Emerging Contemporaries Artist biographies
Sarah Barlow
UNSW School of Art & Design
Biography
Sydney based designer, Sarah Barlow is an emerging contemporary jewellery and textiles artist. Through her practice she explores themes of the unseen interior of the body, disability, and chronic illness. Her passion for perceptions and misconceptions of the body is influenced by growing up deaf with Cochlear Implants, as well as living with several debilitating injuries, and chronic mental and physical illnesses. Sarah explores materials that parallel with her chosen narratives when creating her work to inform, raise questions and challenge audiences.
Artist Statement
INVISIBLE, a contemporary jewellery series of three unique collections that portrays the experiences of people living with invisible disability and chronic illness (IDACI). In society, there is a lack of awareness and understanding of IDACI and its nature. The often-constant battle against misconceptions and stigma surrounding what is not visible has a compounding impact on their lives. Inspired by personal experiences and the perspectives of people living with IDACI, the jewellery series brings attention to the invisible in aim to eliminate misconceptions and stigma towards those with hidden conditions. Through the exploration of material narrative and text, INVISIBLE portrays themes of complexity, transparency, and perception to resemble the layered and complex nature of living with IDACI.
Elliane Boulton
Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT)
Biography
Elliane Boulton is a sculptural artist who now lives and works in Canberra. Growing up on a small farm in Euroley NSW, on the Murrumbidgee river. This is where she found a deep appreciation for the eucalyptus forests and the materials it can provide. Her sculptures are a way of paying homage to her home and that land that raised her.
Weaving aspect learnt from her grandmother Pamela McDougall, with over 60 years as a weaver, her tutelage has been an inspiration in the creation of artworks. Elliane is mostly self taught with the guidance of parents and teachers at CIT. Whilst studying a certificate IV in visual arts at CIT, her teachers provided a space for exploration in natural objects, as a result she found her style and helped create her first body of work.
Artist Statement
In my art, I like to capture the beauty of natural objects. The variation in pieces is what makes my work unique, no two pieces are the same. The hand spun woollen twine illustrates how the natural world is connected to all that is made. The bark is of a poplar tree, ideal for this work due to it being supple while fresh and quite reasonably strong once dried.
Noel Davar
Sturt School for Wood
Artist Statement
“I have always had a passion for building things. Despite a long and rewarding career in IT, I’ve always thought, if I could do it all again, I’d like to be a woodworker. While I have pursued woodworking as a hobby over the years, I have always wanted to learn more about the craft and fill in the gaps in my knowledge. I enrolled at the Sturt School for Wood and undertook a 12 month course in fine furniture making and design. The course taught me a lot about design and working with wood and provided me with a solid foundation on the path to becoming a designer and maker. In the future, I am looking to cement the skills I have learnt and to build furniture that will stand the test of time. Pieces that can be handed down to future generations. I am also looking forward to passing the skills I have learnt, on to other new and aspiring woodworkers.
The inspiration for my Pyramid Floor Lamp came wanting to design something that was a bit different to other lamps I’d seen before. The brief I set myself was to have a lamp that could sit behind an arm chair, or between two lounges, and shine light on a person reading. The pyramid base came to mind as a point of difference from the usual round or flat bases used on lamps. The curve of the stem was designed to run back behind the base and then forward above the reader. This gives the lamp a sense of balance both visually and mechanically. The shade was chosen to complement the lamp and is a similar size to the base. This also provides the lamp with a balance in the vertical plane.”
Solomon Gates
ANU School of Art & Design
Biography
Solomon Gates is an emerging artist based in Canberra ACT. He is currently completing his Bachelor of Visual Arts at the Australian national university. His primary focus is within the jewellery and object workshop, exploring materiality and environmental concerns. Though his focus is predominantly surrounded with metalwork and jewellery, throughout his time at anu he has participated in many different disciplines including textiles and sculpture. Solomon is planning on perusing further studies, with a focus on extending his technical skills within the world of jewellery, with the intention to integrate these skills into his broader creative practice. Some artistic influences that he draws from are artist such as Lauren Kalman, Matt Lambert and Kyoko Hashimoto.
