Carriageworks CEO Blair French and Director, Programs Daniel Mudie Cunningham today announced ten artists and collectives who will be the 2021 artists in residence at the Carriageworks Clothing Store. The 2021 artist cohort represents the third group of resident artists at the Clothing Store since the program was established in 2017 through a partnership with UrbanGrowth NSW Development Corporation to provide resident artists with a subsidised studio space in the heart of North Eveleigh.
Carriageworks CEO, Blair French said, “Our Carriageworks artist residency program has been supporting local artists since 2017. We are delighted to be able to continue this program in 2021 – with the support of Transport for NSW – at a critical time for artists as they recover from the impacts of COVID-19. Following a highly competitive round of applications, we are excited to welcome this new group of artists to the Clothing Store and look forward to working with them over the coming year.”
The 2021 Carriageworks Resident Artists are: Frances Barrett, Elizabeth Day, Keg de Souza, Clare Milledge, Thea Anamara Perkins, Katy B Plummer & Kuba Dorabialski, Re-Right Collective (Dennis Golding & Carmen Glynn-Braun), Salote Tawale and Min Wong. The tenth artist in residence during 2021 will be Dean Cross who continues his residency from this year.
Built in 1913, the Carriageworks Clothing Store is part of the historic Eveleigh Railway Workshops that includes Carriageworks and South Eveleigh. The artist residency program at the Clothing Store has supported more than 19 artists across three years to date. Previous artists in residence have included: Tony Albert, Eugene Choi, Sarah Contos, Cherine Fahd, JD Reforma, Wrong Solo (Agatha Gothe-Snape & Brian Fuata) and Nell.
A number of former resident artists at the Clothing Store have gone onto present major works at Carriageworks including Kate Mitchell who presented a large-scale installation All Auras Touch in January 2020.
Tina Havelock Stevens, a current artist in residence at the Clothing Store during 2020, created a new video work, commissioned by Carriageworks, titled Thank You For Holding. This immersive video and sound installation will be presented free to the public at Carriageworks from 6 – 24 January 2021 as part of Sydney Festival 2021.
Studios dedicated to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists are supported through partnerships with Bloomberg Philanthropies and with Solid Ground, an initiative of Carriageworks and Blacktown Arts that provides education, training and employment pathways for Indigenous Australian youth. Solid Ground is supported by the Australian Government through the National Indigenous Australians Agency, the Crown Resorts Foundation and Packer Family Foundation.
For media interviews please contact: Kym Elphinstone, kym@articulatepr.com.au or Megan Bentley, megan@articulatepr.com.au.
2021 CARRIAGEWORKS CLOTHING STORE ARTIST BIOS
Frances Barrett
Frances Barrett is an artist who lives and works on Gadigal land, Sydney. Her recent projects pivot around the modalities of listening and touch, taking the form of immersive sound installation, live performances and performances with museum collections. Such projects include: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (forthcoming); All Ears: A listening party, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney (2018); Into My Arms, Ace Open, Adelaide (2018); and Handle, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2018). In 2019 she was one of the recipients of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship. She is one member of the collective Barbara Cleveland, whose first survey exhibition, Thinking Business, was presented at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery in 2020. Frances is currently a PhD candidate at Monash Art Design and Architecture and is on the Curatorial Advisory Board at Monash University Museum of Art for a forthcoming event focused on queer curating.
Dean Cross
Dean Cross was born and raised on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country and is of Worimi descent. He is a trans-disciplinary artist primarily working across installation, sculpture and photography. His career began in contemporary dance, performing and choreographing nationally and internationally for over a decade with Australia’s leading dance companies. Dean re-trained as a visual artist, gaining a Bachelor’s degree from Sydney College of the Arts and First Class Honours from the ANU School of Art and Design. Dean is represented by Yavuz Gallery Sydney and Singapore and has exhibited his work extensively across Australia and beyond. Notable solo and group shows include Tarnanthi, The Art Gallery of South Australia (2017); I LOVE YOU, I’M SORRY, Firstdraft, Sydney (2020); and Monuments, 4A Gallery, Sydney (2020). His work is held in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, The Art Gallery of South Australia and the QUT Art Museum. In 2020, Dean was the inaugural recipient of Goulburn Regional Art Gallery’s The Good Initiative, a biennial $20,000 award to living artists.
