About

Anna Masters is a multi-disciplinary artist, whose practice includes mixed-media, installation and participatory public art. Her works examine the transformational qualities of time and context on value and symbolism.

In her mixed-media and installation art, Masters employs a range of organic and found materials, including petals, butterflies, clock parts, optical lenses, bank notes and costume jewellery. The materials allude to personal histories and are often loaded with cultural symbolism. The progression of time, however, strips these materials of their value and meaning: the flowers die; jewellery breaks and stops being worn; bank notes move out of circulation; the clocks stop ticking. By suspending the materials on clear nylon, Masters creates the illusion that the materials are floating mid-air - defying gravity and perhaps defying time too.

Her installations seem to capture a resonant moment, and suspend it there to be experienced, moved through and examined. By re-contextualising the materials in their new compositions, Masters can be seen to actively resist further deterioration and reassign a sense of meaning and value, albeit ambiguous and precarious. The compositions appear fragile, prone to change, prone to succumbing to the natural forces of time and gravity. Compounding this, many of her installations are time-limited, existing only for a short time before being destroyed, lasting only as a memory for those who experienced it. In this way, Masters’ works allude to the temporality of the moment, the fragility of memory and the impermanence of the values and meanings that we ascribe to the things around us.​​

Extending this further, Masters' public art practice focuses on the relationships we have with the people, objects and landscapes around us. By creating subtle disruptions in conventional wisdom and accepted norms, Masters opens new avenues to navigate our social and physical landscapes, and creates fragile new paradigms which ground us in our specific time and place.