Artist Statement
Dysregulation is a reflective work on the current state of invasive flora in Australia and the insufficient stewardship towards environmental conservation. Blackberry (Rubus fruticosus) is the focus of the work as it is a ubiquitous noxious weed in Australia, restricting and disrupting natural processes within native flora and fauna. This idea was translated by drawing parallels between human physiology, native plants, and the unnatural – silver – blackberry; limiting and impeding vital life functions such as gathering and consuming nutrients. Casting directly from blackberry cuttings enabled each piece to convey the malignant nature of blackberry growth though creating an uncanny visual representation of the common, yet foreign entity. Each work was constructed by soldering various lengths of stem together, then bending and forming them around the human physique as if they had grown naturally. Both the piercing nature and constricting form create a sense of claustrophobia.
Dom Gowans
ANU School of Art & Design
Biography
My art is a response to the world around me, a way to reconcile my thoughts on issues I feel I have no power to change. It is a reaction to the things I cannot control, a way of demanding a voice. My work is equal parts statement, enjoyment, and therapy. When faced with difficult situations I prefer to take an ironic or comedic approach, to highlight the absurdity of the situation, to laugh rather than cry.
Artist Statement
My current project is a response to our value system, a subversive response to the waste in our society. Designed to question the valve of our discarded objects by altering several essentially worthless items to create different variations.
Simple changes, potentially comic, will lead my audience to question the perceived differences in value, as well as questioning why these superficial details create differences in their appeal. Ultimately questioning why we view them differently although they are fundamentally the same.
Roz Hall
ANU School of Art & Design
Biography
Roz Hall is an emerging ceramic artist whose current work focuses on questioning and shifting perceptions of the everyday.
Artist Statement
In an investigation of the application of ceramics, I introduce kinetics to my pieces through the variation of vessel forms in combination with appliances. I aim to manipulate responses to an object’s behaviour or function by drawing on collective familiarity with ceramics, hinging on the senses of surprise and wonder. I manufacture these moments with precision, whimsy, and a modernist eye to catch the viewer off-guard, pause time, and present the Kinetics of Uncertainty.
The cohesion of handmade ceramics, movement, and gadgetry in my work feels strange, but the simple motive of each machine and its dynamic absurdity inspires a length of feelgood fascination. It is an exploration of the ceramic medium; through this, I hope viewers find an enjoyable sense of renewal in their perception of ceramics and its kinetic potential.
Brandon Harrison
Sturt School for Wood
Artist Statement
The strength of anything comes from the sum of its individual parts. From the tiny interlocking fibres in wood to the multitude of thousands of joined components of some of the biggest structures in the world. This coffee table is a sculpturally minimalist exploration in aggregate strength from individual frailty.
The essence of Tuna Moiré is this idea. Made from 70 pre-steam bent laminations of Tasmanian Oak and 90 straight sections, with expressed splines to emphasise the lightness and fragility of each element, it is the combined strength of the individual components that gives firmness to the whole.
Negative space is integral to Tuna Moiré. Built by an echoing chevron shape with its corresponding negatives, this produces a ‘moiré’ effect, allowing the in-between space to dance and change as you move around the piece and giving light the ability to move through the ribs to create shadows that inhabit a greater footprint than the work itself.”
Adeline Higgins
ANU School of Art & Design
Biography
I am a ceramic artist living and working on Ngunnawal country. I developed my practice while completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the Australian National University’s School of Art and Design. I specialise in creating organic, expressive wheel-thrown forms.
Artist Statement
The connection between body and my creative practice is a constant inspiration. My graduating work Held, draws on a sense of personal identity, self-acceptance and appreciation. Exploring the idea of body and driving connections that are relatable and comforting.
This series centres around organic bowl-like forms that speak to the body as a vessel. The forms are wheel thrown and altered by hand to represent the folds and creases of skin. Some of the forms have no base, to emphasise our bodies as cavities. The intimate and nestled composition highlights the vulnerability and softness of the body and clay itself.
Held recognises and celebrates interconnection of body parts and our perceptions of body – functional, imperfect, beautiful.
