Nona Burden

Nona Burden was born in Adelaide, South Australia. She has been a practicing artist for the past decade, participating in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia. In 1997 she completed a Certificate of Visual Art Practice at the Adelaide Central School of Art. Her work is represented in private and corporate collections throughout Australia and overseas including, The Federal Court of Australia; Artbank; The Art Trust, Melbourne; The Albert Art Collectors' Society, Melbourne; Interlude Restaurant, Melbourne; Lenzerheide Restaurant, Adelaide; Loreto College, Adelaide and the AIC College of Art, Queensland.

Nona Burden paints simple everyday inanimate objects such as bowls and fruit against complex and dramatic areas of light and shadow. She has made use of stencils and patches of light and shadow to draw viewer's eye across the picture plane. Her works are formalist with a definite grid structure. Objects such as quinces, pears, persimmons and apples are placed into a frame of reference, a context where they are understood and appreciated. Part of the object is always hidden from view, nothing is ever completely visible. Her works reference elements of the known and unknown, the conceptual and the aesthetic and differences between the representational and the abstract. Burden's paintings are about perception in both a literal and metaphoric sense. They are beautifully, joyously rendered, offering sensory pleasure and intellectual and emotional engagement.

'Sometimes, something quite ordinary and seemingly insignificant, can provide profound insights and is capable of stirring emotions in a way which is not always able to be described in words. We live in a visual world. To what extent do we look beneath the surface? How much do context and history affect our response to what we see? Can an image speak as loudly as text, or even more so?' Nona Burden