Elizabeth Day
Elizabeth Day was born in the north of England and migrated to Tasmania in 1963, an experience that was reflected in her Doctorate of Creative Arts, Discontinued Narratives of Migration, which developed migration as a metaphor for her own interdisciplinary, multiform, multi material practice. As a site-based artist, Day has exhibited nationally and internationally, including her cast grass work Liverpool/Liverpool (2011), exhibited at St George’s Hall in Liverpool, England, and Casula Powerhouse Art Centre, NSW.
Since then, she has been developing Invisible Words/Invisible Worlds, which explores the image of ‘the prison on the landscape’ as the meeting of British and Aboriginal Law and culture. In this work Day draws upon her years of working in the marginal spaces of prisons and other institutions, including a garden project in a women’s prison and a community network project Myco Logic, based on the imagery of mycelial fungi roots.
Day was awarded an Australia Council grant to undertake a residency at the University of Newcastle, where she accessed an electron microscope to view carbon nano-tubes and matter at a quantum scale. She works with text and fibres, including miniature matter, to describe the invisible voices of those incarcerated and post-colonial themes that derive from her own Tasmanian experience.
Alongside her own studio practice, Day continues to work collaboratively in The Longford Project, together with Anna Gibbs, Julie Gough and Noelene Lucas, focusing on Longford, Tasmania, and building on the idea that ‘Australia is a Crime Scene’.
In 2020, her work appeared in OLDER THAN LANGUAGE, Salamanca Art Centre, Hobart; Hauswerk, McClelland Gallery, Victoria; and Constructive/Reductive, Griffith University, Brisbane.
Keg de Souza
Keg de Souza lives and works in Sydney on unceded Gadigal land. She uses mediums such as temporary architecture, food, mapping and dialogical projects to explore the poetics and politics of space. This investigation of social and spatial environments is influenced by her formal training in architecture and experiences of radical spaces through squatting and organising. Keg creates site and situation specific projects with people emphasising knowledge exchange and building relationality. In her work temporary architectures are often used as framing devices to host pedagogical platforms for centring voices that are often marginalised. Keg has made projects for South London Gallery, UK; Artspace, Sydney; Biennale of Sydney, Australia; Setouchi Triennale, Japan; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Delfina Foundation, London; Atlas Arts, Isle of Skye, Scotland; Auckland Triennial, New Zealand and Jakarta Biennale, Indonesia.
Clare Milledge
Clare Milledge lives and works between the lands of the Arakwal people in Bundjalung country (Broken Head, Northern, NSW) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal people (Paddington, Sydney). She is a senior lecturer at UNSW Art & Design and is represented by STATION gallery.
Milledge’s work re-examines contemporary environments with a focus on human engagement with ecology through art, in particular using the historical figure of the artist-shaman. Fieldwork is her primary methodology, including collecting, re-organising, transforming and re-presenting recordings, information and material gathered on ecological surveys and site visits. Her work takes the form of public installation environments that incorporate glass paintings, textile works, costumes, sets, collaborative experimental sound and performance.
Milledge completed her PhD at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney in 2013 with part of her candidacy undertaken at the Universität der Künste, Berlin in 2008. She attained her BFA at Sydney College of the Arts with part of her Honours year completed at Statenskunst Akademi, Oslo in 2006. She maintains an active professional engagement with Norwegian contemporary art.
Notable recent exhibitions include: NGV Triennial, Melbourne (2020); Second Sight: Witchcraft, Ritual, Power, UQ Art Museum, Brisbane (2019); Ruler, rete, Arndt Art Agency, Berlin (2019); Strigiformes: Binocular, Binaural, performance for Tori Wrånes, Museum of Contemporary Art, Norway (2017); What Remains, Fotogalleriet, Oslo (2017); Remedial Works, PICA, Perth (2017); Erewhon, Margaret Lawrence Gallery and touring NETS Victoria (2016-2018); The Mnemonic Mirror, Griffith University Art Gallery, Brisbane and UTS Gallery, Sydney (2016); Magic Object, Adelaide Biennial (2016); and Dämmerschlaf, Artspace, Sydney (Sydney, 2016). Her work is held in the collection of the NGV, Buxton Contemporary, Ten Cubed, Monash University Museum of Art and Artbank. She has been awarded several grants and scholarships and was one of the inaugural Artspace studio resident artists in 2015.
Thea Anamara Perkins
Thea Anamara Perkins is an Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist with family ties to the Redfern community. Her painting and installation-based practice has a strong commitment to working with community. She has recently returned from working with town camp communities in Alice Springs. She was a finalist in the Archibald Prize in 2019 and 2020, the winner of the 2020 Alice Prize and received the Australia Council’s 2020 Dreamtime Award for an emerging artist. Thea was commissioned to create ‘Faces of Sydney Festival’ for the 2021 festival.
