Artists Bio

I was born in Sydney, Australia, and was shaped by two decades living in beautiful Oxford and now making Tasmania home.

For most of my working life — or what my daughter calls my “Muggle life” — I worked in business, finance, management and systems: finding patterns, solving problems and bringing some semblance of order to complexity.

But alongside all that sensible stuff, another practice was quietly developing - I was sketching, clicking tinkering creating.

Under my anagram pseudonym Etches Penmen, photographs, words, sketches and digital images gradually became another language — one less interested in certainty, deadlines and spreadsheets, and much more interested in colour, lines, possibility, memory and the things hiding in plain sight.

My creativity does start with the real world but rarely stays there. I photograph, manipulate, paint, crop, layer and reassemble until an image begins to occupy the space somewhere between recognition and imagination.

I’m particularly interested in the moment when a viewer looks twice.

Perhaps something doesn’t quite make sense. Perhaps there is a small detail hiding in the image. Perhaps the work simply catches them unexpectedly and asks them to pause.

Whether working with pixels or poetry, I hope to create that small interruption — a moment of curiosity, a playful tilt of the head, and perhaps another way of seeing.

And if, five years later, someone suddenly discovers the orange I hid in the picture?

Well, that would make me very happy.!!

Stephen McNee aka Etches Penmen