Artistic Themes: Memory and Impermanence
My material is constantly changing but my themes always surround ideas of memory or impermanence; life has value precisely because it is transient and impermanent. The liminality of life lingering, hovering before it's gone. Something beneath the surface, messing with that temporal space between being and nothingness.
Santin has a Bachelor of Visual Art, Adelaide Central School of Art and a Masters of Visual Art and Studio Practice, University of South Australia.
Medium/ Disciplines: Material Play artist
Santin is an interdisciplinary artist creating installations of paint and object.
Oil and polymer paints, as well as found pages, old drawings, texts and, more recently, X-rays are built into the paintings.
The installations employ many different processes, including carved wood, beaten copper, cast cement and recycled orchard netting. As works are often site specific, the artefact changes according to its end destination.
I do, I undo, I redo. Make, unmake, remake. Trying, failing, doing it again.
Louise Bourgeois
Background
Mary Ann Santin (Reynolds) was born in Melbourne, Australia. Her family restored dilapidated Victorian houses in North Adelaide, South Australia and it is this passion for renovation that explains much of an artistic interest in reconfiguring and giving new life to the discarded and unwanted.
Recent installations utilised recycled vineyard orchard netting in countryside ruins and the South Australian landscape. Work in 2020 will explore repurposing old X-rays.
Santin has worked on place-making initiatives with many communities throughout South Australia. The work has featured in public spaces including the Adelaide International Airport, the State Library of South Australia, on Adelaide's city street verges and in the South Australian countryside.