Sydney
Round Tables
Round Table 2
This round table was held at The Cross Art Projects, Sydney, on Saturday, August 17, 2019.
Many thanks to Jo Holder and the team at The Cross Art Projects for their support with this event.
16 Artists and Researchers from four States (SA, VIC, NSW & QLD) attended and gave short presentations on their work in relation to Care, facilitated by Assoc Prof Jacqueline Millner. These 16 Artists and Researchers were:
Sharon Billinge , Belle Blau, Carolyn Craig, Elizabeth Day, Claire Field, Zoe Freney, Sylvia Griffin, Rachael Haynes, Jenny Kent, Benison Kilby, Danica Knezevic, Rox de Luca, Jasmin Stephens, Sera Waters, Linda Wilken, Azza Zein.
Sylvia Griffin
Sylvia Griffin lives and works in Sydney and holds a PhD from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.
Sylivia is a multi-discipline contemporary Artist with a practice ranging across sculpture, installation, textiles, video and photography.
Her work addresses trauma, memory, history and is influenced by the Holocaust and the affect it had on her family and others.
Sharon Billinge
Sharon Billinge is a Sydney based Artist with a painting based practice concerned with people and relationships.
In the past 2 years, Sharon has worked with communities and groups through idea sessions and workshops to produce large scale murals in public spaces.
These projects explore the importance of social bonds and human connection as a force for positive social change.
Carolyn Craig
Carolyn Craig is an interdisciplinary Artist examining relational economies of power, in particular how they enact privilege. Her current research harvests the residue and trace of bodily acts to explore transitory zones between social classes.
She is currently a Director at Frontyard Projects, Sydney and teaches at the National Art School of Sydney. She holds a PHD from the Queensland College of Art.
Belle Blau
Belle Blau is a Sydney based Artist who is currently completing a MFA titled 'A Feminist Expansion of Reductive Abstraction'. Her work explores the history of hierarchical logic within philosophical, artistic practice and exercises feminist strategies to disrupt the phallocentric authority of formalist and minimalist painting.
Her work argues for a return to love, intimacy and care as de-gendered and de-marginalised modes of functioning.
Elizabeth Day
Elizabeth Day is a Sydney based Artist who produces site specific works in response to colonial institution sites.
She completed her Doctorate, Discontinued Narratives of Migration, at University of Western Sydney in 2013 and is currently working as a curator at the Boom Gate Gallery, Long Bay, Sydney.
Some of her projects have involved marginal communities such as Myco Logic at Parramatta.
Benison Kilby
Benison Kilby is a writer and curator with an MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, London. Her research is focused on feminist and Marxist methodologies in relation to art history and curating. Recently, she has been exploring the topic of art and labour and is interested in the way that it intersects with gender, race and disability.
In May 2019, she curated an exhibition called Bodies of Work at Bus Projects in Melbourne which brought together a group of ten Australian and international artists and collectives using a range of approaches to draw attention to women’s work both inside and outside the home.
Claire Field
Claire Field is an artist, independent curator and a founding co-leader of FavourEconomy, a socially engaged participatory feminist art project developed collaboratively by Field, Alexandra Pedley and Bronwyn Treacy in 2015. Presented as an online archive of audio recordings shared by womxn* - for the benefit of other womxn* working in the arts, FavourEconomy involves the action of giving and receiving, which therefore can be understood as operating as an audio gift economy.
FavourEconomy offers a shift from the neoliberal ideal of consumption to contribution, transaction to trust and isolation to community. Hence challenging the neo-liberal ideal of valuing money over the connection we have with one another.
Zoe Freney
Zoe Freney is a South Australian Artist who seeks to identify and create alternative images of a ‘mother’, that challenges the narrow constructs of mothers and motherhood in western, patriarchal, neoliberal culture.
She uses humour to undermine the idealisation of mothers and their work, to instead make the duties of mothering seem completely ordinary and the unrealistic expectations of mothers absurd.
