HEATHCOTE SELECT
Samuel Beilby, Emilie Monty, Neisha Phipps, Oliver Ragen, Siahne Rogers, Ruby Smedley, Sonia Wee
Heathcote Select 2020 features the leading artists graduating from higher education in Western Australia last year. Together they represent the cutting-edge of new cultures of sculpture, installation, sound, printmaking and tech. Since 2015, the annual Heathcote Select program has provided early-career artists vital experience in a professional exhibitory context and access to wide audiences. It affords graduates an opportunity to develop their practice beyond the constraints of the educational framework. The program has debuted significant emerging artists including Sam Bloor, Kim Kim Kim, and Ian Dean.
Ruby Smedley
Ruby Smedley is a recent Bachelor of Contemporary Art graduate from Edith Cowan University (and Taipei National University of the Arts, a New Colombo Plan Scholarship recipient). As a multi-disciplinary artist, her works focus on the interactive, performative and kinetic. Smedley’s work stems from (often unproven) scientific theories and merges these ideas with folklore and stories of legend. Her work creates a world to explore social interactions, behaviour and thought processes that are often profoundly felt but cannot necessarily be explained easily or at all. These multi-sensory works utilise the mechanical to express the emotional. To examine the dis/connect, that flows between us all.
Neisha Phipps
Neisha Phipps is an emerging sculptor, performance artist, and painter. Phipps’ practice is invested in dismantling systems of domestic violence and abuse, spanning levels both personal and within the community. Phipps has conducted research on the ongoing effects of violence against women, and has investigated ways of combatting this global issue. Their work is focussed on disrupting the overbearing silence and taboo that seems to engulf domestic violence and its victims, providing physical presence for the tension, fragility, and emptiness ever-present in lives governed by violence, aggression and abuse.
Sonia Wee
Sonia Wee’s multi-disciplinary practice explores the historical and sentimental narratives we hold that shape our memories and connection to place. Her work considers the fluidity and corruption of memory; vulnerable to influences of time, cultural and political perspectives, as well as conversations with others who hold their own memories. Salvaged Memories references childhood memories of her grandparents’ ghost-town shack and its obliteration by the super-pit mine. Through the process of embossing, printing, frottage and infusing with the materiality of found objects, her work presents an immersive experience to consider the notion that memory is never fixed or reliable but fragmented and fragile, always changing and leaving only an impression.
Samuel Beilby
Samuel Beilby’s multi-sensory practice addresses the sentience, softness and brutality of contemporary digital and mechanical tools. Performing with an exaggerated “clunkiness”, User- Friendly acts as a product of – as well as a metaphor to – digitally linked, transit-guiding technologies that seem to conceal their destructive propensity under the guise of convenience. Entities that blink, beep, buzz and crawl through contemporary terrains are fed into the work’s programmed understanding of worldly phenomena that are worthy of eradicating or bypassing in order to make for a user-friendly journey. The installation seeks to reveal the piercing brutality of the processes by which organic matter is swallowed by agents of digital and electrical transit. Beilby is a multi-media installation artist based in Whadjuk Boodja who is currently completing his Masters of Fine Arts degree at the University of Western Australia School of Design.
Siahne Rogers
Siahne Rogers’ practice stems from their extensive background in performing arts and cabaret theatre, and their interest in the relationship between humour and everyday life. Rogers’ working methodology is filtered through their fascination with exploring how the archetypes and historical context of slapstick occur as a familiar visual language in narrative storytelling. An Animated Sense of False Hope is a response to a live performance, documented during their time at Kingston School of Art, London. Hand crafted squeaky shoes and modified clothing, Siahne goes for a jog; exploring the physical embodiment of the anxieties linked with constantly having to negotiate one’s relationship with notions of fulfilment and futility.
Oliver Ragen
Perth based interdisciplinary installation artist Oliver Ragen explores the internationally resonant concept of the Anthropocene and its symbiotic relationship with the natural world. Ragen’s methodologies within his practice are analytical, creating scenarios, objects and simulations that are directly drawn often from empirical scientific data. His immersive installations offer his audience an alternative experience of the issues surrounding climate crisis in order to evoke critical thought about the problematic consequences that may present themselves more frequently in the future. Specifically, this installation investigates the concept of duality, the separation between humanity and nature and the ongoing, unsustainable exchange of resources that are contributing to climate crisis.
Emilie Monty
Emilie Monty is a recent Fine Art graduate from the University of Western Australia. Her artistic research involves a deep look at the experience of physical pain and, more specifically, the lack of language that exists to describe the experience of living with chronic pain. On a scale of 1 to 10 is an auditory mediation for those who live with chronic pain and those who do not. We all experience physical pain but we process it, embody it and describe it in different ways. This complex relationship means that chronic pain is often an invalidated, undiagnosed and stigmatised condition. With special thanks to Jasmin, Asha and Emma. May your experience always be heard and validated.
