JB: “Give me a little background to your beginnings in
art and your training?”
KI: “I’ve always loved art. My mother was arty and my
grandmother was quite crafty. She spun wool. She dyed
wool and wove fabrics. My grandmother would take me
around the farm and we’d go hunting for birds and bugs
and look at the trees and she would tell me all about
the native fauna and flora. So that’s where my love of
birds and nature stems from. I did art at school until year
eleven when my art teacher told me to give it up. She said
I had no talent. So I stopped doing it and focused on art
history in year twelve which I loved. That’s where I was
exposed to Seurat who did pointillism. But that was the
end of that so I left art and got married and had children.
When my daughter was born I did a bit of painting again
because we needed some art to fill the walls. I got some
canvases and paint and just started painting and it went
from there.”
I first met Kristin Ivill when she breezed into my studio clutching a portfolio
folder full of artworks she wanted to get copied and printed. While pouring
over her work, it took me some time to realise that the exquisite images were
made of thousands of dots, dots of all shapes, dots of all sizes, dots of all hues.
My only point of reference was to imagine that the dots were like pixels in a
photograph. I went along to Kristin’s studio to see if she was indeed going dotty.
Written and photographed by John BottonKristin in her studio (above) and meeting our gaze through a
mirror which also reflects her work, (below).