Sharon was born in Apartheid South Africa, studied at Reading University and The Slade, University of London, and immigrated to Australia in 1982.
She is primarily a Printmaker, although she also paints and does black and white photography. Her work is representational and it is about issues, some private and some public. She tries to depict universal issues by showing them from her personal viewpoint. Her prints are influenced by her black and white photography and by old photographs. Her photographs are influenced by printmaking and painting concerns.
She has been a member of the Sydney Printmakers since 1994, exhibiting with them at least annually. She has had a few one person photography exhibitions, the last being Time Exposures: 60 Life Portraits in 2013.
You can see Sharon’s work on the Artists page at https://sydneyprintmakers.com.au/portfolio/sharon-zwi/
Here, Sharon talks about her practice :
I work in both photography and printmaking and the two feed on, and influence, each other. In more recent times I have been using a tablet and drawing onto a screen with a stylus. I have the images printed by a master printer with whom I discuss the best way to print my work, and which archival paper to use. Sometimes I work in purely in printmaking; other times purely with photography; and sometimes I combine both streams of my work.
Mostly, my work is about people, but visiting Oratunga Station, in the Flinders Ranges, in 2019 when I participated in the JMCCCP (JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice Winter School), gave me an opportunity to work on landscape images. The landscape of the Flinders Ranges was very different from the coastal and city landscapes I’m more familiar with, and this inspired me to try a very different kind of work, which I am still experimenting with.
Photoshop allows me to work in a very similar way to that of screen printing, especially when I use layers. I can get a huge range of effects, textures, and colours with Photoshop, and use a range of drawing or painting ‘tools’ which give a vast range of mark making effects. It is not a mechanistic way of working, and I do not use the ‘special effects’, which can give a uniform feel. It is no more mechanistic or ‘tricksy’ than any other method of printmaking, despite some peoples’ argument that it is. It is a modern printmaking method that I employ and experiment with, and I find it suits the work I am trying to make.
