhere to vent whatever they’re going through, even if they throw it out afterwards,” she said.
At the moment, Nancy works out of the home she shares with her partner Steve and their 10-year-old daughter Sahvanah, but she said she would eventually love to have a studio aside from the house that would also give other artists a place to stay if they wanted to paint rural NSW.
“More and more artists are appearing in the bush and organisations such as Arts North West are doing a good job of promoting arts in their region,” she said.
“I don’t think you have to live in the city to paint but to promote yourself is tougher in the country.
“In the city people have more exposure to art – there’s are gallery on every corner and I think their lives in general are probably more creative but having said that, artists in the country are being recognised more now than we have in the past.”
