Romanian-born Akka Ballenger Constantin has swapped the beloved mountains of her homeland for the Australian grasslands. An almost perfect trade – although occasionally, she misses the heights. She explores her surroundings through keen observation, often focusing on the unseen detail, rather than on the obvious scenery.
A multi-disciplinary artist working across various platforms, she loves mixing new and old, traditional and contemporary, digital and analogue. Her practice combines over 20 years’ experience in photography and alternate processes, with other (newly-found) mediums such as drawing, mixed media, printmaking and poetry. After a successful Artist in Residence at Playing Fields Studios in 2018, Akka went on studying at CIT and graduated with a Diploma of Visual Arts.
Akka has a special interest in visual arts and poetry and her work is never unilateral; words and images complement each other most often in rendering an idea. She chooses to express herself in various languages and unsurprisingly, her poems move from English to French, Spanish and Romanian from one verse to another.
Her work has a minimalist approach, eliminating superfluous details and focusing on the essential that is often unseen, bringing forward a different perspective. She concentrates on the movement, fluidity, transformation and the use of colours. Sometimes the detail takes the stage, bringing forward a different, unseen dimension of the mundane.
Her themes are centred on temporality and connection (or disconnection) with our place. Her process is based purely on a synaesthetic approach, the cognitive dimension is always exploring the feelings of belonging versus displacement.
She loves experimenting with unconventional materials and ephemeral mediums in order to explore further the idea of transience and the many ways we transform in a lifetime.
News:
https://cit.edu.au/news/akka_ballenger_constantin_considers_art_a_tool_in_activism
http://www.cmag.com.au/exhibitions/redefining-leadership
https://www.womenaustralia.info/exhib/wwdact/
Akka Ballenger Constantin 