Regional Spotlight Artist Profile | Colin Reaney
The Regional Spotlight initiative is an opportunity for Wide-Bay Burnett artists at any stage in their career, working in any visual art medium, to receive mentorship and share their work at the gallery. Developed from an expressions of interest process, the 2025 exhibition brings a multifaceted survey of local artists sharing their personal connection to space, landscape, environment, home and time through mediums of painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture and mixed media work.
Colin Reaney's work explores themes of citizenship, agency and collective identity.
How long have you been making artwork?
Firstly, how long? There is a Chinese proverb – “time as long as it takes to eat a bowl of rice”. And then there is ART making. Edward Said, writing about creative endeavours, viewed origins, as being more a fixed starting point, while "beginnings" are dynamic and involve a process of emergence - revealing how something takes shape, how it comes into being, and how it interacts with its environment…Making art is all about new beginnings - a daily experience. So, a long time!
What are your favourite mediums to work with and why?
Currently its big sheets of paper (a sea of white paper), 2B graphite pencils, plaster, paint, and wood.
Who/what inspires or influences you?
I spend my time doing something I really love doing, in the company of people (artists) I like being with.
Has your practice and subject matter changed over time? If so, how?
The material & process aspects change depending on the ideas I am working with/on. For example, I work across both 2D and 3D, so /fabrications according to measured drawings/ becomes a sort of useful working methodology, I try to keep track on all the stuff I do, so this title is more for my archive. The current ‘24 Rabbits/Settlement’ series developed since I came back to HB in 2016 and is an extension to the above. I like keeping an archive its sort of like “housekeeping”.
What do you like most about living in the region?
I was born in Maryborough, and my parents have had a house in Urangan since early 1950s. I love the ocean and have a strong affinity to the shoreline, that line where water meets land. Why, I ask myself, do they not build Art Colleges at the seaside?
What advice would you give your younger self?
I have only to reflect on my years of academic life - all those University Open Days, with nervous parents trying to understand the job prospects for their newly enrolled child in a Visual Art Degrees – I would do it all again.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
I would like to acknowledge my time spent (1988-2016) as both an “Expat” and Academic. My Academic Citizenship, in Southeast Asia & lately South Asia (Middle East) has been central in driving so much of my current art practice and its ideas. Teaching in Art education and living in that accent, meant I had to fact check/question a lot of what I was passing on in these different cultural environments. Interestingly I did not have to wait long before being asked about that “accent”, and like all students, these students would politely and with curiosity, give me the space to “suggest” another possible understanding of what “Art” could be and mean in their space. I have always taught, and learnt much from the time spent with students, this is reflected very much in my personal studio practice.
What is the most interesting feedback you have had about your work?
I was privileged in having spent many years in the company of art students who made my practice, both as artist & art studio facilitator so rewarding.
Photo: Lumi Creative