Abbie Holbrook
ANU School of Art & Design
Biography
Abbie Holbrook is an emerging artist and designer based on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country in Canberra, Australia. Currently completing her B. Visual Arts and Design majoring in textiles at the ANU.
Abbie is interested in exploring the written word through the lens of visual culture. She conducts visual research into text as material object through textiles and text based works, existing across 2D and 3D planes. Abbie situates her work within the intersection of art, craft and design, as she specialises in hand embroidered and appliqued soft sculptures, with a highly realised typographical design style.
Abbie has exhibited in group shows Reading Between the Lines at Tributary Projects in Canberra, Through the Looking Glass at E3 Gallery in Wagga Wagga and Gallery 76 in Sydney, Tripstych at Gallery 76 in Sydney, and was winner of the ANU Interhall Art Shows in 2018 and 2019. Abbie was awarded the Marie Yeardly Scholarship by the Embroiderer’s Guild of NSW, for a large scale embroidered portrait of her Grandmother, who encouraged and influenced her love of textiles.
Artist Statement
Holding Space comprises a series of sculptural textiles banners that materialise the language of menstrual shame. Menstrual shame exists in a culture of concealment which expects us to be least visible at our most vulnerable. This work gives physical form to silenced words so as to make us feel seen and heard.
Historically rooted in activism, Holding Space utilises the language of our foremothers in the protest banners of marches past. It combines the political mobilisation and community building of quilt making with the soft sculptural possibilities of text as object. Thoughts and emotions have been made visible and are validated through the care of embodied labour. While the words invoke shame, the scale and the inherent softness of the banners offer comfort, as if they could hold the body with domestic familiarity.
Whilst holding space for connection and conversation, these banners seek to dismantle the language of menstrual shame and call for action: asserting a space for change.
Tessa Hoser
Canberra Potters
Biography
Tessa is an Australian potter producing wheel-thrown and hand-built forms. Her work explores the contrast between apparently perfect and imperfect shapes. She makes domestic ware as well as sculptural forms in her farm studio in regional NSW and in a community-based studio in Sydney.
Tessa has always been drawn to clay - she was a messy child. Growing up in South Africa, she played barefoot, amongst piles of traditional pots made in the Mozambican villages where she holidayed with her family. Her love of these earthy pieces can be seen in the brown and black clays she uses and her wide-brimmed and textured forms. After moving to Australia, she learnt to make ceramics with the late Hilary Wolff and then continued part-time pottery whilst finishing her legal studies in London.
Her work is held in private collections in New York, London and Sydney. Recent and current exhibitions include at the Canberra Potters Society, Sydney Street Gallery and Crackpot Gallery. She was awarded the Craft ACT 2021 Emerging Artist Award.
Artist Statement
My work explores the contrast between wheel thrown and handbuilt forms; the juxtaposition between the perfect and imperfect. So too, in considering textured and smooth surfaces, distorted and warped, rounded and curved, patterned, layered, I am exploring the bounty of the natural and ancient world. Our time is a speck, the land is for eternity.
Wiradjuri No: 1 is a form that reflects those perspectives and my connection to Wiradjuri country. Working at that time from my studio on the Central Tablelands, in the heart of Wiradjuri country, I felt and saw every day the colours, textures and forms of that land.
The belly of this form is wheel thrown in high-iron stoneware. Coiled and pinched upper sections of that clay rise and emerge as flowers, trumpet-like, having come from the belly of the dark and harsh land. Textured and decorated with iron oxide wash and shino and tenmoku cone 10 glazes, the dots, pours and splashes reflect speckled bark, soil, pebbles and the dusty rawness of that country.
Shen-Ju Hsieh
Canberra Potters
Biography
Shen-Ju Hsieh is a Canberra based emerging Taiwanese ceramic artist who combines functional everyday things and sculpture in ceramics.
Shen-Ju completed a BFA in craft and design, majoring in ceramics at the National Taiwan University of Art. She is currently completing the Master of Contemporary Practices in Art and Design in ceramics at the Australian National University.
Shen-Ju has concentrated on exploring wheel throwing and hand extruding techniques in ceramics, she utilizes the clay’s materiality to express emotions, creating functional sculpture as a metaphor for the relationship between humans and the environment.
