Round Table 2 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.
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 and Azza Zein.
Please scroll down for images and artist information, in alphabetical order, and return to this page for continuing updates:
Sharon Billinge is a Sydney based artist with a predominately painting based practice concerned with people and relationships. In the past 2 years Sharon has worked with communities or groups through ideas 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.
Image: Sharon Billinge, Mary, 2017. Photo by Sharon Billinge
Belle Blau is a Sydney based artist, currently completing a MFA titled 'A Feminist Expansion of Reductive Abstraction'. Her work explores the history of hierarchical logic within philosophical and 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.
Image: Belle Blau, (L) Skin on Skin, 2018, acrylic on canvas on wood, 44.5 x 16 cm (each). (M) Skin on Skin (Merge), 2018, acrylic on canvas, 41 x 31 cm. (R) Single Source, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 46 x 36 cm
Carolyn Craig is an interdisciplinary artist examining relational economies of power, in particular how they enact privilege. Her current research harvests the residue or 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, Sydney. She holds a PHD from the Queensland College of Art.
Image: Carolyn Craig, Bacterial Nervosa,2019, Petrie dishes, acidopholous bacteria, sound loops of swearing, headphones, MP3 players, shelves
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. Day is currently working as a curator at the Boom Gate Gallery, Long Bay, Sydney, and some of her projects have involved marginal communities such as Myco Logic at Parramatta.
Image: Elizabeth Day, Porous/Transgenerational Trauma, 2018, 5.1 X 2.1 m varied re-cycled white yarns knitted on felt backing
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.
Image: Favour Economy visit website here
Zoe Freney is a South Australian artist who seeks to identify and create alternative images of the mother that challenge the narrow constructs of mothers and motherhood in western, patriarchal, neo liberal 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.
Image: Zoe Freney, Gentle Hum, 2018, oil on canvas, 76 x 92 cm. Photo by Grant Hancock
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 and history and is influenced by the Holocaust and the affect it has had on her family and others.
Image: Sylvia Griffin, I Just Couldn't Keep Him Safe
Rachael Haynes is an artist and academic 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).
Image: Rachael Haynes, Protest Scores (Affirmative Action), 2018-19, pencil and ink on watercolour paper, each 50x40cm
Jennifer Kent is a sessional academic in environmental management, environmental communication and sustainability at UTS, UNSW and Boston University Sydney with a background in community education. Her research interests span the areas of sustainability transitions, grassroots social innovations and deliberative democracy. In particular she is interested in understanding how grassroots collective voluntary action that addresses the wicked challenge of climate change and continued fossil fuel extraction can contribute to better climate change governance. She completed her transdisciplinary PhD in Sustainable Futures at UTS in 2012. Her research focused 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.
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 that 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.
Image: Benison Kilby (Curator), Bodies of Work installation view, Bus Projects, Melbourne, 8th May - 1st June 2019
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 other through caregiving. Knezevic's work and practice also analyse 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.
Image: Creation of a Carer, digital photo, 2016 by Danica Knezevic
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.
Image: Rox de Luca, Green bundle, Loop Bar, Art + Climate = Change, 2019, found plastics, wire, photo credit: Martina Capuso
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.
Jasmin Stephens, The essayist opening, The Cross Art Projects, Sydney, 3 August 2019, pictured Ida Lawrence, Idris, 2018, photo Alex Mitchell
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.
Image: Sera Waters, Falling: Line by Line, 2018, vinyl wallpaper, woollen long-stitches 2x7m. Photograph by Rob - Acorn Photo (WA)
Linda Wilken is a Sydney based artist currently undertaking an interdisciplinary PhD in Criminology, Art and Law, University of Sydney. Her research investigates a concern that political motivation enacted changes to legislation that facilitate prosecution of Australian contemporary artists in relation to images of children. She cares that artists, whom are creators of visual culture, are soft targets to law enforcement within the criminal justice system.
Image: Linda Wilken. Child pornography 2008 legislated defence
Azza Zein was born to a Syrian mother and a Lebanese father, grew up in Beirut and is currently based in Melbourne. Her art practice examines parallels between museums, digital archives and 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, wood carving, her recent work counters abstraction, standardization and the invisibility of domestic labour.
Azza Zein, Taskscape, Mixed Media, Shell inlay, cowrie shells, textile, silk thread, oil painting, pine wood, soil, hibiscus, gold acrylic, dryer’s lint, Photo Credit: Matthew Stanton.2019