Asil Habara /  by Kirrily Jordan

 

Asil Habara, 2023. Image courtesy of Jack McEvoy

Meet the Artist

Asil Habara is a multidisciplinary artist, with printmaking as their primary medium, complemented by installations. Immersing audiences in the exploration of Australian Arab diaspora culture, employing low-brow approaches to unravel intricate narratives. A synthesis of maximalism and tongue-in-cheek humour she attempts to create a vibrant tapestry that weaves internet aesthetics with political contemporary dialogue. Her work acts as a living commentary, a discourse transcending visual boundaries. 

At the core of Asil's multidisciplinary practice is the transformative use of collage, employing familiar imagery to construct narratives that grapple with the experimental and contradictory nature of the contemporary climate. With a deliberate focus on the unsettling aspects of our surroundings, she utilises collage to establish a new relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar. This prompts viewers to contemplate the peculiarities of our rapidly evolving world. She positions collage as a dynamic space of undecidability and indeterminacy, encouraging thoughtful reflection on the perplexing intricacies of our contemporary existence.

Asil invites audiences to reflect on the profound intersections of culture and technology, creating visually arresting and immersive experiences. Seeking to engage, to question and to be part of a larger dialogue shaping the cultural landscape. 

Kirsten Wehner /  by Kirrily Jordan

Environmental Artist Residency 2024

 

Kirsten Wehner, 2022. Image courtesy of Gemma Fischer

Meet the Artist

Kirsten Wehner is an artist, curator and writer based in Canberra in Ngunawal Country.
Her practice explores people’s relationships with the more-than-human world, working across drawing, sculpture, installation and participatory experiences to generate cross-species empathy and care. Kirsten’s current research centres on waterways as places of cultural and ecological potential and on embodied methodologies for engaging with multi-species worlds. 
Kirsten has held residencies at the University of Canberra/Belconnen Arts Centre, the University of Sydney and the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich. She has delivered experiences and exhibited in Australia and internationally. Kirsten is the James O Fairfax Senior Fellow in Culture and Environment at the National Museum of Australia, a co-director of the independent creative platform Catchment Studio, and serves on the governing committees of the Cad Factory and Plumwood Mountain. Recent projects include River Country, a public installation at the National Museum, the documentary, More than a Fish Kill and the publication, Living with the Anthropocene: Love, loss and hope in the age of environmental crisis (New South Books, 2020)

During her residency, Kirsten will continue her on-going research into conceptualising β€˜sustainability’ as a process of community engaged creative regeneration grounded in the liveliness and agency of place. This is about exploring how people are transformed by places, even as they seek to shape and care for them, and how these engagements might open up new spaces for more-than-human cultural and ecological flourishing.
Kirsten will create a new body of work exploring Weston Creek, a largely unknown and little-loved waterway in suburban Canberra. Drawing on her recent learnings about the creek as Country, Kirsten will investigate the waterway’s experience as a channelised, buried and highly colonised entity, that nevertheless continues to call for connection. Kirsten’s project will focus on investigating how people along the creek are seeking to care for it and how the creek cares for them, responding to the materiality and actions of the waterway, its species and peoples.

Sophie Dumaresq /  by Kirrily Jordan

Sophie Dumaresq, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.

Meet the Artist

Sophie Dumaresq, is an interdisciplinary artist who brings perspectives of absurdity, queerness and humour to creative and critical robotics. Working across photography, video installation, sculpture and performance, her work explores what it is to try and share joy, love, laughter and communicate in a universe filled with beings whose brains, existence and or bodies are built inherently differently to that of your own. Her artistic practice seeks to bring voices of difference to the emerging cultures of robotics and computation.

Her work explores the politics of care and mischief making through symbiotic cycles of consumption, destruction, and creation, which demonstrate how as a species we relate, show empathy, learn, and evolve with and within our surrounding environment.

Sophie graduated from ANU honours first in her year in 2023, winning the Peter and Lena Karmel Anniversary award for the most outstanding body graduating body of work from the Australian Nation University’s School of Art and Design. She was also awarded a Peter and Lena Karmel Visual Arts Honours Scholarship during her honours candidacy, as well as three 2023 Emerging Artist Support Scheme Awards. In 2023 she also undertook a Digital Leadership Fellowship through the Australia Council for the Arts and Creative New Zealand. During this fellowship she began a mentorship with the world renowned performance artist Stelarc. 2023 is also the year in which she was selected and participated in the Queer Development Program through Performance Space. Her work is in the Macquarie Group Collection as well as several distinguished private collections.

Clementine Belle McIntosh /  by Kirrily Jordan

 

Clementine Belle McIntosh, 2023. Image courtesy of M16 Artspace.

Meet the Artist

Clementine Belle McIntosh is an emerging rural artist from Gilgandra NSW, the waterhole meeting place of the Wiradjuri, Wailwan and Kamilaroi peoples. Through collaborative methods in circular systems, McIntosh produces predominantly textile-based, site-responsive installations representing her learnt sense of place.

Her process-based practice focuses on the act of mark-making to record local dialogues, exchanges and relationships connecting herself with others (strangers and/or the nonhuman). After art display, McIntosh's works are returned to local nonlinear systems as they are composted in the garden, gifted to a neighbour or repurposed into usable objects.  Underpinning this methodology is a departure from the mainstream art market and its problematic hierarchies of care ie. the tendency to preserve cultural artefacts produced from a place but not preserving the place itself. 

Local Gifts, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

Blanket in Place, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

Photo of artist studio at the KEPK art space in Yeerongpilly QLD, 2022. Image credit: Clementine Belle McIntosh

Jonathon Zalakos /  by Kirrily Jordan

Portrait of Jonathon Zalakos in studio. Image courtesy of Tracey Nearmy.

Meet the Artist

Jonathon Zalakos is an emerging artist and contemporary jeweller based in Canberra, Australia, on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. He seeks to integrate traditional goldsmithing materials and techniques with contemporary practices and philosophical thought. His work takes the form of jewellery, interactive objects, digital media and installation. Jonathon is particularly interested in how meaning is co-produced through the processes of expression and perception. 

This drives exploration into the visual language of cultural phenomena including contemporary pop jewellery culture, online viral media and the two-way relationship between the human and manufactured worlds. These concepts are deconstructed and reassembled so as to consider the different worlds we occupy with our bodies and minds. 

Jonathon Zalakos ,Ruby bug, 2021. Sterling silver, synthetic ruby. Image courtesy of the artist.

Jonathon Zalakos ,Ticks, 2021. Sterling silver, cubic zirconia. Image courtesy of the artist.

Jonathon Zalakos, Nest, 2022. Sterling silver. Image courtesy of the artist.

Jonathon Zalakos, Emerald bug, 2021. Sterling silver, synthetic emerald. Image courtesy of the artist

Saskia Haalebos /  by Kirrily Jordan

Saskia Haalebos. Image courtesy of Mark Mohell.

Meet the Artist

Born on Ngunnawal Country, Saskia Haalebos is a multi-disciplinary artist who works with text, humour, film, melancholy, performance, printmakingβ€”whatever the idea calls for really. With an existentialist heart and autism, most of her work is about memory, mortality, empathy or mis/communication. 

Saskia has exhibited in local and interstate galleries; been awarded residencies with Megalo, CCAS and The Unconformity (TAS); and has work in various collections, including the NLA. Alongside this, she has created workshops for the NGA, Belconnen Arts Centre and Goulburn Regional Art Gallery; taught Book Arts at the National Art School; and currently works for the National Portrait Gallery.