Penny Stotter is one of New Zealand’s leading contemporary printmakers with
a distinctive style born of her heritage and love of pattern-making. Refreshingly, she is the first to say that she is driven to create works of beauty rather than ‘meaning’, however, scratch their aesthetic surface and there is far more there than she readily gives credit.

Stotter’s pride in her homeland was honed during years spent in Europe and Melbourne. When she returned and put down roots on Waiheke Island (off the coast of Auckland) she began to employ motifs of New Zealand’s unique flora and fauna in her work as well as less likely cultural icons such as a vintage Maori doll (named Rua). Her love of the process of pattern-making is obvious in the meticulous arrangement of their shapes into her final compositions. Their abstraction is a nod to her time spent practicing as a graphic designer prior to devoting herself to her art full time and doing justice to her degree from the
Ilam School of Fine Arts.