The Fine Arts Major Graduating Exhibition 2021 UWA School of Design Cullity Gallery | Fine Arts Building | ALVA Hub
Foreword The preview of this graduating student exhibition has been a fascinating thing to experience over several days during its installation. We are fortunate in the School of Design to have our Cullity Gallery as a main thoroughfare through which students and staff travel each day as they move to and from classes, meetings and offices. Going about daily business here takes on a new dimension when it is framed by the incremental appearance of an exhibition. Watching the gradual set-up of this show, I have been struck by the sense of its emergence. Students have been immersed in installing works that are tactile, visual, audible and spatial. Pieces have been placed, moved, adjusted, considered. Quiet conversations have been a continuous soundtrack while students have inhabited their allocated spaces, testing and refining their installations. Close attention to the curation of a performance or an experience is an essential aspect of each of the works, and core to the appreciation and understanding of the audience. We should acknowledge what a privilege it is to have the time and space to make and install artworks in such a deliberate and focused way. Likewise has been the unique opportunity for us to enjoy the work in its evolving state. This exhibition invites us into worlds that are both intensely individual and private and, at the same time, inhabited and shared by the wider community. It has been encouraging to see the growth of Fine Arts at The University of Western Australia in recent years. Enrolments in the Major have steadily increased at entry level and moving into the second year. As well, students from across the university continue to enrol in large number in the first year studio and drawing units to undertake their broadening requirements, delivering the promise of multi-disciplinary learning and engagement that makes Fine Arts at UWA a wonderfully diverse mix of backgrounds, ideas and practices. Supplementing studio-based classes, a new Level 2 Curatorial Practices unit was taken by Major students for the first time this year. Into the future, the development of curatorial curriculum in the Fine Arts and History of Art disciplines in this School represents exciting opportunities to strengthen our industry and community partnerships as well as our graduates’ career prospects. The drive to create art is particularly inspiring in an environment where government fee-setting and regulation could be a disincentive for the study of a course such as Fine Arts. My congratulations to all of the students completing the Fine Arts Major at Level 3 or with Honours, and to the dedicated group of academic, technical and sessional staff who have inspired and mentored them through the course. We are continually reminded by the work Fine Arts Major graduates of how powerful a voice art can be: for equality, for visibility, for empathy, for change, for strength. Dr Kate Hislop Head of School UWA School of Design
A Reflection on FAM2021 The relationship to who I was is tenuous. Is this true of all people? This is why it seems important to me that all people create, make art, practice their imaginations, exercise beauty. When we fill the world with artifacts of what we dreamed we begin to learn from who we wanted to be, an imagined people [...] *** Whose blood must the rules be written in? And whose tears will dampen the book’s turning page? And what materials does the fire burn? And who will set it? Is it poet’s-fire or an anarchist’s or a white supremacist’s or a prime minister’s or a CEO’s? Must the artists enter first that womb of fire? Is it the practice of the fun, the authentic, the intimate, the affective, the cooperative, the collaborative, the granted? Is it the practice of the quantified smile? Is it the practice of a managed intimacy? Is it the practice of the scripted hello? Does it grow in the ruins of authorship? Does it grow in the ruins of ruins? Is it that the right relation of an artist to a city is for a city to fiddle while the artist burns? And what is the trial of today if art has lived on after its failed self-abolition, aerosolised, manic and ambulatory, freed from the constraints of medium and modality, living on as a form of management, living on a form of flexi-feeling, living on in an already granted self-dissolution, living on as resilience in all the resilient horror? Would it find a compromise in silence? *** The finalisation of a project, an occupation; a procedure or fascination does not always find a concrete ground, but often widens the field of abstract questioning, feeling and doing. Even if we are at the end, it can nonetheless feel like we are in the wake of a beginning. I’ve made an artwork, I’ve held my mirror up to culture, and … still I ask how and why I should do more, if I should do differently, or expand and return to what I have done. What have I done? Where have I assisted - have I developed a home, have I refused borders and platitudes? Looking at the work produced by the student cohort throughout the year, the undulating dialogues, questions and actions are fixating, rousing and attracting. There is a clear premium placed on individual introspection that is not unbalanced by abundant evidence of collaborative conversation-making. At points I am reminded of my own burn-out that sits amongst our collective “Burn Out” and I still cannot grasp how art manages to be made in moments of utter desolation and tiredness, against the tide. For every place to sit and lie, to stop and watch and unwrap a lollypop (remembering here Felix-Gonzalez Torres, one of my first lessons, one of my first mirrors), there is also movement, dance and sound. For every inhuman object which has been pulled out of the fetters of its human-dominated category, there is human-ness anew, identity built on pure desire and potential, untethered and unbound (not that desire is not produced by binds and tethers, straps and grips). For every line and mark decisively made, there is colour, tone and texture that rushes to fill the void.