Rachel Haynes
Rachael Haynes is an Artist and academic who is currently based in Brisbane, Australia. Her art practice and research engages with feminist ethics, archives, care and activism through pedagogical, curatorial, participatory and installation strategies. Rachael completed a Doctor of Philosophy in Visual Arts (2009) with the support of an Australian Postgraduate Award for research at QUT, where she is now a Lecturer in Visual Arts.
Rachael was a founding member of the feminist art collective LEVEL (2010-2018) and the gallery director of Boxcopy artist-run space (2012-2018).
Linda Wilken
Linda Wilken is a Sydney based Artist who is currently undertaking an interdisciplinary PhD in Criminology, Art and Law, University of Sydney. Her research investigates the concern that political motivation enacted changes to legislation, facilitates prosecution of Australian contemporary Artists in relation to images of children. She cares and idealises that Artists who are creators of visual culture, are soft targets to law enforcement within the criminal justice system.
Linda Wilken
Linda Wilken is a Sydney based Artist who is currently undertaking an interdisciplinary PhD in Criminology, Art and Law, University of Sydney.
Her research investigates the concern that political motivation enacted changes to legislation, facilitates prosecution of Australian contemporary Artists in relation to images of children.
She cares and idealises that Artists who are creators of visual culture, are soft targets to law enforcement within the criminal justice system.
Sera Waters
Sera Waters is an Adelaide based Artist, Arts Writer and Academic.
Her embroideries and hand-crafted sculptures dwell within the gaps of Australian histories to examine settler colonial home-making patterns and practices, especially her own genealogical ghostscapes.
Azza Zein
Azza Zein was born to a Syrian mother and a Lebanese father. Zein grew up in Beirut and is currently based in Melbourne. Her art practice examines parallels between museums, digital archives and the interplay of different systems of abstraction.
She is currently pursuing an MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her practice-led research explores how gestures and material encounter can comment on the dematerialization of the economy.
Using dryer’s lint, silk, textile, shell inlay and wood carving, her recent work counters abstraction, standardization and the invisibility of domestic labour.
Jennifer Kent
Jennifer Kent is a sessional academic in environmental management, environmental communication and sustainability at UTS, UNSW, Boston University Sydney and an additional background in community education.
Her research interests expand across the areas of sustainability transitions, grassroots social innovations and deliberative democracy. In particular she is interested in the understanding of how grassroots collective voluntary action. This addresses the wicked challenge of climate change and continued fossil fuel extraction, thus contributing to a better climate change governance.
She completed her transdisciplinary PhD in Sustainable Futures at UTS in 2012. Her research focuses on how notions of responsibility for voluntary climate change action are understood and practiced at both the individual and collective level. This work formed the basis of her book, Community Action and Climate Change, published by Routledge in 2015.
Jasmin Stephens
Jasmin Stephens is an independent curator, mentor and lecturer in curatorial studies and contemporary art in Asia. She was a team member of Future Feminist Archive (2014-16).
In her curatorial PhD at UNSW Art & Design (2020-24), Jasmin is working with members of Sydney Culture Network and colleagues in Southeast Asia to research the possibilities of data sharing in local and global contexts.
Rox de Luca
Rox de Luca is a Sydney based Artist. Her works are made out of plastics that flourish on Bondi and Rose Bay beaches. The gathering and sorting process is followed by the jewellery-like threading of plastics onto wire.
The resulting mounds are reflections of our coastal environment and its relation to the greater human landscapes of waste.
Danica Knezevic
Danica Knezevic is a performance Artist working across endurance performance, video, audiovisual installation and photography. Her practice lead research investigates her autobiographical experiences through psychology, in particular, the negotiation between self and others through caregiving.
Knezevic's work and practice also analyses gender and queer theory as well as cultural identity.
She finds meaning by using her body and actions as a metaphor to bridge the gap between the self and the other.