artist statement

Linda Adair is a (re)emerging artist (having stopped art making as worklife and family took up her time) and is a poet, writer and a publisher of Rochford Press, and co-editor of the online Rochford Street Review. She spent most of her early years living unwittingly on Dharug Land and now works and lives on Dharug and Gundungarra lands in the Blue Mountains. She has First Nations people in her family and pays her respects to the Traditional custodians of the land and Elders past present and emerging on whose land these images were made and where they are shown.

Adair’s artwork has been shown in Sewn Up and Sewn Up 2 in 2019, at BigCi Open Day on 15 May 2022 and this is her first solo exhibition.

Her debut collection The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering was published in 2020 by Melbourne Poets Union and her work has been the anthologised in the following collections: To End All Wars, Messages from The Embers, Poetry for the Planet, Pure Slush Volume 25 and the Volume on Work. She has been published in various online and print journals, both in Australia and internationally.

She has read her poems at festivals, conferences and venues around the country and has been a featured poet in Cuplet, Newcastle, Live Poets at Don Banks, and will be reading in Poetry at the Pub in October.

Safdar Ahmed is a Sydney based artist, academic and educator. He is
a founding member of not-for-profit community art organisation
Refugee Art Project, for which he conducts regular art workshops with
people of an asylum seekers and refugee background in their studio
at Thirning Villa in Ashfield. He is also a member of eleven: a
collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and
writers.

Alyx Guidi is a ‘Jill of all trades’ who delves into different mediums across the multimedia, audio-visual and fine arts working in a 2D-3D sculptural, performance and installation context. She has designed and made props, costumes, stilts/backpack processional (bamboo) puppets and roving character performances for opening and closing ceremonies for community events/festivals which includes City of Sydney, South Sydney and Fairfield City Councils and corporate events at CarriageWorks, Mardi Gras, Performance Space, IKEA Tempe.

Alyx’s fine arts adventures are of continuous line and/or ambidextrous mirror B/W and COLOUR drawings, that can be interpreted using horizontally or vertically flipped orientations, hinged in diptych combinations.

Alyx is active in and passionate about contemporary arts especially with a focus on community engagement, dialogue, and accessibility. The socio-political aspects of cultural life have always been part of her inspiration. The artist can be contacted by email: alyxox@yahoo.com

I regarded myself as a writer rather than a visual artist until I joined Richard Neville’s OZ Magazine in London in 1968. I soon realised I was more interested in the OZ artists than the writers, who were Richard’s main passion. We became a good double act, with Felix Dennis already the businessman, handling advertising and design. We survived the six week seminal Conspiracy and Obscenity Trial of 1971 at the Old Bailey, but two
years later, we closed OZ down and went our separate ways.

In 1975, I settled in Bolinas, an alternative town in northern California and became the Monday editor of the local newspaper, the Hearsay News. As well as writing a weekly column about local affairs - plenty of those, Bolinas at that
time being a renowned political and creative hothouse - I had to come up with a weekly front cover. Thus began my life as a collage artist.

My work has been exhibited frequently in both northern California and back here in Sydney after I returned to Australia in 1993. LAMPOON, AN HISTORICAL ART TRAJECTORY 1971-2011 an exhibition at the University of Sydney’s Tin Sheds Gallery summed up my career in both image and word.

Lampoon was also the title of an illustrated book accompanying the exhibition, which was under the aegis of that year’s Mardi Gras Festival. My new series, Landscapes of Survival and Reconciliation will be part of the HeadOn Photo Festival 2020, now rescheduled for November after a successful run online (courtesy of Covid-19) in May.

Annie Parnell is an emerging artist of Irish settler heritage living on Gadigal + Wangal Land. They completed their honours in the Sculpture and Spatial Practice department of the Australian National University in 2021.

Their background in ceramics informs their current work both aesthetically and materially. Yet, in their current work, materials have shifted to occupy metaphorical places. Currently, Parnell is interested in how systems such as kiln firing, AI and performance, impact and transform materials to create meaning.

Parnell has exhibited work locally and internationally and their work is held in private collections in Australia and overseas. Their first solo show was at Strathnairn Arts (Canberra) and their work has been included in multiple group shows including Talente 2021 (Munich). Parnell has received various awards and scholarships, including the Peter and Lena Karmel Honours Scholarship (2021), the Hiroe Swen award (2020) and the Strathnairn Arts Residency (2020).

The art practice of Gabrielle Bates has evolved over 30 years into an immersive investigation of how we occupy, understand and enchant place.

In 2007 Gabrielle undertook a year long residency in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which led to subsequent residencies in Penang, Manila and Australia. These experiences introduced her to more community-inclusive approaches to cultural production, as well as prompting her masters research into Witchcraft, ritual and creative activation.

In Australia, Gabrielle’s art works have been selected for highly regarded award exhibitions, she has received numerous commissions, and produced 13 solo exhibitions. Gabrielle also runs Cloudbough Residency in Kandos, regional NSW for creative and cultural producers.