There are so many further questions, deepening the abstract journey of inquiry that an artist is tasked with. Re-reading Anne Boyer’s ‘Questions For Poets’ (quoted above) has reminded me of the at-times bizarre complication between creative practice and question-making. It also reminds me of Jasper Bernes’ booklength poem ‘We Are Nothing and So Can You’ which was a timely (or perhaps untimely, nihilistic yet thrilling) accompaniment to my own graduation several years ago, in that it dives headfirst into a future of question-loaded materials. A quote from that as follows, and as a point of conclusion: I saw Montmartre. Nothing was on fire, as predicted. OMG, the universe! Most of it missing! Where hunger was, the cement of diverse categories Become the cubes or taking place of an awkward Relation to the glittering, plastic pronoun That does its dirty work Singing Queen on the steps of Sacré-Coeur And then the headless Lacoste mannequin Speaks ellipses under fashion, the catacombs, a kind of mall. Argent urgencies! The skull-and-bones ring On the wedding finger, clicked twice Upon the glass of beer, as if to invite One bridge or another to meet its end In the new Piranesis of what we no longer Defend from love, as money, “A pleasure Cruise…before the whole Human race” *** Paul Boyé (they/them) is a writer and artist working and living on Whadjuk Noongar boodja. Currently working on: Cool Change Contemporary, PhD at UWA School of Design, Currents Journal.
DYLAN AH-TIVE Fine Arts, Communications and Media Studies THE TINY BALLERINA
multimedia installation, film, audio @dylan.ahtive
THE TINY BALLERINA in its essence was created as an opposite to Dylan’s last work THE LITTLEST CLOWN. Here Dylan wanted to create something that would invite audiences in and to help create a shared experience, one of love and heartbreak. Everyone has a different reaction when it comes to love in their life, but we all experience it, it is a universal feeling. After his last work Dylan wanted to create something warm and inviting. That he could be proud of because if his work connects with at least one.
LEYLA ALLERTON Fine Arts, Linguistics Videotape Archaeology: an installation 70 photographic prints on paper
MEM BOT
Handmade fibreboard box, steel rods, enamel paint, printer, paper, computer program @leylaallerton
One aimless evening, two young adults dance together in their living room while their children sleep unaware. Seventeen years later, a videotape from that night is unearthed; mesmerising documentation of a charming but ultimately unremarkable event. An artefact of the future, videotapes are steadily becoming an obsolete form of technology. Videotape Archeology monumentalises a moment of frivolity while MEM BOT dutifully generates novel artefacts. If images have the authority to make history, what is the value of these curious records before you?
AMY BROWN Fine Arts, Landscape Architecture Over & over again
Burnt match sticks, MDF, PVA Glue @_.amyrae._
Repetition motion artwork explores repetition of two or more elements or forms within a composition. The systematic arrangement of repeated forms creates patterns and rhythm which allows a more detailed structure. The work is produced through repetitive action across numerous days. By focusing on the conceptual and repetition themes within the work utilising just the one material shows time, focus and care. The work explores ideas of infinity and timelessness in a slow process of being present in a moment giving a sense of appreciation to how time is a simultaneously an extension of an eternity cyclic motion.
CLEMENTINE COHEN Fine Arts The Internet: Sleeping
Website, light box and vinyl sticker @nolongerhuman.online
The world is digital. Skin alone no longer works to fully allow us to interact with reality. The internet has forever and unimaginably shifted our relationship with others and ourselves. The Internet: Sleeping is day-to-day life; grabbing coffee, falling asleep, the human condition. Pulled into online existence, where we are all here already? The work demands technological assistance, existing solely online, only accessible through a phone and scanning of the QR code. Transforming human moments and thoughts into scattered, looping animations and text, The Internet: Sleeping is a work designed to just keep going.
PAHNIA ELLISON Fine Arts, History of Art Hair Aversions
Human head hair, yarn, glue, acrylic, hairspray, found objects, ceramic tile and water @pahniaeart
There is an innate attachment to the hair upon our heads, evident by the substantial amount of time and money spent to keep it looking and feeling its best. Yet, when those exact hairs we cared for end up washed down our drains, stuck for months awaiting our re-encounter when cleaned away, they are rendered nothing less than disgusting. Hair Aversions is a series exploring that exact relationship of hair from the desired to the repulsed. Giving life to disregarded hairs once more in multi-pieced installations, leaving room to question how we shift our relationship with the simple yet complex material, hair.
