Jill Chism sees herself as a custodian of the natural environment. She recognizes the significance of place and our connections as individuals to both our local environment and the larger cosmos.
With academic qualifications in art and theology, Jill’s understanding of reality has evolved to become more aligned with non-dual spiritual traditions and perspectives. Along with personal experience her wider perception has led to an appreciation for the great mystery of life, the preciousness of the present moment and the understanding that we are just a small expression of a greater consciousness.
Her perceptions and experiences inform her artwork, evoking the liminal zones where questions are asked, objects appear and disappear, edges blur between realities, always inviting reflection on who we are and our purpose.
As a prolific North Queensland artist with an extensive CV, Jill has worked between various art forms including environmental art, installation, sculpture, digital art and public art. Her work spans diverse materials and processes, in response to the artwork or project at hand.
Currently Jill is the curator and instigator of an Environmental Art Festival, Call of the Running Tide, for the Douglas Shire in which she lives.
Rose Rigley
Growing up north of Brisbane (Bribie Island), Rose Rigley utilises a broad range of media, including artist books, sculptural assemblage, drawing and installation.
This Cairns-based artist draws on firsthand experiences as she wrestles with ideas around loss, memory, and the untranslatable space between words. Her work often uses repetitive processes in a liminal exchange of unuttered questions, silent pauses, and the quiet physicality of making. For Rose, the act of producing can provide deeper understandings of absence in the fullness of what is created and insights into the state of being both “with” and “without”.
Valuing connection and collaboration, Rose is part of the TAFE Queensland visual art teaching team at the same campus (Cairns) where her own creative meanderings first started.
Barbara Dover
Barbara Dover is a Cairns-based contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary art practice primarily deliberates on our relationship with animals within the understanding of animals as sentient beings. She engages a range of materials, methods and processes including assemblage, sculpture, photography, video and drawing to wrestle with the familiarities and intricacies of human-animal relations at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics and animal advocacy.
She is among an increasing number of contemporary artists who are seriously interrogating and discarding the established hierarchies in the portrayal of animals in visual art.
Robyn Glade-Wright
Robyn Glade-Wright is a practicing artist and arts educator who seeks to create a sense of disquiet in her works of art to engender reflection about the kind of life (and death) we impose on sentient creatures. Glade- Wright’s works of art respond to the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene in a form that conflates beauty and dread, and allure and anxiety to provoke contemplation of these terms in an effort to foster a sustainable future for life on this small planet. Glade-Wright is an Associate Professor, within the College of Arts, Society & Education at James Cook University Cairns. She has presented over 40 solo exhibitions in public and private galleries.
Rhonda Woolla
Rhonda Woolla is a proud Wik woman of the Putch Clan, Aurukun, who learnt the art of weaving and making feather flowers from her mother and grandmothers, the old girls in the community. She started weaving at a young age and sources and prepares all her own natural materials.
“My Kaath (mother) is my inspiration in everything I do. She was not just my mum, but my teacher, my biggest inspiration and greatest influence on all the knowledge I have gained. I believe that her spiritual presence guides and motivates me now in each weaving I create. She was well-known at home and across Australia for her leadership, in the Wik vs Queensland case and serving our community as the first female Mayor of Aurukun, in the 1980s, and 1990s.
When I make my weavings there is a strong feeling, and I am connected with my Kaath and Kemwayyow (grannies) and my culture and Country. When I was a little girl, I remember being around my Elders. Their presence created a warm and loving atmosphere. They always taught cultural knowledge, passing it down from generation to generation.”
Peter B Morrison
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE 2018 – 2020
Peter Bertie Morrison was born on Thursday Island and grew up in Cairns. After he finished school, like many Torres Strait Islanders at the time, he moved to Western Australia to work for many years, before he returned to his family’s place Wug Village, Saint Paul’s Community on Moa Island in the Western Island Cluster.
