Melbourne-based Anna Finlayson is best known for her site-specific installations as well as wall and floor based sculptural forms and assemblages, which often utilise pre-existing and mass-produced objects such as plastic balls or electrical cables. However, her work has consistently derived from an expanded drawing practice, and her obsessively rendered drawings over the past ten years have constituted an ongoing series of investigations into the subjectification of the grid through the creation of a narrative of process.
Dates and times are recorded at the commencement of a work, grids are calculated and ruled, calculations defining the parameters of the drawing are noted, coordinates are documented, lines are numbered and space is counted. The notation and recording of the practice creates layers of data and information that not only create the works, but also give the viewer proof and evidence of the process of making—and the presence of the maker. All of this information manifests as both part of the visual language of the drawing and an essential aesthetic component of its composition.
Her ongoing spectrum works will appeal to those with an obsessive/compulsive streak; here Finlayson meticulously rules and annotates her own detailed grids on paper, only to fill them in with an ever-shifting spectrum of orderly gouache daubs, recording the time and date of each in the process. They serve as both an aesthetic exploration and an almost diaristic​ record of artistic activity… Finlayson's colour choices and gestures may be pretty and palatable but the sustained rigour of her process and logic puts these works in another realm entirely.
Dan Rule, The Age, October 2015.