Hello. My name's Yvonne Boag. I'm an artist from Sydney in Australia. I'm going to show you some of my recent work going back over the past 10 years.

My work involves my life and it's not political or social. It's about my own experience and how I view life. I have, since 1993, been visiting Seoul in Korea, usually twice a year.

I was born in Scotland in the United Kingdom. I came to Australia as a teenager with my family and was educated there. My most recent work is about the experience of migration. And the images you've just seen are about, like the ship, I came by ship from England, and about the transfer of culture and home to a new country.

I work in acrylic and oil, mostly, and I also make etchings and prints related to the paintings. The work that you've just seen, the last few pieces, have been made in 2012 and all relate to my experience of migration.

Australia is a country of many different nationalities, and I've always had a feeling of not quite belonging there or quite belonging in Scotland. And I think partly the reason I spend so much time in Korea is because it's half way.

I think the most recent group of paintings is my own way of trying to come to terms with this dilemma of being a part of two cultures. And the third thing about these recent works is that the colour, the bright colours have been very influenced by my experiences in Korea, and seeing the colours used in Korean traditional clothes and Korean buildings, traditional buildings.

When I first came to Korea in 1993, I came from Paris. I was living in Paris, and I met some Korean artists. Then, I came back in 1995 on a government scholarship from the Australian government.

I found my first visit to Korea in 1993, so amazingly different that I knew I wanted to come back, and when I saw that Asialink,

the Australian government body that gives grants to artists to visit other Asian countries advertised Korea, I was determined to come back and actually received the first Asialink grant, and spent four months working here in Chung Ju.

In Paris, there's a certain of type of colour and history, Western art history, and coming to Korea I just discovered a whole new world of art.

I worked with an artist, Lee Jong Mok, who explained to me the Korean way of using paper and painting, Korean style painting, which is I've been doing ever since, as well as Western style acrylic on canvas painting.

This is one of my Korean type paintings.

I also became aware of the problem with language, and then my work started to be involved with how to represent language in a symbolic way.

These works here are about different languages overlaying and sound and movement. This one and this one in acrylic and this one.

It's about how we can hear sounds but not know the meaning, but we can see the symbols in a painting and understand them.

Like I said, my work is about my experience and my experience of being in Korea, Australia, UK, or working with the aboriginal people of Australia. This is all the influences that feed my work. I go to these places, do sketches and small watercolours, and then return to Sydney to do the bigger works.

So all these influences mix up and in Australia, I work on my experiences of travel and then in Australia I go into the country and do a lot of sketches of landscape. This is one of my landscape gouaches that I've done when I've been out camping in the country. Later, I go back to the studio and make larger paintings. These are some of the landscapes.

I think some of the my later landscapes show the influence that Korean art has had on my work by the colour and the block shape. More of the Korean traditional painting.

The next work is a drawing I made when I was a resident artist at Taronga Zoo in Sydney. I was there for one month and was given access to visit all the animals and talk to the zookeepers. It was a great privilege to do that. This talk is really like a diary of my life going back from 2012. In 2011, I did a whole series of work about the animals at Taronga Zoo. This is just some of the sketches.

When I was making these sketches, I had no idea how I would use them, I keep them as a record and maybe in a year or two, I'll make paintings. Often I make a sketch or a gouache, and it's maybe one year or two years before I make a larger work.

This work is a tapestry that was commissioned by the Australian government for a building in Dubai. It's made from Australian wool, and it's woven at the Australian Tapestry Workshop. I had to make a series of gouaches when then they chose one, which they wove. It took two months and three weavers to make.

It was a good commission, because they gave me the freedom to make any image I liked, as long as it had a feeling of the Australian bush and country. So I tried to get the more muted Australian colours, which are a little bit different than the colours I use in my normal painting, a little bit softer.

The Australian Tapestry Workshop is in Melbourne in Victoria, and it's the only one in Australia. And they make tapestries on commission that are sent all over the world.

This is one of the gouaches I made for the tapestry. I actually worked and made 12 different works for them to choose from, and they chose one.

Now, I want to show you something different. I also at the same time make small artist books, which are full of words that have no meaning, but when I go back and look at them, they seem to make some sense. But this is like my recreation from painting and printing.

I've made so many of these books. I can look back over 20 years and every time I open one, I can go back and remember the place where I made it. They're really just for me, not for show, but they're very important to me. I think sometimes ideas come from them.

This is an oil paint, an acrylic painting that was the inspiration for the gouaches for the tapestry and I showed in a gallery in Australia.

And this, another landscape. When I'm in Australia, I normally do landscapes, because I don't really like the city much in Australia. I prefer the city in other countries.

In Sydney, I have my studio and where I live in the same building. I show my work in different states of Australia, mostly Melbourne and Sydney.

This is a picture of an exhibition in Melbourne, an installation of the shot of my exhibition.