Karen Bloomfield is represented in several east coast galleries and has created a brand for herself through two distinctive mediums: Industrial oil paintings on canvas; and Australian Wildlife in charcoal & inkon plywood. Her recent melding of the styles has been termed, ‘Reductionist Pop’. Bloomfield’s work is in collections throughout Australia, Amsterdam, the U.K., Hong Kon, China, Ireland and Afghanistan.

Christine Carey is Sydney based. She has been studying collage for the past six years under two different teachers with differing approaches and has found she really enjoyed expressing herself through collage. Guided by the principles and elements of Collage her aim is to create structured compositions which are balanced and unified.

Catherine Hourihan’s career has traversed visual art, dance and theatre in Sydney and New York. She has exhibited her photography in multiple solo and group shows in both Sydney and New York. Grants and awards include a Swing Space grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, in support of The Art of Falling, a multi-media site specific dance work, 2007, the NSW Artist Grant, awarded by NAVA in support of solo photography exhibition, Raw Glitter at the Slipper Room NYC, 2014, and a Creative Fellowship grant awarded by the City of Sydney, to create Legal Tender a solo photographic exhibition at Vandal Gallery, Sydney 2021. Catherine has also exhibited her photographic art in solo shows at Disorder Gallery, The Silent Thoughts of Statues (2018) and Back Stage NYC at Gallery 106 in 2008, on her return to Sydney after 12 years in New York City working as a dancer/choreographer and burlesque artist.

Her work has been included in numerous group shows, galleries include, Charles Hewitt Gallery, Australian Centre for Photography, The Kings Cross Photography Prize, Brand X and m2 Gallery.

Before she relocated to NYC in the mid 90’s Catherine presented Neverness, a full length multi-media solo performance at Performance Space, Sydney, and performed with Sydney’s Entre’acte Theatre Company at the Belvoir St Theatre.

Christophe Domergue was born on Kur-in-gai Country in Sydney, and currently works on Gadigal and Wangal Country from his studio in Marrickville. In 2023 he was a finalist in the prestigious Dobell Drawing Prize, with his resin and fibreglass piece and also highly commended in the Milburn Art Prize for Landscape, Brisbane institute of Art.

At the heart of Domergue's artistic practice lies his innovative technique, aptly named "Peeling." This method employs thick, malleable pigments in resin, serving both as painting medium and adhesive. Through this process, he physically peels away surface layers of urban landscapes, resulting in almost a sculptural object. Domergue's work transcends the conventional, inviting viewers into a world of texture, colour, and form.

His first series was titled, Post Industrial Peelings (2017) and his most recent series, Dust Room (2023) were created on the floor of the shared dust room at his Marrickville studio.

Staci Crutchfield is an itinerant potter who has pursued a self-directed study of wheel and sculptural pottery techniques since 2005.

Her interest in clay, seeded while living in Japan during high school in 1982, continued through her tertiary education in Asian Studies at the Australian National University and work in the tourism and hospitality sector to then provide a creative antidote to the challenges of delivering social services to those who need them the most while working in the Public Housing sector in New South Wales between 2011 - 2021.

In 2014, Staci built a portable wood-fired kiln to further her understanding of high temperature wood-firing and the use of ash glazes. In conjunction with attending ceramic workshops and conferences in Australia, Italy and Hungary, she has travelled to Mali, West Africa and Malekula, Vanuatu to experience the traditional clay arts and handicrafts of these cultures. Her current practice is based around carved functional vessels where the form directs the decorative surface treatment and sculptural work using found and altered clay bodies, which combine textured surfaces from the natural environment with small clay origami cranes.

A founding member of Claypool in Sydney, she has also been a member of the Bribie Island and Shorncliffe Pottery Clubs and is thrilled to have been invited to fire kilns with many of the wood-firing community.

Staci is interested in collaborating with makers in other media such as fibre, wood, glass and metal whereby her clay cranes or abstract forms could be incorporated into works with shared themes.
Staci has exhibited at Pine Street Creative Arts Centre and Yuga Cafe Gallery in Sydney.

Laneikka Denne is a young queer maker, playwright and actor from Western Sydney with a weirdly absurd yet feminist lens on the mundane moments of womanhood. Her photographic work has been exhibited at the Goods Space Gallery and The House That Dan Built's Festival in a Box in 2022.

Laneikka wrote her debut play DEAD SKIN at seventeen which was awarded the State Theatre Company of SA's Young Playwright's award and went on to be performed at KXT in 2021 to sold out audiences of teenagers. Laneikka is the recipient of the Diversity Creative Mentorship 2022 where her play was performed in Los Angeles and is currently being developed into a feature film. Laneikka's plays are published on Australian Plays Transform and she is currently in pre-production for her screenplay OI that was awarded Open Screenplay's Best Drama Screenplay and was a finalist in the First Flight's Female Voices Fund in 2022.