Anna Medwedski is the new Steve Cooke scholarship recipient. Photo: Katie Witt, Cannery Arts Centre.
When Anna Medwedski opened a letter congratulating her on becoming the next Cannery Steve Cooke scholarship recipient, she jumped excitedly around her work at the Sandy Hook Tavern.
“I’d been checking my emails a lot and my flatmate said there’s a letter for you from the Cannery Arts Centre and I’m like ‘no way!” Medwedski said.
“I didn’t know what was inside but I was already super excited and I was hoping they wouldn’t go all the way to drop it in person just to say ‘no’ to me but apparently I forgot to put my email on my application.
“I couldn’t stop smiling.”
The year-long scholarship allows an emerging artist to partake in Cannery Art Lab workshops, pottery classes, wheel classes and handbuilding for free and includes a 12-month Cannery membership.
It was named in honour of Esperance glassblower and artist Steve Cooke who wanted to support up-and-coming artists in the region.
Medwedski said she mostly dabbled in black ink works and watercolours and she said she did tattooing too.
She said part of the reason she applied was to try different mediums, while gaining inspiration from fellow artists.
She submitted a watercolour piece of Esperance to demonstrate her creativity.
“I made a little card with the Twilight Beach view in watercolours and then you can open it and you have a seagull staring right at you — it gives you like a side eye, kind of, and then if you turn the card around I continued the seagull and gave it a big chain which is a clock,” she said.
Medwedski is from Hamburg, Germany and moved to Esperance two months ago. after a long stint hitchhiking around the world with her boyfriend.
She said she drew on her life experiences to create art.
“I get inspired by travelling and by nature because sometimes when I don’t know what to draw, I draw something that I see in front of me or some nature and I think it’s really calming,” she said.
“As we were travelling, it was really hard to have different art supplies, especially living out of a backpack where everything is heavy and you cut all the tags [off clothing] to lose a little more weight on your shoulders and to put more art supplies in instead.
“I started to do watercolour because it’s really small and compact and versatile and I just had black liners and pencils.”
She said her creativity helped regulate her emotions.
When I’m mad I like to draw something that expresses my anger but also when I’m feeling particularly sad I’ll draw something more cutesy that will cheer me up.
“The drawing I did about the burning airplane for example, I was taking a plane and I try to fly as little as possible because I’m a hippy or something and I like to not be too harsh on the environment but sometimes you just can’t get around it and I saw all these planes and it’s such a big industry.”
Medwedski said her love for art came from her mum whose dream was to design lolly packaging, though she found herself teaching mathematics instead.
“As a little girl I really liked to draw and my mum also encouraged me a lot to draw but she’s very perfectionistic,” she said.
“She helped me a lot to improve my art even though sometimes I didn’t really want her to, you know you just want to be a child and draw but it was fun.”
Medwedski said her “super dream” was to have her work displayed and sold in galleries but she said that was a long way off yet.
Her backup career option was a little quirkier.
“Have you ever seen the ASMR head massage videos where people go to the spa and make videos about it — I want to be the character in these videos like to go to the spa and get paid to do that.”
For now, Medwedski said she was taking every opportunity she could get in the Esperance art scene.
“For me I have a lot of hope in Esperance and it’s been treating me very well,” she said.
Medwedski received her scholarship just three weeks ago and said she had already participated in all available workshops.
