Although I have had no formal art training, I have had a lifelong interest in the visual arts. Throughout my primary teaching career, I emphasized the benefits of artistic expression and now that I am retired I am able to dedicate time for my own personal artistic pursuits. 

Working in different media; painting, pottery, photography, jewelry and paper-crafts, enables me to satisfy my need to explore, experiment, make and create. Inspiration comes from the natural.          

Born in Africa 1950. 

Pottery college in UK 1971. 

Set up my pottery first as a Steiner teacher, then became a studio potter in Mallorca Spain.

In 1996 moved to Australia continuing my pottery, carving stone and also teaching art in Steiner High Schools.

Byron Bay, Federal and now Kyogle have been my studios as I explore and enjoy clay work for over 50 years.

Born and exposed to African Art in my formative years 1950-71.

I became a potter; training in UK.

I learned to see around corners working as a stone sculptor. 

Clay is forgiving and gratefully responds to the gentlest touch. 

I use my throwing skills and my 3D sculptural perception to explore ceramic form and fire. 

Thank you, dear viewer, for participating in the ‘sighted’ shapes of an intuitive moment!

 I like to paint a variety of subjects from landscapes vistas to nature studies, the man-made landscape, portraiture and of course still life. 

I take my inspiration from my surroundings either around the immediate environment, country side or whilst on one of my travels. The natural, and man-made world supplies ample choice for works. I am always looking for a composition in the visual field and use the camera extensively to record ideas. Some scenes just jump out at you and demand to be painted. 

With my works I aim to capture the viewer's attention and engage them in the subject, hopefully sharing some of my interests. To achieve this visually I create interest through the dramatic interplay of opposites with the use of saturated hues and strong tonal contrasts in a balanced design. Once the viewer's visual attention has been captured the subject itself holds the attention with a familiarity that conjures images of grand journeys or a hint of nostalgia with an element of shared experience.

I think the concept of modern realism best describes my style. I am a great admirer of photo-realism but prefer to keep a painterly quality to my work. Although impressionism is also a great source of inspiration to me as well as the Renaissance and Dutch Masters my main painting techniques relies heavily on blending and glazing and draftsman skills. I endeavor to constantly adapt and extend my techniques to suite the visual concepts that interest me.  

Retirement has endowed me with abundant stress-free time to finally pursue my first passion. Having a partner who also shares this creative passion has made for a wonderful journey so far. I have appeared in several collaborative exhibitions at my local community gallery and exhibited in local art competitions. I accepted the challenge of holding a solo exhibition which thrust me into 18 months of intensive work. 

Since retirement art and travel have been my main activities. I find travel a good adjunct to my works and artistic development. Many of my recent subjects have originated from images captured from my journeys. Having had the opportunity of viewing firsthand the works of masters present and past has fueled my enthusiasm to continue developing my art.

Rebecca Tapscott’s inclusion in Sighted explores the quiet, often overlooked intersections of life, death, and perception within the Northern Rivers. This body of work documents the specific points where native fauna have succumbed to habitat loss and environmental shifting, demanding they be truly seen. At the heart of this collection are cyanotype prints created from contact printing deceased animals, captured with a spectral stillness that suggests a haunting, blue-hued permanence, a way of fixing them in our collective cosmos.

In the installation Carry Their Country Within Them, the silhouette of each creature becomes a meticulously painted window into the very landscape where they were found. These animals do not simply exist within a space; their forms become a vessel for the soil, the scrub, and the sky they once inhabited. By placing the siteinside the subject, the work suggests that to truly sight an animal is to recognise its habitat as inseparable from its body; a singular entity where the loss of one inevitably results in the vanishing of the other. The materiality of the work grounds absent forms in the physical reality of the region. Mounted on ovoid marine plywood, the shapes reference the egg; a universal symbol of origin and potential, contrasted against the finality of the subject matter.

This concept is further expanded in a second installation, a patchwork of cyanotypes, reminiscent of the installation Echoes of Absence, where individual memories are woven into a collective environmental narrative. Overlaid across this blueprint of loss are the echoes of the animals, rendered in vibrant watercolours and ink linework. These translucent layers act as a fluid reminder of the life that once flowed through the landscape. In this space, the animals are sighted once more, made visible even as the ground beneath them is stripped away. They appear as shimmering residuals, persistent even when their environment is being lost. 

Rebecca’s artworks force a confrontation with the reality that to be sighted is to be held in the gaze of the living, anchored to a home that is increasingly ephemeral.