Artists
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Making safe spaces in public places.
Drawing on personal rituals of place making - wandering, foraging, collecting, crafting, nurturing, befriending.
Finding public places to inhabit as art – gaining permission, learning the rules, investigating the history, hearing the stories, spending time, sensing, connecting.
Crafting in conversation with materials - forming like play, intuitive, child-like, instinctive, I wonder.
Caring for materials as kin – without hierarchy, exploring working with more than doing to materials.
Mattering is my lens for being more attentive to the world around me as I inhabit and encounter place.
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Sarah is an emerging artist making and teaching under the name Snakebird Designs.
Using “waste” and non-traditional materials in her works, she hopes to encourage resourcefulness, play and respect for the more-than-human world. Driven by curiosity and love of material exploration, Sarah did not purchased anything new for her practice in 2023. Utilizing found materials and “waste” has led her to new methods such as fibre crafts and basketry as well as ceramics. Sarah’s solo exhibition.
In Plain Sight showed at Louis Joel in 2022, where each work incorporated a material from her immediate environment (such as kitty litter, antacids and toothpaste.) Sarah was a panelist for Art That Treads Lightly at LJAC and Meet the Designers for Design Fringe 2023. She is part of the Alternative Ceramics Supply team alongside Georgia Stevenson, Claire Ellis and Amelia Black, who ran the interactive pop up shop/exhibition Bulk Buy as part of Craft Contemporary in 2023.
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Mastaneh Nazarian is a guitarist, composer and writer.
She has performed in the US, Australia and Singapore with various projects.
Her ensemble Kafka Pony explores improvisation on compositions that often feature words by poets from Iran, America and Australia as a context for expanding stylistic boundaries.
She is performing Journey of Violets in September 2023 at Smith + Gertrude with performance artist Jonathan Sinatra and visual artist Pouya Bagheri.
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Zoë Sydney (they/she/he) is a painter, maker, and all-round snartist (science artist) currently living and working in Melbourne. They love working with and around the boundaries of the body in relation to sexuality and gender, and bringing big questions about the universe into small spaces. They also have a Bachelors in physics specializing in quantum mechanics and like dressing up as a pea in their spare time.
Their work Other People (2023) was shown at Smith + Gertrude in August, 2023.
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Rory is an Australian lens-based visual artist who investigates the posthuman condition using photography, moving images and performance. His interests are focused on how photography is used as illusion and delusion, the threshold between man and animal, and how these impact the destiny of the human species.
Born in Perth, he now shares his time between Singapore and Melbourne, straddling the commercial and artistic worlds with his photographic practice.
He works in the style of “speculative fabulation”, inventing and imagining the future within an ambiguous narrative, often using Butoh dance to convey the story.
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Nicky Tsekouras
Nicky is an emerging, queer, multi-disciplinary artist with a practice that focuses on expression, late capitalism, community, and sustainability, with the essence of the human experience at its core.
They live and work on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Their practice is based on a profound quest for personal identity examination and discourse, realized through a vibrant and compelling creative channels. and the essence of the human experience.
They aim to disrupt conventional art-making practices as they seek out new ways to navigate and respond to their surroundings while prioritising sustainable and found materials.
Their work ‘Have you played today?’, a collaboration with Zeth Cameron was shown at Smith + Gertrude in September 2023.
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Zeth Cameron
Zeth Cameron’s practice follows lines of resonance through different media and research rabbit-holes, with an emphasis on the intersection of queerness and disability. Half-spoken sentences and unrefined projects are celebrated.
Cameron is an emerging installation artist interested in mixing media and moods as a form of audio-visual intervention. Their practice is grounded in their experiences with ADHD and gender non-conformity, and embraces work that is tonally ambivalent or seemingly 'incomplete' as a sort of queer disability-led praxis.
Their work ‘Have you played today?’, a collaboration with Nicky Tsekouras was shown at Smith + Gertrude in September 2023.
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Drawing inspiration from the interplay of light and shadow, visual distortions, the environment, and architectural shapes, Susanne’s paintings lintegrate geometric shapes and outlines to express an opposing structure to an underlying fluidity.
She works with diverse media from textiles to printmaking, photography, digital art, slumped glass, acrylics, and inks to create large-scale, contemporary abstracts.
Born in New Zealand, Suzanne has been dedicated full-time artist since completing her BA in Contemporary Art at Curtin University of Technology (Perth WA) in 2001 and her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) at the University of Western Australia in 2009.
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Alice Duncan
Alice is an artist and image-maker, currently residing in Naarm/Birraranga (Melbourne). Alice’s practice exposes the multifaceted, ever-changing and (most importantly) constructed nature of our personal and cultural identities. Utilising photography, ready made materials and site specific installation, Alice visualises the complexities involved in collectively living on colonised land. She creates images that layer both past and present Australian histories, using a combination of past (analogue) and present (digital) photographic techniques.
Alice completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2014. She was the winner of the acquisitive Terry Cutler Award and finalist in the Majilis Travelling Scholarship for graduate students. In 2019, Alice completed an MA in Photography at RMIT where she was awarded the Kayell Photography Prize and the Dean’s Award for Excellence. She is currently undertaking a practice-led research PhD at RMIT.
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Ciaran Begley
Ciaran Begley is a Pakeha artist who straddles the spheres of conceptual art, engineering and science. With a strongly installational practice, Begley’s work has a tendency towards found objects, architectural intervention and light.
Born in Hawaii, Begley’s family emigrated to Aotearoa in the wake of the nuclear era. Begley grew up in Wellington and completed a BFA in Christchurch in 1999. Begley has since set up galleries on the isles of New Zealand and Britain, as well as Our Neon Foe in Sydney, Australia. After completing an MFA at Sydney University in 2016, Begley has since moved to Melbourne retracing his mother's steps to settle in the same neighbourhood where she was born.