Annika is an art therapist, youth arts worker and painter.
I use artmaking as a tool to better understand my experience of the world through a lens of intensely bright colours and whimsical patterns. There is a naivety and youthfulness to my aesthetic, which is both a celebration and reclamation of my 'inner child'. Growing up in the Gold Coast Hinterland has encouraged a deep appreciation of the natural landscape, and my work also reflects this.
I find painting therapeutic and often use it as a healing technique with the young artists I mentor at DRASTIC, a youth-based artist-run initiative on the Gold Coast. I am a creative facilitator at DRASTIC, and I am helping to build a peer-driven therapeutic creative arts and life skills program for young people.
Annika was recently awarded a grant from NAVIGATE (a young artist development program and City of Gold Coast arts and culture initiative) to undertake an arts-based internship at tbC. I hope to develop the skills to run a studio program at Drastic that resembles tbC’s professional approach to collaborative artmaking with young people.