Lizzie Horne

Lizzie Horne’s Wild River series is a meditation on place, rendered through the unpredictable beauty of sugar-lift etching. For Horne, an Armidale-based printmaker, the high-country waterfalls and wild rivers of New England have long been a source of fascination—a geography she explores with a gestural, expressive style informed by the land’s scale and force. Yet her journey to articulate this landscape on paper has carried her far beyond the local gorge country. Over more than a decade, Horne has worked with mentors and studios around the world, most notably at the Art Print Residence in Arenys de Munt, Spain, where she collaborated with master printmaker Jordi Roses Pou.

Her technique is steeped in tradition, echoing the practices of Pablo Picasso, John Olsen, and Brett Whiteley, yet imbued with her own spirit of experimentation. “Working with both degreased and un-degreased plates, I have developed an increasingly gestural style,” Horne explains. The deeply etched copper plates, created during her Spanish residencies, required three aquatints and hours of meticulous labour, resulting in prints whose embossed surfaces convey a near-sculptural dimensionality.

Lizzie Horne’s work has appeared in numerous national award exhibitions, including the 2025 Muswellbrook Art Prize and the inaugural PLC Signature Art Prize. She received an Award for Excellence in the 2023 WAMA Art Prize and has been a finalist in the Biennial Australian Monoprint Prize, the Peebles Print Prize (2019 and 2021), and Inkmasters (2016, 2018, and 2021). In 2018, Horne was awarded the Helen Dangar Memorial Art Bursary, which supported her studies at the Il Bisonte studio in Florence, furthering her technical mastery with the help of a Regional Arts Fund grant.

Horne’s contributions extend beyond her studio. She leads printmaking workshops across the region, including CreativiTEA sessions for Arts North West, and teaches at NERAM in the Museum of Printing. For her, the act of creating is as much about community as it is about craft—a way of engaging with the land and the people who inhabit it, tracing connections as fluid and enduring as the rivers that inspire her work.