Artist Statement
At the garden by Shen-Ju Hsieh explores the functional wares in the ceramics medium as a metaphor to explore the landscapes that express relaxation. Nowadays, the word “”slow living”” can be seen frequently in the business and the market. Home is an important site in slow living. Shen-Ju believes home goods and the aesthetic landscape in the house will influence the mood in the living. The work here is not only a sculpture but also an everyday object, that expresses a sense of relaxation and reminds people to slow down the pace in their life.
Shen-Ju’s artwork combines wheel throw and hand extruding techniques. The anthropomorphic wheel-thrown vessels and weaving gestures bases give this work its energy. As if vessels are relaxing at the garden. She breaks the rule of understanding everyday objects, her artwork is viewed as both sculptures and utilitarian objects, which miniature a part of our life.
Alex Khoo
University of Canberra
Biography
Alex is an Industrial Designer from the University of Canberra, currently located in Canberra. Passionate in traditional furniture design, emerging technology and sporting goods; with experience in all 3 fields as both a user and a designer, giving me a unique perspective and outlook on design.
As a young designer, the ability to create a product from a simple idea is what peaked his interest into the design world. Now, this is complemented by the thought process that allows for an aesthetically pleasing solution and good design to be merged.
Alex believes that design should not only be aesthetically pleasing but affordable and accessible. As designers we not only create solution to solve a problem but to positively improve users lives.
Artist Statement
A Japanese inspired timber stool. Hand crafted using traditional Japanese wood joining techniques, accompanied by a contemporary twist; simultaneously aesthetic and functional. Simple and basic techniques were employed to design and create the stool. The joining of traditional and contemporary is incorporated in the One Chair, One Process Project, creating the Torrik stool.
Oliver Owens
ANU School of Art & Design
Artist Statement
Inspired by the land and seascapes of coastal areas in southern New South Wales, my ceramic vessels explore the relationships humans share with place through an abstracted depiction of landscape.
The act of viewing landscape is a highly psychological one, involving a complex cognitive process of information reception and analysis based on sensory immersions and the presence of subjective expectations or memories. This process has a strong capacity to shape our understanding and relationship to place by forming conceptions such as beauty, value or safety. It is these effects and conceptions which have driven my practice. By creating ceramic vessels which capture the light and colour qualities of the sky, land and sea of New South Wales’ coastal vistas, my work distils the essence of a place characterised by dense vegetation, rock formations and expansive ocean horizons. At the same time, it relies on viewers’ psychological processes which form conceptions and expectations of the natural world to generate its meaning, asking those viewers to consider the relationships to the places they know and care about.
Each of my pieces are wheel thrown before being altered with folds and indentations, creating an undulating surface profile and accentuating the quality of the thrown mark. Such qualities recall the structure and stratification of rock formations along the coastline. The segmentation of each vessel focusses the three-dimensional representation of the landscape around a horizon line, and the use ofsatin glaze finishes complements this. Operating in bands across the display, my glazes are employed to explore colour field relationships as they relate to atmospheric qualities of light and colour. Soft hues of blue, white, orange and green mirror those found along the coastal landscape in the vegetation, sea and sky, and in the transitional areas where glazes overlap, each vessel registers a unique surface interaction of running, mixing and speckling.
Sue Peachey
Craft ACT CAPO Emerging Artist Award
Biography
Sue Peachey has a deep appreciation and gratitude for all that sustains us on planet Earth. Hand building with coloured porcelain and using the technique of nerikomi, she makes ceramics that evoke our natural world in the wish that other humans may also connect. Sue’s background is in landscape design, permaculture and poetry. River’s Edge Ceramics can be found at Studio 7 in the delightful garden of Canberra Potters Society.
