Anna Parry is a Naarm/Melbourne based mixed media artist working with cut paper, spray paint and glue.

Travelling with Scissors is a selection of work created between 2018 and 2021, while living in Sweden. 

Initially the only problematic part of travelling for me was bringing my tools, scissors and scalpels, especially when flying with hand luggage only - oh the amount of scissors I’ve lost in airport security screenings! 

But then in 2020, of course, everything changed and crossing borders itself became troublesome.

While much of the world was in lockdown, Sweden allowed some travel; limited but enough to keep my restless soul happy. I kept up my daily practice of making work, be that on the hard floor of an Ethiopian circus or at a friends table in Berlin. It became an anchor and a joyful way to process and celebrate the culture of the places I visited.

The A4 format was a practical choice - everything needed to be portable and fit in a small backpack. Early on work was pretty simple but somewhere along the way I started setting myself three requirements that each piece must meet: 1) It must not be beautiful, 2) it must surprise me, and 3) it must be something I knew I could not have created the day before. This way the work stayed fresh, pushing me while becoming an expression of my immediate experiences. I also unintentionally created a memory bank where a glance at any piece vividly brings back the exact place and smell and feel of where it was created.

My hope is that it inspires the viewer to their own small daily acts of creative expression.