PETA TRANQUILLE 

Peta Tranquille is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist based in Melbourne, originally from Perth and raised on farms in the Western Australian wheatbelt. Her early years, shaped by rural life and long family road trips across Australia, fostered a lasting curiosity about place, observation, and the subtle details that often go unnoticed. These formative experiences continue to inform a practice grounded in structure, pattern, and attentive looking.

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With a career spanning more than thirty years in cartography, Peta developed a way of understanding the world through systems, structure, and spatial logic. This background continues to underpin her artistic practice, shaping an approach that explores memory, perception, and cognition through repetition, modular forms, grids, and ordered frameworks. Rather than simply representing the world, her work seeks to understand how information is organised, interpreted, and retained.

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Central to Peta’s practice is her experience of living with Aphantasia, a neurological difference that prevents her from forming mental images or re-experiencing memories visually. Without access to internal imagery, she relies on external systems, objects, photographs, and physical processes to reconstruct and understand past experiences. Her artworks often function as visual archives, assembling fragments of information into structures that reflect the way memory is pieced together when imagery is absent.

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While completing her Bachelor of Fine Art, Peta encountered challenges within traditional teaching models that frequently relied on visualisation and imagined outcomes. Through persistence, adaptation, and experimentation, she developed alternative creative strategies that not only supported her learning but became fundamental to her practice. These experiences reinforced her interest in process, problem-solving, and the many ways people understand and navigate the world.

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Working across sculpture, installation, photography, drawing, painting, multimedia, and everyday objects, Peta frequently incorporates analogue materials such as film slides, archival photographs, handwritten text, and everyday artefacts. These materials act as carriers of information, allowing her to externalise what cannot be internally visualised. Her work explores the tension between what is known and what is inaccessible, creating reflections on memory, absence, preservation, and the human desire to make meaning from incomplete records.

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During Melbourne’s 2020–21 lockdowns, Peta began documenting her daily walking routes using her iPhone. What began as a simple routine evolved into an ongoing investigation of footpaths, markings, surfaces, and traces of human activity within the urban environment. These observations continue to inform her practice, reflecting a belief that significance can often be found in the overlooked details of everyday life.

 

Through systems, structures, and acts of careful observation, Peta’s work invites viewers to consider how memories are formed, recorded, and reconstructed. Her practice explores what remains when mental imagery is absent, revealing alternative ways of understanding, remembering, and navigating the world.

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