Inez Edwards is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on the expanded practice of textiles in contemporary art. Drawing from experiences and memories of an adolescence spent in the Central Desert of Australia, Inez’s works explore family, memory and identity, in connection to place. Her practice is haptic and sensory, using traditional craft techniques in a process of drawing and mapping to revisit memories of the desert landscape – the muted colour palette, the spiky textures of the spinifex, and the smooth soft forms of the gum trees in the dry riverbeds. Everything has a double meaning – the contrast of wool and silk, hard and soft, natural and man-made fibres allude to divergent experiences of connection and the importance of bodily engagement in place and memory.
Chantel Magor is an early-career painter based in Perth, Australia. Her landscapes are grounded in psycho geographic walking; where observations of ephemeral qualities such as the changing weather and light conditions are recorded and responded to. Chantel’s paintings reference the physical landscape as she attempts to incorporate an expressive portrayal of here motional presence. The resulting works are both a record of remembered experiences and reflective of the artists’ present-time response to those memories.
Cedar Rankin-Cheek is an emerging textile and sculpture artist based in Boorloo, Western Australia. Her practice is centred around the femme body born from her own bodily experiences, with her sculptural installations acting as sites of corporeal healing and growth. Sit on this is a comedic yet emotive exploration into comfort and functionality, a representation of the aesthetic alterations we perform in order to be conveniently categorised by others. Rankin-Cheek disrupts the sacredness of the private space that is the bathroom, providing the alluring yet repulsive possibility of an upholstered toilet. The work questions the relentless search for bodily comfort under the guise of the male gaze and the point at which aesthetic comfortability and convenience eclipses functionality.
Harrison Riekie is an emerging land artist based in Boorloo, Western Australia. His art practice raises questions about digital communication systems and their relationship to human intervention. He works predominantly in places of transition, subtly manipulating the earth's surface in durational and temporal displays of large-scale ecological manipulation. The work depends on aerial perspective, which ties the inconspicuous nature of the act against its scale and placement in consideration of human intervention. In their work, I'm not a robot, we are forced into contemplation of an arrangement of tracking and verification codes. As opposed to its coded meaning, what presents creates a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only partially and incoherently.
Megan Shaw is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Boorloo (Perth), Western Australia. Led by a curiosity towards the discarded and every-day, Shaw re-works her materials into playful, colourful and zany compositions. The cultural and ecological conditions which make Shaw’s work are not always upbeat; however contemporary social patterns and processes inform the aesthetics in her work, particularly those that relate to production ,nostalgia, and allure. The playful and inquisitive treatment of materials creates an opportunity for a new aesthetic encounter with the quotidian in both process and outcome.
Kat Wilson-Smith is a Perth-based installation and performance artist. Wilson-Smith’s current practice questions the perception of gesture in relation to the body, landscape and art history. Her work Release represents an act of catharsis, where personal trauma is purged. The work references John Everett Millais’ Pre-Raphaelite painting Ophelia (1851-52) to create a video performance as a conceptual act in a local wetland. In contrast to Ophelia, for Wilson-Smith water as a concept becomes an act of joy rather than desperation. By letting go and releasing past events, the artist invites the audience to release their history too.
