Keemon Williams (b.1999) is a queer Meanjin (Brisbane) based artist of Koa, Kuku Yalanji and Meriam Mir descent. He utilizes an array of mediums old and new to expand his relationships with location, personal histories and cultural plasticity. Through practice he forges belonging within all parts of the self.
Kim Ah Sam
Kim Ah Sam’s weaving practice embodies storytelling and knowledge-sharing and is tied to the renewal and reconnection with her Kalkadoon father’s country and culture. Kim explores weaving as a therapeutic practice towards a process of cultural healing and a way to address feelings of disconnection and reconnection with her Country.
Jack Wilkie-Jans
Jack Wilkie-Jans (Jack Jans) is an emerging multi-disciplinary artist, respected arts writer and worker, and Aboriginal affairs advocate from Mapoon, the Western Cape of Cape York Peninsula, Tropical North Queensland. Artistically, Jack practices contemporary and abstract forms of painting and still and moving image portraiture, soundscape and poetry.
With fifteen years of expertise across economic development and contemporary Indigenous visual arts sector, Jack specialises in arts writing and policy review; project scoping and delivery; governance and operational best, Cultural practice.
Jack is of mixed heritage, being Waanyi, Teppathiggi and Tjungundji; British, Danish and Vanuatuan.
Geoffrey Schmidt
After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Fine Art from the Queensland College of Art in Brisbane, 1987, my practice in Performance Art continued for a decade.
I exhibited work in Artist run spaces and Government funded Galleries
throughout Australia. My art practice then developed into a more 2D approach, mostly painting. Battling persistent Depression, Anxiety and then a series of 4 quite debilitating Heart Attacks I began to exhibit work periodically. However, I continued to produce large amounts of work, which in most cases were destroyed or given away, embracing the
ideas of the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence and emptiness. My focus was on the need to create where the process was the important aspect, not the product.
My work has developed from painting to digital drawing. The themes of my work have been constant, related to the human condition and how we fit or don’t fit into our own personal psychology. The issues of mental and physical illness have informed the work with reflections on the impermanence of life through Buddhist practice and the understanding of how the mind processes.
– Geoffrey Schmidt
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
- 2023, MANdala, NorthSite Contemporary Arts, Cairns
- 2023, Autonoetic, Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts, Townsville
- 2022, Mind Wires, Mission Arts, Mission Beach
- 2015, Pictures of Nothing, Canopy Arts, Cairns
- 1995, Fetish, ISN’T Gallery, Brisbane
- 1987, White Noise God, John Mills National Gallery, Brisbane
John Pagnozzi
John Pagnozzi (1985) is an artist working with drawing and writing. John approaches drawing as a haptic experience influenced by immediacy, mood and poetry. His work explores spontaneity as a method for the practice of object making, foregrounding intuition over notions of efficiency and rationalism. Using a material led approach the work functions to deal with the disembodied nature of experience and information exchange, finding meaning in associations amongst everyday materials; crayon, sand, spray paint, house paint, textile. Underlying the work is an interest in the space of communication, the possibilities that arise from ambiguous pictorial spaces and the effects these have for the making of personal and collective meaning.
Art projects include:
- ‘Shift’ for Next Wave Festival and Bus Projects
- ‘600ML’ for South Australia’s Integrated Design Commission.
Written works include
- poem ‘Thinking.2’ for Cordite Poetry Review
- ‘A large mountain landscape’ for UN Magazine issue 8.1
- Curatorial project ‘01-01’ comprising responses from eight Australian poets for UN Magazine issue 8.2.
Sandra Selig
Sandra Selig was born in Sydney in 1972 and currently lives and works in Brisbane. Her poetic practice observes the cause and effect of natural phenomena such as wind, sound, light, and movement. Working with existing materials, forces and spaces, Selig produces large scale intricate installations and delicate works on paper, often through simple adaptation, subtraction, or ephemeral intervention.