Artist Statement
Evoking nebulae, colourful clouds of interstellar gases and dust, these two cylinders accompany and talk back to the piece Sun burnished and further invite the viewer to consider other-worldly possibilities and interpretations. That these nebula-like patterns can be recreated from clay and minerals, the very basis of Earth’s materiality, reminds us that we are part of a much wider universe, a wonder that we can easily forget in our day to day lives. Sue Peachey is an emerging ceramic artist who hand builds in coloured porcelain using the technique of nerikomi. She has a deep appreciation and gratitude for all that sustains us on planet Earth and her love of the natural world is a recurrent theme in the ceramics she creates. Based in Canberra, she is originally from New Zealand and brings a background in landscape design, permaculture and poetry to the work.
Kate Rice
ANU School of Art & Design
Biography
Kate Rice is a designer and visual artist from Parkes in central west New South Wales. Currently residing on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country in Canberra, Kate is an undergraduate student at the Australian National University’s School of Art and Design. Studying a double degree in Design and Visual Arts majoring in textiles, Kate has always been drawn to the universality of textiles. Due to its closeness to the body, both physically and conceptually, textiles have an inherent ability to evoke emotional connections.
The principles of textiles as a medium forms the base of Kate’s artistic practice, informing her pieces whether they are made from textile materials or not. In her current artist practice, Kate has been exploring the conceptual and material possibilities of wire. Kate applies a textiles philosophy to the medium of wire to create pieces that form and movement.
Artist Statement
Boundary line aims to challenge perceptions and expectations of boundaries within the landscape. It asks: do boundaries connect us to place or heighten our sense of disconnect or exclusion?
My experience of growing up on the land in a third generation farming family frames this question. Through this work, I have engaged with themes of place and memory; seeking to materially create connections and form tangible representations of intangible emotions. In weaving my own fence line, I have drawn from the universality of textiles and their closeness to the body.
The weaving takes on a body-like quality, bulging and stretching, causing disruption in the landscape. Formed by memories and actions, our boundaries shape us. In making the piece I have retraced the fence line over and over, resulting in a well worn path along the boundary. This dynamic piece asks the viewer to walk along the fence line as well and to consider the shifting of boundaries within their own landscapes.
Bronwyn Sargeson
ANU School of Art & Design
Biography
Bronwyn Sargeson is an artist who works primarily with glass. Raised in Canberra, Bronwyn studied at the Australian National University in the Glass Workshop. Prior to starting her degree and during this time, she has participated in workshops at Canberra Glassworks run by leading artists within the field. Bronwyn is an active member of the Glass Art Society and attended the organisation’s conference in New Zealand in 2019. She has worked as a studio assistant for local, national, and international artists of a high calibre and is currently on the Exhibition Install team at the National Gallery of Australia.
Bronwyn’s work challenges notions of beauty often associated with glass. Although including playful elements of colour and form, her work tackles the jarring and often necessary medical procedures required for a chronically ill body. Bronwyn’s current series of work features anthropomorphic blown glass forms interacting with kiln formed glass elements. She uses this interaction as an exploration of the intervention between the body and medical apparatus.
Artist Statement
Reimagining medical procedures, interventions, and associated apparatus, this series seeks to transform the experiences of a wounded body into moments of wonder and playful exploration. Glassblowing is a method that allows the artist to be present in the moment of transformation and through active engagement with the material, seeks to intervene in the same way medical procedures are performed on the human body.
Drawing together amorphic forms conceived through breath, motion , and manipulation; glass is interrupted, pierced, distorted, held , or encased. The subject of further manipulation, some of these forms are then slumped in the kiln over multiple firings, supported by hand-built clay elements as they melt. Here, the artist is left speculating the outcome, having been removed from direct influence. Encountering the final work, the viewer witnesses the careful reconstruction of symbiosis between the body and the external components it is dependent upon.
Lucy Stackpool
Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT)
Biography
Lucy Stackpool is an early emerging artist practicing drawing, painting and sculpture. Her work focuses on children, motherhood and telling human stories. Based in semi-rural NSW, other themes in her art practice include her love and concern for our natural environment and the creatures who live alongside us.
Lucy graduated with a Diploma of Visual Art from the Canberra Institute of Technology in 2021, and has since been awarded the Craft ACT Emerging Contemporaries Award 2022. Her work has recently been shown in the 26th annual Blacktown City Art Prize at the Leo Kelly Blacktown Arts Centre and the 59th annual Fisher’s Ghost Art Award 2021 at the Campbelltown Arts Centre. Two of her portraits have previously been included in a group exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.