“This is where I learnt our traditional customs, on the island. My mother is from Darnley Island and her tribal group is Zagareb, which is on Murray Island. My father is from Mabuiag Island, he worked as a Skipper and Pearl Diver on the lugger boats around many Islands.
Family is important to me. I am very passionate about learning and teaching and I hope my images will inspire and help others appreciate the beauty and significance of our natural environment.”
Morrison commenced studying at TAFE in 2010 and has completed Certificates and a Diploma in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Arts. He works across drawing, etching and fabric design.
He completed technical and business training through KickArts/ NorthSite Contemporary Arts in 2018 and has been an Artist in Residence since, completing over fifty unique drawings of marine and plant life of the Torres Strait.
Jane Heraghty
Jane Heraghty, is a contemporary artist who works across disciplines including collage, watercolour drawing, printmaking and sculpture. Living in Cairns her work is affected by the fecundity of the tropical environment, the work is unruly, messy and bursting with movement, colour and acts of creation.
Her practice observes our ordered and regimented social and economic system and asks where is the room for madness and visionary myth, for magic and shamanism. She draws a circle in the sand and say here is my magic space.
Jane Heraghty is currently teaching in Far North Queensland, her teaching and art making practices are equally important and she finds the balance sustaining.
Shannon Brett
Shannon Brett is a descendant of the Wakka Wakka, Butchulla and Gurang Gurang peoples of southern Queensland. Brett is an interdisciplinary artist who creates and designs artworks indicative of their experiences as an Aboriginal person living and surviving in modern, urban Australian society.
Technically trained in fashion design, graphic & web design, music production, animation, theatre and film, Brett also holds a Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art; Fine Art & Photography via the Queensland College of Art – Griffith University.
Brett also works extensively as an independent art curator, writer, trainer and arts manager, motivated by art that operates at the juncture of cultural politics and visual practice. Additionally, Brett maintains their position on the Editorial Board for Garland Magazine and the Board for Brisbane’s longest running ARI; Boxcopy.
Billy Missi
Billy Missi was born on Mabuiag Island in 1970. Informed by a childhood engaged with story-telling, song and dance traditions of the Wagedagam Tribe, Missi’s inherited creativity combined with his passion and experience growing up with the living customary practices prepared him for his journey into art. He felt the impulse to create when he first encountered the works of contemporary Torres Strait Islander artists in 1992, but it was not until 1999 that he felt ready to devote himself to his artistic pursuits full-time. With only minimal initial formal training on Moa Island, under the tutelage of Dennis Nona, he rapidly worked his way to the forefront of contemporary Zenadh-Kes printmaking. Missi skilfully combined traditional carving techniques, iconography and his distinct fish-bone patterns with the Western medium of the linocut to forge a new aesthetic and print movement in the 1990s alongside his peers, an aesthetic firmly based on traditional Torres Strait Islander principles. Billy Missi gained international recognition prior to his passing in 2012.
NorthSite continues to working with the Billy Missi Estate to realise posthumous exhibitions and displays including Billy Missi’n Wakain Thamai and the Bulmba-ja Digital Facade Commission in 2020.
Tim Ellis
Tim Ellis immortalises everyday scenes of Far Northern Queensland’s small rural towns with a hyper-focused brushstroke and digital rendering tools.
His large-scale paintings affectionately capture an eccentric panorama. Working predominately across painting and film, Ellis’s experience as an art director in the UK film and television industry informs his artistic practice. Ellis has lived in the Far North, working in creative leadership roles in Port Douglas and Mossman, since emigrating to Australia in 2005. He uses a film-framed aesthetic and approach to compose his paintings and experiments with common image and video editing applications to create digital artworks.
Ellis first studied art and design at the Winchester School of Art, UK and holds a Bachelors degree (with Honours) in Fine Art from Newport Art College, Wales before attaining a Masters degree in Fine Art from Jan Van Eyck Academie, Holland. He has worked as a sessional lecturer within the Creative Industries Department at James Cook University.