Former Heartlands Refugee Art Prize winner Minela Krupic is bringing her poignant and thought-provoking first solo exhibition Palimpsest to Point Nepean National Park from April 5, 2014.

The Palimpsest exhibition explores the stories of migrants quarantined at Point Nepean through collected images of them.

Minela won the 2012 Heartlands Refugee Fine Art Prize with the etching installation titled Kolekcija and with the support of AMES, Multicultural Arts Victoria and Parks Victoria, she undertook a ten day artist residency in 2013 at Wilson’s Promontory National Park.

This was her first visit to the Prom and she found it a very inspirational experience.

“As it was a short time there I decided to use it mainly for inspiration; taking photographs in nature, sketching in my visual diary, as well as doing some etching on copper plates I had prepared,” Minela said.

Minela arrived in Australia as a refugee from war torn Bosnia in 1997 and says her artwork reflects the experiences and the changes in her life since then. Since leaving Europe, she has pursued her artistic endeavours through studying painting at RMIT and recently graduating from printmaking at the Victorian College of the Arts.

As an artist in Australia, she has overcome language barriers, cultural differences, loss and discovery and has embraced these challenges through her arts practice.

A palimpsest is a manuscript from which the text has been scraped or washed off so that it can be used again. Using print-making techniques on various materials such as paper and silk, the exhibition explores the themes of memory and its fallibility through the manipulation of photographs and the degradation of the image.

The exhibition opens at Point Nepean National Park Quarantine Station, at the end of Point Nepean Road, Portsea, from April 5. It runs until April 30.

For more information on this story, contact AMES Communications on: 9938 4031.