In 2022, Exploring Giant Molecules, the first survey of Selig’s work was held at the University of Sunshine Coast Art Gallery, Queensland before traveling to UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Other notable exhibitions include The Kaleidoscopic Turn, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Contemporary Australia: Women, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; and Sonic Spheres, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Melbourne. Selig’s work is held in major national collections including MONA, Hobart; The Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Monash University, Melbourne; The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; The Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; University Art Museum, University of Queensland, Brisbane; and Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane.
Image credit: Sandra Selig, 2022, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland. Photo: Josef Ruckli.
Daniela Vavrova
Dr Daniela Vavrova is a creative visual anthropologist based in Cairns, Far North Queensland.
Daniela is currently a part-time curator at the Cairns Museum, casual research officer at CQU (Central Queensland University), an adjunct research fellow at JCU (James Cook University) and the director of The AV Lab and ALTAR at The Cairns Institute. Along with her interest in different cultures, she explores the relationship between anthropology and visual communication, between written accounts, photography and ethnographic filmmaking. Since 2005 her field site is situated in Papua New Guinea exploring how people shape and are shaped by their social and cultural environment through their sensory experiences.
Emma Gardner
Emma Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist based in Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia. Gardner reworks salvaged, silk and organic textiles, and experiments with the laborious and process-driven techniques of cyanotype, trace-monotype and embroidery. The female nude appears figuratively and performatively in her work as she explores the layered meanings within self-portraiture. Her work is grounded in Contemporary Occultism which emphasises the human connection to natural cycles and rhythms.
Gardner graduated from Queensland College of Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2016. Her first solo exhibition, Wildish, toured from Redland Gallery, QLD (2020) to Lismore Regional Gallery, NSW (2021). She has since exhibited, Fictionalish, at Logan Regional Gallery (2023) and participated in multiple collaborative and group exhibitions, including the wonderfully large-scale immersive painting of RMXTV + BAD (Brisbane Art Design) at the Museum of Brisbane, QLD (2021), a satellite event for the Asia Pacific Architecture Festival, Architecture Media at the State Library of Queensland, QLD (2020), and Contemporary work for the screen at D-Lux, Sydney, NSW (2018). Gardner is grateful for a Queensland Art Showcase Program grant, which facilitated key opportunities in her practice, including international travel. She has pursued practice-led research through England, India, Spain, and South Africa; and received further funding from the Sydney Myer Foundation, the Queensland Arts Showcase Program (QASP) and the Australian Government.
Julie McEnerny
After studying at Julian Ashton Art School in the 1980s, Julie developed a career in art and commercial illustration, that has spanned thirty years.
In 2009, after turning her practice toward botanical drawing, she commenced the first of five annual residencies and exhibitions with Cairns Botanic Gardens and Tanks Arts Centre. On completion of the fifth residency, a retrospective of the solo exhibitions was toured nationally by the Tanks Arts Centre in partnership with Cairns Botanic Gardens, supported by Australia Council for the Arts.
Julie lives in Cairns, North Queensland where she continues to explore the botanical realm through her work – from colourful exotics to Australian natives of the Wet Tropics region.
Regi Cherini
Born and raised in Sydney, Regi Cherini has chosen to spend most of her adult life living in regional and remote northern Australia, including the Northern Territory, the Kimberley region of Western Australia and most recently Far North Queensland. Remote living comes with many challenges and blessings and has afforded her perspectives and insights into various unconventional characters and lifestyles.
Now in her late-thirties, Cherini’s current series of works explores the shared experiences of women within the frame of societal pressure, expectation and gender inequality. Inspired by the contemporary needlecraft movement, Cherini utilises the medium of embroidery to depict still-life compositions. She revels in subverting the traditional domestic medium of embroidery to express seemingly incompatible subject matter.
In recent history, needlework has been a marker of femininity in its various iterations, a domestic ‘craft ‘constrained by utilitarian or decorative intent. Cherini is interested in challenging and undermining notions of imposed boundaries and hierarchies of creativity, raising embroidery out of the realm of craft and into that of fine art. Approached with a post-modern sensibility, referencing and yet rejecting a traditional context, Cherini demonstrates that embroidery can be an unconventional and subversive medium for examining and challenging issues of gender, equality, class and culture.
Words courtesy of the artist.