Shortlist announced for prestigious visual arts fellowship
Artspace NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship 2019 shortlist. Photo by Anna Kucera. (Back row L-R): Shivanjani Lal, Rebecca Gallo, Amala Groom, Katy B Plummer, Harriet Body. (Middle row L-R): Jelena Telecki, Shireen Taweel, JD Reforma, Leyla Stevens. (Front row L-R): Connie Anthes, Linda Sok. (Absent) Nick Dorey.
Eleven emerging visual artists from NSW have been shortlisted for the 2019 Create NSW and Artspace NSW Visual Arts Fellowship.
Now in its 23rd year at Artspace, the prestigious $30,000 Fellowship gives an emerging artist the opportunity to undertake a program of professional development (such as research, further study and internships) over two years.
The Fellowship provides a breakthrough opportunity for emerging talent that allows for experimentation and creativity within the NSW visual arts community and the delivery of exciting new works for NSW audiences.
Artspace Executive Director Alexie Glass-Kantor and Assistant Curator Elyse Goldfinch will co-curate the exhibition, collaborating closely with each artist through a series of studio visits and mentored exchanges to further develop their work for the finalists’ presentation.
The shortlisted group will now develop works for a collaborative exhibition to be held at Artspace in Woolloomooloo from 15 November to 15 December this year, where an assessment panel will announce a final recipient for the Fellowship.
Shortlisted visual artists
Connie Anthes and Rebecca Gallo (Make or Break) (Parramatta, Western Sydney)
Make or Break is a collaboration between artists Connie Anthes and Rebecca Gallo, based in Sydney. Make or Break produces a range of process-based projects that are coauthored with the communities they intersect with and are passionate about exposing invisible labour and deploying artistic methods to question and challenge the social and political systems that influence lives and livelihoods.
Harriet Body (Bulli, Regional NSW)
Artist working in the expanded field of mark making to contemplate process and time. Moving across painting, textiles, ceramics, and dance, Harriet melds traditional materials and processes in unconventional ways. Harriet also works collaboratively with various community groups, providing workshops and art experiences for people of all ages and abilities.
Nick Dorey (Tugrabakh, Regional NSW)
Artist working across sculpture, installation, performance and photography. Nick’s practice involves creating large environments of a personal and (at times) autobiographic nature, analogically hidden in cipher, compelled by a desire for personal transformation.
Amala Groom (Ilford, Regional NSW)
Wiradjuri artist whose practice, as the performance of her cultural sovereignty, is informed by First Nations methodologies. Working across diverse media, Amala’s work often subverts and unsettles western iconographies to enunciate Aboriginal stories, experiences and histories, and to explore the legacy of colonialism.
Shivanjani Lal (Lidcombe, Western Sydney)
Twice-removed Fijian-Indian-Australian artist and curator. Shivanjani works across mediums to explore her dislocation that seeks to account for memory, erasure, healing and the archive. Her current research posits that her body and the landscapes she is from hold the grief of being removed. Her work attempts to document and create gestures of healing, and has been shown in Australia, New Zealand, India, Barbados and France.
Katy Plummer (Dee Why, Sydney Metro)
Artist who makes video installations about the phenomenology of politics and the politics of phenomenology. Katy juxtaposes cinematic storytelling with anachronistic domestic textile practices and the camp aesthetics of high school theatre.
Linda Sok (Cecil Hills, Western Sydney)
Cambodian-Australian artist whose practice is strongly driven by her Khmer cultural heritage, particularly in relation to the Khmer Rouge Regime which forced her family’s migration to Australia. Through her practice Linda investigates this culturally and personally significant event that has greatly shaped her family and identity. With a particular focus on cultural objects, rituals, traditions and their materiality, her practice often manifests in sculptural installations.
Leyla Stevens (Myocum, Regional NSW)
Australian-Balinese artist and researcher who works predominately within moving image and photography. Leyla’s practice is informed by ongoing concerns around gesture, ritual, spatial encounters, transculturation and counter histories.
JD Reforma (Campsie, Western Sydney)
Sydney-based interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice encompasses sculpture, performance, installation, video, photography and writing. JD’s work is embedded in different racialised and classed contexts: the lived experiences of the Asian-Australian diaspora; popular culture and the cult of celebrity; corporate branding and institutional critique; and political dynasticism and cultural imperialism. He is a 2019 Carriageworks Resident Artist and also participated in the 2018 4A Beijing Studio Program.
Shireen Taweel (Punchbowl, Western Sydney)
A multimedia installation artist based in Sydney whose work broaches issues of the construction of cultural heritage, knowledge and identity through language and the constantly shifting public space of the social, political and religious axiom. Shireen’s artistic practice draws from the personal experiences of being Lebanese Australian living between cultures, and how the physical spaces within her community reflect a complex cultural landscape of transformation expressed through hybridity and plurality.
Jelena Telecki (Leichhardt, Sydney Metro)
Artist interested in representation through painting and sculpture. Installation plays an important part in creating a dialogue between painting and sculpture and is used as a means of articulating Jelena’s sense of personal and shared narratives, internal and the external. Jelena’s most recent work traces her interest in the ways power relations inform our decision-making and how we experience the choices we make.
Image: Artspace NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship 2019 shortlist. Photo by Anna Kucera. (Back row L-R): Shivanjani Lal, Rebecca Gallo, Amala Groom, Katy B Plummer, Harriet Body. (Middle row L-R): Jelena Telecki, Shireen Taweel, JD Reforma, Leyla Stevens. (Front row L-R): Connie Anthes, Linda Sok. (Absent) Nick Dorey.
Published: 29 October 2019