Indya Pearce Art
Indya is Meanjin based artist who works predominately with painting and photography. Indya has been a part of many exhibitions and gallery shows giving her extensive art knowledge in and around the art community. She started painting when she was thirteen years old, using social media as an influence to learn. Having this access to social media was uncommonly a positive influence to her art as she could find other artists, tutorials and artworks to learn from. Social media has also been a big influence for her more recently on her photography journey as she takes immense inspiration from other photographers around the world.
As Indya progressed through her art journey she found it hard to distinguish if she just enjoyed the end result or the process. It made her question her work and the true reasons she was painting. Through exploring this dynamic she came to the realisation that she really did enjoy both. Having some of these moments of inquiry helped her define her work and create new ideas and concepts.
She started her photography journey when she received a camera as a gift from her grandparents at fifteen. She always had a good visual eye for aesthetics and composition and she was then able to explore the photographic realm. Her practice in photography at a young age slowed down and she instead preferred to create visual art like drawing and painting. It wasn’t until her photographic inspiration was reignited when she began art school and was able to learn about analogue photography. She spent time using the University facilities like the darkrooms to explore this medium. Being surrounded and encouraged by other artists rapidly improved her photography, but her best friend Silvana was the main catalyst for her love of photography. Spending time photographing Silvana as her muse helped her explore more creativitely within the realm of photography. Creating a free and safe environment to explore ideas with the comfort of a best friend, she was able to convey ideas and create photoshoots surrounding emotion and nudity that helped her photographic style to form.
Her work is at the core about her personal identity. Creating artworks that show her growth as a person by using open and powerful body poses that visually show self-confidence and freedom.
One of her most recent works surround the ideas of freedom and adulthood. Having worked through a lot of issues with self-confidence and body image, this particular painting coveys growth and freedom to express the body without fear or judgement and encapsulates the emotions surrounding these moments in time.
Her artworks, much like this one, don’t start with concept in mind. She creates practice based artworks and during the process, she works concepts and themes into the works. This is caused by her experimental style and her visual thinking.
Experimenting with new techniques and mediums is something she enjoys doing and wants to continually work on and incorporate into her practice. University classes and teachers have really pushed her to try new and interesting techniques; workshops with Dr Bill Platz taught her how to combine drawing and photography into one ‘dark drawing’. Experimenting with this continues to lead to further exciting ideas as she continually collaborates with friends and artists in and out of the dark rooms. As she learns more about the different ways of making art, and developing new concepts and themes, she becomes more talented at her craft.
All of these aspects lead to an incredible creative artist that works in multiple disciplines - nature film photography series, colourful paintings of the human body, textile works and more. Indya has a few series of work out which you can see on Instagram and a YouTube channel that I highly recommend you look into.
