Trudy's Journey
MY LOVE OF ART
As a child growing up in a busy musical family, my initial creative efforts focused on playing the guitar and singing. I also dreamed of running a gallery to display my pottery. However, at age 14, a teacher rocked my artistic confidence. Whilst horse riding, I broke my arm and could not collect my end-of-year art projects, and my art teacher threw out all my classwork for the year.
Consequently, I began to devote more time to my music. By the age of twenty, I was travelling overseas. I busked in London; I loved the acoustics in the tube train tunnels. I recorded some original tracks with two of my brothers. When my first son was born, I decided that a musician's life was not for me. It was then that my love of art came to the fore again.
MY LOVE OF COLOUR
I've always loved colour. At art school, teachers told me to 'tone my colours down,' now, in my art practice, printing layers of colour with solar plate etchings, drawings, stencilling, mono-printing and more - I feel I bring the paper alive!
To make my solar plate etchings, I take my drawings, place them in the sun with a solar plate, wash out in a bath of water, and then ink and print them onto paper. It is time-consuming, but the results achieved with this non-toxic printmaking method capture my drawings of our natural environment perfectly.
WHAT INSPIRES
People often ask what inspires me; I'd say you bring many parts of your life experience to your work.
My husband and mother-in-law are the most talented gardeners and inspire many aspects of my work. I collect specimens from my local gardens and around the coastal landscape of Lorne on Victoria's picturesque Great Ocean Road in Southern Victoria, Australia.
One of my favourite specimens is the Banksia, a stunning Australian native flower with various colours and textures. I have many specimens in my collection, but I still ask friends to let me know if they ever find anything interesting.
A few years back, I received a small container in my mailbox that contained a dead dragonfly. I posted a picture of the package on social media and thanked whoever had left such a beautiful gift!
My friend commented, "only you would think a dead bug in your letterbox was a gift. "Very funny, but I do find them fascinating.
The Garden Serenade by Trudy Rice. Available at Queenscliff Gallery
A NEW START
When I returned from my travels, I found a different artistic avenue, modelling in the fashion industry. Working with some of our country's most talented couture designers for more than twenty years was terrific but challenging. This experience enabled me to gather real inspiration from fabric, texture, and colour. Working as a fashion model, I still dabbled in jewellery making and drawing and sold my work at local markets. I still love markets!
When I met my husband, who noticed some drawings I'd done and said, "what are you doing, you should be making art". He bought me an easel and canvases for my birthday, and I never looked back. Enrolling in part-time art school was the best thing I could have done. It introduced me to printmaking in many forms.
I have had eczema since I was a baby and the toxicity of the acid and some solvents played havoc with my skin. So I researched all the non-toxic printmaking methods and happened upon the talented solar plate etcher Janet Ayliffe who just happened to be running a workshop at Warringah Studios in Sydney. I was captivated by this marvellous technique, and it was a fascinating and significant turning point in my art practice. I didn't touch solar plate etching for the following two years but was again enticed to do a refresher course with Janet and fell in love with the process all over again. I set up my studio to work in this beautiful, magical medium, convinced that I would work this way for many years.
TEACHING
I have been teaching for some years and enjoy working with both children and adults. When teaching children, I try to convince them that 'nothing is a mistake,' all our work can say and express something. I love seeing students' expressions when they pull their first print. Absolute magic!
THE JOY OF COLLABORATING
Ever since I made and showed my art, it has often been said that it would look fabulous on fabric. So I’ve transferred my art to various substrates, including wallpaper, fabric, and indoor and outdoor projects.
It’s taken many years to research and develop my art practice and my product creation, and am now honoured to have my designs licenced with Ashdene who distribute locally here in Australia and New Zealand. Find out more about LICENCING HERE.
EXPERIMENTATION
I've been thinking about how the things that change us or unsettle us have their own quiet beauty. I keep returning to the idea of Kintsugi: the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer and powdered gold. Not to disguise the cracks, but to honour them. To acknowledge that the break becomes part of the story. I feel this deeply. It is how I want to live, and how I want to create.
Printmaking has always been a great love. I enjoy painting, but I always return to paper - the textures, the impressions, the way it records my drawn mark. My process follows a gentle order: drawing, mark making, and preparing plates. These stages are structured, almost meditative.
Then comes the colour. Mixing pigment is like cooking - intimate and tactile.
Inking plates and preparing the press is grounding; it's physical, almost like being in the garden.
But the moment the work reaches the press, something shifts. I move into intuition, instinct, flow. Here I'm not thinking in straight lines. The work becomes a conversation between memory, landscape, and something quieter inside.
Recently, I've been learning to pause more. To step back. To notice what I'm responding to in the work, and let that lead me forward. This has opened a pathway toward abstraction, toward what is felt before it is seen.
This shift carries echoes of family. I recently learnt of my father's design for a family home. Creating a space for his growing family. A round house - spaces drawn to feel open and held.
Now having a copy of these sketches, I am drawn to use them as yet another layer of complexity in my work.
Now, as we grow into our life on the land in the Otways, these memories rise. I watch light move across the dam, dragonflies emerging in the late evening light and the breeze moving through tall grasses. I am learning about this place slowly. The land itself is teaching me to listen.
There are cracks, of course - old ones and new ones.
I am letting them glint, just slightly, like gold.
I'm working on a new series, a gentle step into unfamiliar territory - a shift that feels both tender and necessary. It may look a little different to what I've created before, but it is the truest expression of where I am right now.