Katy B Plummer
Katy B Plummer (she/her) lives and works on stolen land intersecting Garigal to the North, Darramurragal to the West and Gayamaygal to the South. She makes complex, messy video installations that are evocative environments using spontaneously generated incantations, cinematic storytelling, anachronistic textile practices and high school theatre aesthetics to frame history as a haunted house. Her work suggests that our complicity with toxic hierarchies will not protect us from them, and that violence and witchcraft are legitimate political strategies. Katy has a BFA from UNSW Art & Design, Sydney and an MFA from the School of Visual Art, New York.
Kuba Dorabialski
Kuba Dorabialski is an artist, filmmaker and writer originally from Wrocław, Poland. He works primarily in video installation. He is interested in the intersections of mysticism, radical leftist politics and the personal poetic; his tools are geography, language and cinema history. Kuba lives on Garigal land in Sydney, Australia.
Re-Right Collective
The Re-Right Collective (Re-Right) is an artistic collective between Dennis Golding and Carmen Glynn-Braun that spans across artistic, curatorial, writing and research disciplines. The collective centres on stories of contemporary life with an approach to heal and strengthen the voices of First Nations history and experiences.
Southern/Eastern Arrernte, Kaytetye and Anmatyerre artist Carmen Glynn-Braun takes a trans-disciplinary approach across many mediums including painting, sculpture, and installation. Her work predominantly explores lived experiences of Aboriginal women translated through gentle and experimental approaches to materials and form.
Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay artist Dennis Golding critiques the social, political and cultural representations of race and identity. Working in a range of mixed media including painting, video, photography and installation, Golding explores empowering notions of Indigenous cultural identity by challenging the categorical boundaries from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous experiences.
The artists co-founded Re-Right to provide a safe space for emerging First Nations practitioners to form ideas and build a support network within the cultural arts. Re-Right strives to expand their creative practice through collaboration with a key goal to highlight resilience and truthful narratives of history and cultural identity.
Salote Tawale
From the perspective of her Indigenous Fijian and Anglo-Australian heritage, Salote Tawale explores the identity of the individual within collective systems. Through self-performance, she draws on personal experiences of race, class, ethnicity and gender, formed by growing up in suburban Australia.
In 2016 Tawale received a Master of Fine Art from the Sydney College of Fine Arts, The University of Sydney, and has an undergraduate degree in Media Arts and a Master of Fine Art from RMIT University, Melbourne. For over 15 years she has exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; The Commercial, Sydney; Spring Workshop and Para Site Gallery, Hong Kong; Raven Row, London; and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney. In 2018-2019 Tawale undertook a six-month Australia Council London residency, and in 2017 was the recipient of the Create NSW Visual Arts Mid-career/Established Fellowship. She was a studio resident at Artspace in 2019 and at Parramatta Artists’ Studios in 2017. Recently she was named the inaugural winner of The Michela and Adrian Fini Fellowship from the Sheila Foundation and was awarded the 2020 Mosman Art Prize. Tawale is currently Associate Lecturer of Screen Arts at the Sydney College of the Arts.
Min Wong
Through sculpture and installation, Min Wong seeks to explore and embrace metaphysical narratives, esoteric practices and mysticism. The motivation for her research stems from her involvement in Evangelistic Christianity as a child and her Chinese father’s ritualistic practices as a Buddhist. These lived experiences are the foundation for her investigation into contemporary spirituality and a search for authenticity in this paradoxical time. Min’s practice explores spiritual countercultures, utopias and esoteric practices to heal from the disconnection of community and nature and to reimagine a renewal of connection between nature and spirituality. Min believes that self-care, in its genuine state, can be a defiant act for social justice, a holistic approach that includes emotional, mental and spiritual fulfillment that also supports the utopian collective. By looking to past and present spiritual movements, Min’s practice investigates illusory hopes, desire, failure and seeks to remodel alternative worlds as possible futures within the contemporary dystopic.
Min is currently undertaking her MFA at UNSW Art & Design. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and participated in residencies in China, Spain and Los Angeles. Her recent exhibitions include a commissioned work for the inaugural exhibition of the Housemuseum Galleries and collection, Melbourne. Min has been included in many group exhibitions and award exhibitions such as Brand Library, Los Angeles; Churchie Emerging Art Prize, Brisbane; and Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Sydney. Min has held recent solo exhibitions at Artspace Ideas Platform, Verge Gallery, Firstdraft in Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery and FELTSpace in Adelaide.