This is my son, December Jack in the tube and my nephew Zac testing the durability of the sculpture!
Mirror State
Projects Blog
H.W.Y dreams
H.W.Y dreams is an on going line of enquiry. In which I carve text and images into the rubber of a car tyre. The tyre is then inked like a traditional lino-cut print and printed directly onto the gallery floor. The text often links ideas about the repeat with popular slang related to driving and travel. Sentences such as You'll Go Far Baby are carved into the rubber of the tyre.
Installation view
H.W.Y (She's copying me)
car tyre relief print
dimensions variable
H.W.Y dreams (Give me some relief)
car tyre relief print
dimensions variable
Installation view
H.W.Y dreams (you'll go far baby)
car tyre relief print
dimensions variable
H.W.Y dreams 3
four car tyre relief prints
dimensions variable
Detail
Studio
I utilise various studio locations in Melbourne and abroad depending on the type of work I make. I have a Research Studio, a Painting Studio, and when making prints I utilise community print studios. I have had studios in different locations throughout the world during residencies and projects as well, my permanent studio in Brunswick is finally complete - Cozens Street - check it out!
Working in a screen-print studio on the Artbox commission "Don't stop - Pop!"
Research studio
I am currently completing a PhD at RMIT University. This is my studio on the corner of Franklin St and Swanston St right in the heart of Melbourne. This studio offers me the contemplative time to experiment and write.
Research studio
Cozens Street. In 2015 I leased a place in Brunswick, Victoria that was basically an empty shell. I then, with the help of friends, began to build Cozens Street. We wanted to create a space where artists and creatives could work in a community of makers, sharing ideas and skills.
Building
SOLOMON ISLANDS
In 2014 I embarked on a residency in the Solomon Islands. This is my studio at the National Gallery in Honiara. I worked on a series of collaborations with artists I met there. This is Jimmy Sinumoana and Fred Oge, both well respected young artists in SI.
This is one of the lovely women who showed me how they use printing processes to make their famous Lava Lava
In the studio with a young student
Modes of copying in the collaborative work with Fred Oge and Jimmy Sinumoana.
All the artists outside the National Gallery
Painting Studio
painting and experimenting in the studio
Magazine prints
Printmaking is largely miss-understood in a contemporary art context and generally confined to historical processes.
This is the departure point for these works. I see printmaking as potentially the most relevant form of contemporary art, it straddles both traditional and contemporary visual culture. Using a historical knowledge of print and visual production, I acknowledge that printmaking is the origin of our current visual world. All visual technologies derive from the historical processes of printmaking.
Looking towards mass production as a form of printmaking. I produce prints as published pages in popular visual art magazines.
The process of mass produced offset lithography is an updated version of the traditional stone lithograph with this insight I produce my own version of printmaking as mass produced unlimited print editions available at the cost of a magazine.
The aesthetic is text and basic forms, commenting on print and popular culture simultaneously.
I work outside the traditional concepts of unique object exclusivity limited edition and gallery.
My work is an attempt to democratise/inform/play/quote/humour and revitalise printmaking.
offset print on five separate pages of Art Almanac
22 x 150cm
Finalist in the East Gippsland Artist Book Awards
Hors de commerce
offset print on two pages of Art Collector
150 x 150cm
Finalist in the Hazelhurst Works on Paper Award
Unique state
offset print on two pages of Art Monthly
dimensions variable
Finalist in the Ex Libris Artist Book Awards
H.C
offset print in Art Collector
30 x 40cm
Finalist in the Archangel Art Award 2010
Hotmetal
offset print in Island literary magazine
22 x 12 cm
Finalist in the Burnie Print Prize 2009
Four panel form
offset print on two pages in Art Almanac
42 x 60cm
Finalist in the Geelong Print Award 2009
Hot process
offset print in Art Almanac
22 x 15cm
Winner of the Fremantle Print Award 2008
Exhibitions
Fremantle Print Award 2012
RMIT University Project Space, 2011
Heterodoxia, Kyabram Rodeo and Next Wave Festival Melbourne
New Print, Michael Koro Gallery, Melbourne, 2010
New Print, Michael Koro Gallery, Melbourne, 2010
Solomon Islands National Gallery, 2014
Solomon Islands National Gallery, 2014
Stockroom Gallery, Kyneton, Victoria, 2012
Unique state
This work explores the paradox of the edition of one. Titled Unique state, which is a print definition used to describe a 'one-off print', I was commissioned by Art Monthly to produce a print for their 250th edition of the magazine. I chose 1/1 as the image to explore the mass produced medium of commercial print production. This 'unique edition' was printed in the tens of thousands, I then placed 300 of the magazines with the pages open on the gallery floor.
Unique state was a finalist in the Mackay Art Space Libris Art Awards.
Read about it here:
http://blogs.slq.qld.gov.au/ala/2013/05/15/artspace-mackay-libris-awards/
U think yr green?
For Christmas 2012 I decided to hitchhike up the east coast, I wanted the experience to be an extension of my art practice. I created a sign that could hang off my back-pack that would make motorists consider their role as emitters and offered an idea that exposed the irony of carbon trading.
The sign read: Let me reduce your carbon footprint. It is, at once, an irreverent humour pleading with motorists to pick me up – offering them a type of salvation for their guilt ridden east coast petrol guzzling journey- and on the other hand it discusses the irony that baffles popular interpretations of the carbon trading schemes. That is, that there is no real displacement, it is just a carbon neutral person allowing a carbon heavy person to use their neutrality to continue to exist in the same manner as before…
This work is an installation of the remnants of this journey. The sign itself, the photos I took and a cue card detailing some of the places I passed through.
You think yr green?
Performance vestige - tarpaulin, digital print on petrol station receipts and pen on card.
Dimensions variable
Performprint: Fremantle Print Award
Peformprint statement:
Bearings, beauty and irrelevance talks about the inconsequential nature of art, text, and performance. In this work we are trying to highlight the aesthetic and ephemeral qualities of such activities through the combination of printmaking and skateboarding. The performance of skateboarding and the art of text are two activities whose agencies are inherently purposeless though this is also their strength, their beauty. Bearings, beauty and irrelevance is an attempt to articulate this duality – the meaningful and the meaningless.
Logistics:
The work is performed within the gallery directly on the floor. A circular ink (thick ink) bed should be prepared in the centre of the 3mx3m performance area. The ink should be applied directly onto the floor with a spatula and rolled out using a print roller. We have supplied a circular stencil and ink for the ink bed, four carved skateboard wheels (which the skateboarder will have to mount onto his board in any formation) and an indemnity contract (in the form of a wearable T-shirt) which the skateboarder will have to sign with white ink and wear during each performance to clear Performprint and FAC of an liability. The T-shirt becomes the property of the skateboarder.
A skateboarder will ride through the circular bed of ink repeatedly for 10-20 minutes generally keeping within the square area creating the work. When the ink has sufficiently spread across the square the performance is finished and the print vestige is left.