HUGO FAULKNER Fine Arts, Landscape Architecture Untitled
Arduino, Concrete, Cedar Brick, Limestone, Monitor Piezo element, Sand, Speaker, Stere cabling @_u.of
Untitled is an audio/visual mediation on sonic materiality’s propensities to elucidate the hard borders of both our skin and milieu, inviting a more than human connection to place and materials. Streaming data from a coastal fault line that surfaces as a jittered caressing of metal and limestone, Untitled begins as a network of communications that slowly exposes both the performativity and agency of sound as noise enthralls materials, conducing them to a membranous function. Within both the visual and sonic noise fluctuations exist a constantly vibrating world.
NOLA GASMIER Fine Arts Honours Portraits of Us
Oil and acrylic on canvas, board, recycled objects, papier-mâché, PVA glue, polyfilla @nola_gasmier_artist
Portraits of Us is a body of work exploring figurative subject matter in the autobiographical context of growing up in the 1950s to 1970s. The images are carried by either bright or subdued colour using a Neo-expressionistic style with loose, free brushwork imparting detail and overall impressions. Each artwork verges on, or moves into abstraction. Ambiguous or partially indicated features aim to provoke the viewer’s imagination.
JAMES KNIGHT Fine Arts Honours Good Evening
Single Channel Animated Film
Good Evening is a multimedia narrative consisting of an animation and short written story. The work explores and reflects on an experience of sleep and sleeplessness. It depicts an episode of a dream world and external world colliding, a merging of reality and non-reality.
XUANCHENG LIAO Communications and Media Studies, Fine Arts Active Forgetting
Inkjet paper, ceramic plates, sponge, water, video @Lxc_Cheng
Active Forgetting is an exploration of the rawest nature of every free person, from collecting stories to actively experiencing the various states of evil that anyone is exposed to, either actively or passively, throughout their lives. The process of actively transcribing onto paper represents the artist experiencing the memories of someone else firsthand. These memories will be preserved in the artist’s mind or future life. The artist then uses a soft sponge dipped in water to continually rub, destroy and eliminate the results of the writing process, symbolizing the author’s own initiative to stimulate protective mechanisms after exposure to specific or large amounts of information.
JASON MAXLOW Archaeology, Fine Arts Future Relics
Laterite stone, wood, steel @jasonmaxlow
Jason Maxlow is a West Australian artist based in the Perth hills. With a background in mining and minerals exploration and current undergraduate study in Archaeology and Fine Arts, Jason is interested in challenging historical narratives, toying with the notion of the artefactual relic in his sculptural works. Often using materials imbued with the power of deep-time permanency such as stone, Maxlow questions what future scientists and archaeologists will think of the sculptural objects they unearth? And what historical narratives will they assign to them?
CLANCY MERCER Fine Arts Ursus Citrus - To Mark
Tattooed orange peels, salt @clancy_mercer_art
To decorate our skin, to colour, to draw. To mark our skin, is to be human. People have been modifying their skin and bodies for thousands of years, the oldest known tattoo dating back to 3250 B.C. belonging to Ötzi the Iceman. And yet people are shunned and disregarded if they’re tattooed. Ursus Citrus - To Mark is a playful child-like way of exploring the relationship between art and tattooing. Oranges are featured as the material, a nod to how it all begins. Learning to tattoo on fruit, especially oranges. To learn, to become a child again..
mg.g.M.Mg.MG Inwardly (Group Performance) mg: meat glitch g: gyrating M: Murmur MG: Mother Goo MG: Tox
This work reflects our shared interest in worldbuilding, alternative cosmology, experimental lorecraft, and situated transgression. We have integrated video, musical improvision, noise, robotics, found materials, embodiment practises and (pseudo) randomness.
DARCY MORRIGAN Fine Arts, History of Art Home
Multimedia installation, film, audio, organic elements, wood @arty_darcy
Darcy Morrigan’s artistic practice highlights the innate connection we as humans have to the natural world around us. Home is a multimedia installation that conflates the urban space of the gallery with the natural world. Dried leaves cover the floor and crunch underfoot as viewers are invited to walk over them to take a seat on the hardwood logs. This piece transports viewers deep into the old growth forest of the southwest of Western Australia for an elongated moment of connection. Home reflects a deep longing for nature. It invites viewers to reconnect and rest. This piece invites us, Home.