This is an installation in Sydney, and the work that you see was made in Korea. It's about language, again, and the communication problems. The other work is a landscape. This is in Australian Galleries in Sydney.

This is an exhibition I had at Deacon University in Melbourne. It was a retrospective exhibition, and it had many of the works I made from the aboriginal communities. I visited Lockhart River aboriginal community in Cape York Peninsula, over five years, every year.

This painting is acrylic on canvas, and it's from the time when I was staying in the aboriginal community. In that community there are 500 people living, but six different languages. This painting is about the house, the people, and how all their different languages link together, and they end up with a sort of pidgin English, a mixture of all languages and English.

See, like these colours are the languages and these are the houses and they can... Some people speak one language, some people another, and they try to communicate in a mixed language.

This painting is another acrylic on canvas, and it's about how, as human beings, we can communicate with our bodies when we can't use language. In my own feeling, different colours, these colours represent different emotions, like these two are warm and together, and this one is cooler and alone.

This work is about my feeling of living in Australia in an Australian house, my ambivalence about my position in Australia. The blue, the blue represents how bright the sky is, and the red is the feeling of being there.

The advantage of being in Sydney or in Australia is you can have a really big space and you can have close to nature, so I try to put that in this painting as well.

Because I work alone in my studio, I don't share a studio. I have many animals, three dogs, three birds, and fish. This is one of my dogs, Max. Every day we walk in the park. This is just Max in the park.

This is me walking in the park. The colours are like the more winter colours, and also the feeling of not so good feeling. My colour is my emotion. I actually feel colour more than see it.

In this painting, I remember feeling the trees and the outside was more real than I was, than I am, so I became pale and they became very strong.

These are more about houses and language, which was a big part for many years.

Black houses like this one in the aboriginal community, some houses had people who didn't get on with the rest of the community, and they were sort of isolated. That's what this black house and this being such a small community, they were isolated if they did something wrong or broke the rules.

Everywhere in Cape York Peninsula is the sun. Always hot, always raining, always humid, and just the brightness of the light, I tried to convey on this.

I also make prints, etchings, and screen prints and lithographs. This is an etching called "Somersault." It's about when you're a child and you roll over, and the black is the person rolling over. Somersault, it's a word that means "jump and go round like that." Only when you're young, you can do it, and when you're old, you can't.

So that's me remembering somersault, the joy of turning, and the colour.

After I made that etching, I then did a triptych, which is three meters by a meter and a half. And it's about a discussion between myself and my sister. This is me and this is my sister, and the colours and the shapes are the words that are going between us. And like, how we share, we have a similar history, but now we're quite separate.

This is a series of etchings about the language problem I had in the aboriginal community, trying to speak to so many young people who all spoke different languages. In Cape York Peninsula and Lockhart River, the young people cannot leave, because there's no road out.

They can only fly out.

It's maybe 12 hours driving if the road is open, but the rain stops the road being open, so they're very isolated. So, I fly in to teach them art.

This is another etching about language and connection, and trying to understand a different culture.

This one is similar, a triptych.

This is an etching of the community in Lockhart, and because it's tropical, the houses are high up so the water can go underneath, and very open so the air can flow through. This is why I made them open, like see through.

Another language, just problem. The blue lines are the words and the red lines are the answer. The shapes are the people, the culture.

This painting here is 2004, and it's a diptych, and it's 138 by 274, so quite big size. It's of Australian countryside, and you can see up here a typical Australian shed the farmers have, and the houses and the trees. It's simplified. I like to... I do a sketch and then I take it back to studio and simplify it until I feel a harmony in the whole painting.

This is the gallery I show in Melbourne, Australian Galleries.

This is an etching, and this one is about family. I became very aware of the importance of family and history from both being with Korean people and aboriginal people, because as a migrant, I left all my family and I did have no connection, so this is like a family tree growing.

This is the same subject, and it's an acrylic painting, quite big, maybe two and a half meters by one meter. Often I make a painting and a print that relate to each other.

This is an etching, again about language exchange. I find that when I make prints, it can often balance paintings. If I'm painting too long and get stuck in a painting, I make a print, and it resolves some problems.

This is another Australian landscape with buildings, a diptych. When I have red in the building, for me it feels these buildings occupied, and these ones are empty. These shapes symbolize the tree, so they are symbols. It's like I invent my own language of colour and shape.

Another etching of language. These are etchings about my relationship with my father. They're at one meter by 50 centimeters. I can't explain them.

I spent some time ... I got another government residence in Tokyo, and I made many prints and paintings. This is a series from the Ginza, Ginza Street night, the lights and the people.

Another installation shot of exhibitions. This one's in Melbourne.

This is a series of paintings I made in Korea when I was working at Ewha University, and I had a studio there. Again, it's about communication. At that time, a close friend was very sick, and I missed talking to her, so I made a series of paintings about that. This is one of them. The black darkness is about her illness.