Artist Statement
Climate Coral is a series of works looking at the threats to our delicate pacific marine life – open and vulnerable to the impacts of our lifestyle. The cords wound around the forms represent the plastic pollution that binds animals and coral. Recent and unprecedented mass bleaching events - caused by the increase in global surface temperature due to greenhouse gas emissions - have devastated our coral reefs, and placed these ecosystems of enormous biodiversity in grave danger.
Eliza Styles
University of Canberra
Biography
My goal is to create beautiful, well considered designs in my mission to become the best designer that I can be. I am passionate about designing a wide range of products, as I enjoy improving my skill set and stepping out of my comfort zone. I am particularly passionate about furniture and homeware design and I am very inspired by other furniture designs and designers too.
As a young, emerging designer, my aim is to focus on sustainable design as much as possible, to create design which is not only good for the user, but also better for our world and prevents avoidable pollution and harm.
Artist Statement
Turning milk bottles to furniture: the Moo Table proves that recycled plastic can be stylish. The Moo Table was created to showcase the possibilities of transforming recycled materials into a new form, which is completely unrecognizable from the original form. Through the use of repurposed HDPE plastic from milk bottles, the Moo Table was meticulously handmade, with the intention of bringing a high end look to the finished design, which could fit into the modern home with ease.
Moea Vonsy
Sturt School for Wood
Biography
Working with wood is a demanding and challenging task. Wood has a mind of its own and it takes a skilled craftsperson to coax it into the shape you have envisioned. But if you can convince it, it is the most wonderful of partners. That is why I choose it.
My work explores both organic and geometric shapes, for patterns transcend the natural beauty that is around us. They give order to the chaos, without constricting it.
Each piece tells a story. It is a reflection on the journey we undertake, the obstacles we face and the small victories we reap. They are not flawless, yet they are complete, each one expressing the unique meeting of maker and material and the conversation that was born from it.
Artist Statement
Because, as we navigate through this life, we know the reward is just around the next bend. Even when said bend sometimes feels like it will never end. And on we go. We set our course and we stay it, trusting in our inner compass. We ride the waves, weather the storms, through all of life’s twists and turns, and all its curve balls. And we reach the peaceful cove. And we set sail again, for another voyage, because nothing’s sweeter than finally coming home from our amazing odyssey.
The coopered cabinet is of Queensland Silver Ash veneers. The 60 staves form both concave and convex curves, in the shape of a Fibonacci spiral or a nautilus seashell. Inside, the joints have been detailed for a panelling aspect reminiscent of a boat interior.
The starburst pattern on the top and bottom of the cabinet have been replicated on all four faces to mitigate the effects of wood movement.
The stand is made of Jarrah.
Cathy Zhang
ANU School of Art & Design
Biography
Cathy Zhang is a Canberra-based artist whose practice is in both ceramics and gold and silversmithing. She graduated from the ANU School of art & Design in 2021 with a Bachelor of Visual Arts with First Class Honours and was the recipient of the ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences Honours Scholarship and the Drill Hall ANU Art Collection Acquisition.
Artist Statement
Materialising the Impact of Digital Technology through Wearable Sculpture.’ Have you ever stopped to wonder what goes on inside our digital devices? Or the likeness of digital landscapes to our own mindscape as we aimlessly scroll through touch screens? These two landscapes, the digital and our minds, are not so dissimilar.
This series by Cathy Zhang materialises the impact of self-reflection in our hyperconnected, digital world. Utilising digital tools and resources and gold and silversmithing techniques, Zhang has uses components found in digital devices to create works that highlight the pervasive nature of digital technology and our anxious attachment to our devices. This attachment is coupled with contemporary notions of wellness that demand a detox from our digital lives as we confront the relentless hold of digital technology over our lives and minds. Digital components are countered with acupuncture needles which speak to this precarious balance between connection and disconnection, pain and relief.
Emerging Contemporaries is on display at Craft ACT from 3 February - 19 March 2022. Find out more here.