MATILDA NELSON Engineering Science, Fine Arts Loop
Metal mesh, wool
Ada
Jarrah wood, electrics, metal, paper, thread, rubber tubing
Here I Stand / On the Ocean Floor Found Objects, embroidery thread @artbymatild
On repeat, recycling, a continuum; no beginning and no end. A loop is a process that organises and directs material and immaterial information. With a similar attitude to that of the loop, the grid is also employed to categorise the world. The loom and the computer both adopt systems that require the loop and the grid to function. Matilda Nelson’s artwork investigates the relationship between these technologies: of their histories, processes, and characteristics. With respect to the work of 19th century mathematician, Ada Lovelace, Nelson’s work highlights the current gender disparities in the computer workforce and questions how the cycle of inequalities can be stabilised.
VALENTINA SARTORI Fine Arts Honours more than anything Film, 9.5 mins
@nudiebaptism
more than anything occupies the meeting place between openended technological futures and the concrete past and present of trauma. It explores the effects of generational trauma being imposed on, and passed on to, human and non-human creations. Within this space of tension, the work questions the role of reproduction as an immovable given, in the context of technology’s emancipatory potential. Driven by an intersectional feminism, especially Xenofeminism, the role and responsibility of creator and Mother is re-imagined, suggesting the possibility of a world where the inherited infrastructures in which their children reside can be overcome.
ZOË SYDNEY Fine Arts Honours Queer Fabrications
oil and acrylic on repurposed canvas, textile, video, found objects, giclee prints @zoe.sydney zoesydney.com
Queer Fabrications is a series of portraits that have developed out of a new language of queerness as performance. The portrait is most commonly thought of as a “representation”, a word which has become a goal for marginalised communities in struggles for visibility and acceptance. However, the demands of representation are unable to be met by the shifting language, aesthetics, and realities of Queer communities. Queer art is forced to seek an alternative to the rigid categorisations that the structure of identity and representations offer. In Queer Fabrications, the gallery becomes a stage draped with strange materials that encourage the audience to look a little closer.
SHIORI XIN THONG TAN Communication and Media Studies, Fine Arts Er Xing Qian Li Mu Dan You
Installation, images, PVC, mirrors @artbyshiori
Er Xing Qian Li Mu Dan You is a Chinese proverb saying, ‘when a child travels 1000 miles away, the mother worries.’ The installation is a collection of text messages between the artist and her mother, currently 4,000km apart, exploring how a mother will always worry about their child. Etching the words and shaping each PVC sheet by hand, prompted the artist to recall memories, stir up emotions and regret many things reflecting on the past two years as she could not fly back home due to travel restrictions.
JULIUS YU Fine Arts, Music Unheard
Speakers, media players, dimensions variable juliusyuart.weebly.com
Julius Yu’s artwork explores the relationship that humans have with sound and music and examines the way we interact with and experience them. Unheard is an immersive sound experience that features a series of audio recordings of electronic and mechanical devices found within Yu’s house. These sounds are often incredibly quiet and are unable to be heard by the human ear and as such allows the listener to become conscious of the sonic world that they live in. By immersing the listener into a fullbody sound experience, Unheard challenges the audiences physical and mental perception of sound.
JULIE ZIEGENHARDT Fine Arts Honours handle with care
digital illustration, animation, projection, cardboard, pine @badjjjujjju badjuju.me
handle with care engages with the capacities by which play can be used as a mechanism for navigating and understanding personal and political degrees of belonging. States of disorientation and alienation that emerge from experiences of temporal dislocation connect in a visual narrative to explore relationships between identity formation, material culture and homemaking. The spaces between the familiar and the uncanny, the permanent and transient, are folded together to question the coherence expected from environments found within and around the self.
We wish to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we meet and create on, the Whadjuk Noongar people. We acknowledge and respect their continuing culture and contribution to the life and culture of this city and region. Head of School of Design Dr. Kate Hislop Adjunct Staff Sohan Ariel Hayes Erin Coats Curtis Taylor Artist Residencies 2021: Pip & Pop Dr. Donna Franklin Dr. Andrea Rassell
Discipline of Fine Arts Staff 2021 Sarah Douglas (Discipline Chair) Dr. Ionat Zurr Dr. Vladimir Todorovic Paul Trinidad Andy Quilty Jo Darvall Mike Bianco Annie Huang Elham Eshraghian Samuel Beilby Nick Mahony Andrew Christie
Thanks to Dr. Darren Jorgensen and the Post Graduate students, Paul, Annie, Sam and Santiago for their support in reviews and artist talks. Their generous contribution is much appreciated. FAM2021 organising committee would like to thank Miranda Johnson for presenting the opening address, Sarah Douglas for coordinating the exhibition and Andrew Christie for his outstanding assistance with the installation. Thanks to the workshop staff Guy Eddington, Dave Marie and Ellie Eshraghian for additional technical assistance. Many thanks to Hugo Faulkner, Pahnia Ellison and Leyla Allerton for their commitment to the design, layout and editing of the catalogue.