Cantata Studio - International
photographic artist: Toni Rogers
After many years of teaching photography, printmaking, fabric design and fibre art,
Toni Rogers now works through her Cantata Studio in Kuranda, in Far North Queensland.
Toni has exhibited her photography and fibre art since 1974 and has featured in a
number of publications and are held in a number of private collections in Australia,
New Zealand, France, USA, India and the UK.
Toni's photographs tell a story, reveal a place, an event, a state of mind. There
is a common theme in her work where simplicity is the most important aspect,
however, while giving considerable attention to detail she tries to show the
extraordinary in the ordinary. Toni draws heavily from nature recognising the
importance of natural images in conservation and education.
Toni's birthplace, New Zealand, is an environment that continues to strongly
influence and support her creative direction as it has since her father first
introduced her, as a very small child, to the seashore and its mysteries. Her designs
reflect strong emotional ties and evoke the traces of human and natural processes
with repeat patterns, like water on sand and the ever-changing seascape.
Part of Toni's fibre work is described as 'Oceanic Art'. Toni uses sculptural
fibre and works with extremely broad definitions of fibre. Just about anything
flexible becomes fair game in this effort to gather and interlace the great breadth
of materials available. Toni considers weaving fibre as an art of assemblage and
juxtaposition; the satisfaction lies in making an inventive whole out of disparate
parts.
Toni finds value in the discarded, and her fibre pieces are almost exclusively
created with materials salvaged from our surroundings. These raw found elements
have their own characteristics that can push a work in unexpected directions. In
the most basic way, the work springs out of our community and our environment.
These days in the midst of our culture's rush toward the disembodied world
of cyberspace, Toni has chosen to participate in the tangible, to grapple with
unwieldy lengths. Her collection is visual art, but is about hands as well as eyes,
about hammers and tin snips and long-nosed pliers. Modern as it is in some ways,
her collective works hark back to the kind of dignity and pride that were possible
for a craftsperson before the Industrial Revolution's mass production methods obscured
individual skills and ingenuity.
