Siying Zhou is China-born Melbourne (Naarm) based artist. Her practice is mostly identified within the visual art discipline. It draws upon her self-reflection on her Chinese heritage and her ongoing interrogation of the ontological value of the female Asian immigrant to western societies. By producing predominantly installation works, Zhou uses the permutation of multiple objects at the exhibition space, and the contrast of various media, such as video, photography, performance, drawings and text, to create a hybrid narrative and fictive space. In the production, the slippages and conflicts are deployed as the strategy to examine the notion of the Other, and to inform an alternative reality.

Zhou is the winner of the Linden Art Prize 2019 and the National Gallery of Victoria Women’s Association Award twice in 2015 and 2017. Her works have been included in many exhibition programs and shown in international and national art organisations, such as Buxton Contemporary Art (VIC), Newcastle Art Gallery (NSW), Ararat Art Gallery TAMA (VIC), C3 Contemporary Art Space (VIC), Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (NT), and Meinblau Projektraum (Germany).

siyingzhou.com

It gets more complicated to separate the day-to-day experience from radical thought.

My desire has never been to make art but to express something that I cannot recognise or understand.

I believe that all my skills, knowledge and experience of the world are transferable, I never waste any opportunity to learn something new and shift.

www.clairelambe.work

Chris Bond is an artist and character who inhabits the uncanny worlds of his own invention. His fictional scenarios require him to adopt auto-fictive, pseudonymous and collaborative authorial personae in which he attempts to shift habitual response, experience new ways of seeing and cultivate atypical expressions. Fictional artists, writers and organisations are typically invented as a support mechanism, which provide Bond with documentary material that he appropriates and recontextualises within his painting and installation practices.

Chris completed a Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts (Visual Art) at VCA in 2018, in which he considered the role of dissociation in the manipulation of subjectivity within the visual arts through the invention and play of alter identities.

www.chrisbond.com.au

Megan Evans is an interdisciplinary artist, working in video, photography, sculpture and installation. These media build on a traditional background in painting and drawing. Megan’s work is informed by social issues. It examines the nature of belonging and the impact of colonisation on identity, both self and nation. Megan began her creative life doing large political murals in the 1980’s such as the Women’s Mural and the Northcote Koori Mural. Her career has spanned several decades and practices. Over the last ten years she has exhibited both nationally and internationally, been published widely in books and journals and been awarded international residencies.

www.meganevansartist.com/acknowldegement

Established in 2007, Public Assembly is an ongoing collaboration between Lynda Roberts, Ceri Hann and a dynamic, everchanging community. Acting as playful provocateurs, this creative duo aim to stimulate conversation and disrupt our expectations of the objects, spaces and systems around us. They work towards this by devising site specific participatory workshops and installations that venture out into the public realm.

Wearable Artifactory is an ongoing self-initiated project, inspired by Lynda and Ceri’s regular weekly visits to the Camberwell Sunday Market. Found objects are re-assembled in-situ to become wearable ‘subjects’ of conversation, purchased by donation. As a social hub for a diverse cross section of the community, the market provides a regular venue and context to source materials, make and draw on complimentary social dynamics already underway within the market.

Public Assembly live and work on the unceded traditional lands of the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung peoples. Lands that have long been a place of learning, teaching and creativity.

publicassembly.com.au

This short film documents fragments of a living-practice which includes my day-to-day vocalisations with place, people and companions on my grandmother’s farm, just outside of Naarm. I am interested in the stories that inhabit our voice and its inter-dependance with the more-than-human world. I also work closely with my grandmother as she enters the twilight years of her life. She is an eco-monument and a place of personal and political praxis.

I work undisciplined with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and labours: an embodied practice that I call voice in the expanded field. Within this field are many projects including designing a speculative multi-species hospice for dying-better-together with a group of interdisciplinary thinkers and makers. Collaborating with animal companions, family, regional communities, and peers, I explore the more-than (the potential for alternate flows of movement) through feeling-kindness-warmth as thinking-instrumental and interrogate market value identities/socio-economical implications on the commoning of Life and cultural production.

tinastefanou.com

Chelle Destefano is a Deaf multi-disciplinary artist working with performance art, sculpture, textile, poetry and Auslan poetry, drawing and painting, often combing some or many of these disciplines into one work. For example, some of her Auslan poetry performance artworks utilise textiles, which are later sewn with poetry words and hung to allow a performance recording to be projected onto it.

Chelle’s works are currently focused on informing of her Deaf history and Deaf experiences to educate people on Deaf culture and Deaf history and to give them a real Deaf experience.

Chelle has had many solo and group exhibitions between 2012 and 2021, shown in Melbourne, Adelaide and between 2015 and 2017 abroad in Venice, Paris, Berlin and Rome. She was selected as a finalist for many art awards from 2019 to now. She has been included in the Banyule Art Award for works on paper, Lyn McCrea Drawing Prize, Noel Counihan Art Award, Incinerator Art Award, Fishers Ghost Award, Lake Art Award (which she won in December 2020), and the Footscray Art Prize in 2021.

chelledestefano.com

Through a sensitive engagement with the intelligibility of matter, Narelle creates porous and provisional assemblies of ceramic material. Embracing experimental strategies and material poetics, her work proposes an ethic of empathy and recognition, through the organic and animistic qualities of her porous, lively things.

Narelle holds a BA, MA and BFA – having studied in Australia, The Netherlands and the United States. In the European winter of 2020, Narelle undertook an intensive residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre in Oisterwijk as a beneficiary of a Ian Potter Cultural Trust grant. She is presently studying at the Victorian College of the Arts.

narellewhite.com