Naomi McCann
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Naomi McCann is an emerging artist working in the fields of painting and drawing. She graduated in 2023 with a Bachelor of Visual Art (Hons) from the Adelaide Central School of Art and was awarded the Hill Smith Art Advisory Certificate of Commendation.

Naomi works across water-based and dry media on paper, and oil and acrylic on canvas. Her work presents as formally accessible but with an undercurrent of disquiet suggested by altered geologies, engineered feats, atmospheric affect, artificial intelligence and hybridity. The works are at once epic and ethereal; the harmonious palette at odds with dystopian themes. Her long engagement with drawing, abstraction, and unforeseen outcomes coalesce with more representational methods while maintaining strong links to process-led making. 

Naomi’s paintings, in oil and acrylic, begin with carefully observed skies rendered in a swift manner that reflects the fleeting nature of changing light. She then overlays geometric motifs borrowed from the fields of navigation, astronomy and surveying that suggest a twenty-first century alertness to western perspectives and constructs. These ‘atmoscapes’ highlight the western preoccupation of plotting, measuring and evaluating the potential utility of land, sea and skies to our own ends, overlooking the intrinsic wealth and fragility of nature itself. A layering of objective and subjective modes of seeing point to the human tradition of taking aesthetic gratification in the affective forces of nature, while simultaneously appraising its potential worth to our colonizing and consumptive tendencies. 

Naomi has been selected as a Finalist in the prestigious Fleurieu Biennale, 2024.

Naomi lives and works on Kaurna land, South Australia with her family of five.