These paintings I'll run through are all around 2000, acrylic on canvas. They were influenced by working with the aboriginal people, because they work down, looking down, because they work on the ground in the sand or on canvas on the ground, and I learned this line scratching from...They work with their fingers, so this is a series I did after a visit to Lockhart River, and their landscape from above.

This is the village of Lockhart from above, with the buildings. From being with the aboriginal people, I became aware of their spirituality and connection to where they live and their different view of time, which was something very new to me.

This is another one, etching about my father, which I still don't know or understand.

This is Korean paper and paint, using the method I learned from Lee Jong Mok. All the time now between acrylic painting, Western style and etching, I do work like this on large sheets of Korean paper, because I enjoy it so much.

And these symbols would be from my influence from the aboriginal people. They use this symbol like a campsite, and they use this for time lines, for time.

So I became ... I am very influenced by where I am.

Every now and then I go off on a strange tangent, because I get bored with what I'm doing, so this was influenced by reading about string theory, physics. I'm trying to describe what I read with marks. I don't think they were very successful, but I enjoyed doing it. I have to do this to avoid being bored.

For the same time I was making the previous work, I am making work like this, which is about the community again, and they have many dogs everywhere. This is just an aboriginal community, the people, the dogs, the houses.

When I'm planning my work or I don't know what to do next, I make many little sketches in colour or drawing, and just maybe 30 or 40, and just put them aside. Maybe later they're used, or maybe I never use them.

This is an etching. When you drive in Australia, everything is so far and so long and so boring, so many hours driving, this is about long driving in Australia. 14 hours to drive from Sydney to Adelaide, from Sydney to Melbourne to visit my friends.

I, the endless straight road, signs on the road, very easy to fall asleep.

Now, this is Lockhart River, the top of Cape York Peninsula. This is a type of landscape where the aboriginal community is.

The mangrove swamps. They have crocodiles in there, so you have to be careful.

This is some of the aboriginal painting.

This is a spirit figure, Wondjina figure. These aren't my paintings. These are paintings of the young people I was teaching.

This is one of the artists, Sammy.

This is the airport. The only way in.

The type of house they have there.

This is Doris and her paintings. Doris does more figurative than some of the other artists.

They have a community center where everyone paints, so they can make some money, because they have no other way of earning money.

This is another of the artists, and they use a commercial house paint, because the atmosphere is so humid, normal paint becomes fungus.

This is Terry. He's doing a fish. Terry also is a park ranger who looks after the country.

This is Rosella Namok. I started working with her when she was 16. Now she's 26 and she's a well-known artist and making a living as an artist, and has moved into Cairns, out of the community.

This is the sand on the beach, and you can see where the mark comes from in the aboriginal paintings.

I just show you some views of the area.

And this is a linocut I made when I was there to show the aboriginal people how to make linoprints. And this is one I made of the community.

This is the beach and people going to collect turtles and seafood.

The reason I'm showing you this is because to let you understand that my work is about my life, where I am, what I do is what my work is.

This is another image from Lockhart River.

This is some of the ladies going out to collect grass to make baskets.

These, going back to the mid '90s when I first came to Korea, and I was staying in Chung Ju. I went to visit the market, and saw the dog market.

I made this series of works.

This is going right back to when I was living in Paris, and after my first visit to Seoul, I made this print in Paris at the famous print workshop Mourlot. This is called "Oksu-dong Station."

This is one of my first works after visiting Korea, just my impressions of all the little images and the crosses everywhere, and the neon crosses in the sky.

These works are from '96, and they're large works on paper. This is when I learned the Korean style of painting and laminating paper.

That's the Moochim River in Chung Ju and big balloons.

This is just one of my first impressions of Seoul after Paris, the intensity and I think here you can see I am still using the European colours. Standing in the middle, confused by Seoul.

This is when I came in the early '90s to Korea. All the men wore gray suits and black suits, but underneath they seemed quite wild and funny and humorous, so I contain them in the black line, but put their energy and colour inside.

I call this one "A Business Man."

This one I called "Aboji," and it's about the change happening in the Korean family from the male being so in control, but slowly change happening with the Western influence.

There's a lithograph in Paris.

This is some of the work from Paris.

An etching from Aberdeen in Scotland.

This is also Scotland. You can see the colours were much darker and more muted until I had the influence of coming to Korea.

This is me in the Paris Metro, the muted colours of north Europe.

This one is when I was going to Paris, I stopped in Japan and went to Nikko. The three wise monkeys and made an etching in Scotland.

This one is my last slide, which is an oil painting which I did as a student in my final year. So, I can see in this work a lot of the elements that have remained in my work until now. So I haven't dramatically changed, I've just minimalized and refined and continued more or less the same way for more than 20 years.

That's really how I work. It's very personal and it's my own language. And it's something I just have to do. So I continue.

So thank you for listening to me and you can see that my work sort of wanders around my life, and seems to have a direction when I look back, but looking forward, I never know.

Kamsahamnida.