home, a Studio A group show at Retort House, Sub Base Platypus, North Sydney
home: |hom| n.
1. the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.
2. an institution for people needing professional care or supervision.
Home is a concept familiar and relevant to all but a reality experienced diversely. Moving out of home is a milestone moment in anyone’s life. Living independently with an intellectual disability involves added challenges and hence is particularly significant. The potency of this subject inspired home.
This year (October 18 – November 2), in the centuries old Retort House at Sub Base Platypus, North Sydney, ten Studio A artists contemplated ideas of ‘dream home’. Utilising mediums spanning animation, augmented reality, textiles, painting and sculpture, Studio A artists Victoria Atkinson, Thom Roberts, Katrina Brennan, Meagan Pelham, Guy Fredericks, Daniel Kim, Phil Sidney, Mathew Calandra, Annette Galstaun and Emily Crockford, showed that home is not physical but rather in our relationships – in our dream loves, family members, pets, loved ones and city circle lines.
home offered an opportunity to literally step inside an artwork, to be immersed: to be showered by the lights and sparkles of Emily Crockford’s Disco Dream House; to be drawn into Thom Roberts’ animated alternate universe, City Circle Line; and to ourselves animate Meagan Pelham’s giant bride and groom marionettes, to see them wave as if king and queen of the land.
home also welcomed students from Western Sydney for workshops. Under the tutelage of Studio A artists the students made small paper houses and contributed love poems to Meagan Pelham’s growing collection. Of the workshop one student said: “it lifted the veil between those who seem regular and irregular; we united in the dreams we portrayed in our artworks”.
home was created with support from the Australia Council for the Arts, Create NSW, the Big Anxiety Festival and our official partner, Harbour Trust.
Thom Roberts Residency at Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Cesena, Italy
In September this year Thom Roberts and Emma Johnston (Principal Artist, Studio A) travelled to Cesena, Italy to undertake a residency at the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, an established and renowned experiential theatre company. There, for ten days, Thom worked with Chiara Guidi (Director of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio), Teodora Castalucci (performer at Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio), Scott Wright (Artistic Director, Erth Visual and Physical Theatre) and selected creatives, to explore new modes of performance art, including dance, light and shadow, set and costume design, film and virtual reality. The residency culminated in a theatrical night time performance experiment in a nineteenth century outdoor theatre at Giardino Pubblico, Cesena.
During the course of the residency, a particularly strong creative connection emerged between Thom and Teodora, and seeds have been sown for a new collaborative work to developed in 2020.
Thom and Emma also visited the 2019 Venice Biennale: ‘May You Live In Interesting Times’ curated by Ralph Rugoff. Thom was particularly struck by the works of Nabuqi and Lorenzo Quinn.
Thom Roberts’ residency at Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio was generously supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
Photographs by Emma Johnston
Studio A at Sydney Contemporary 2019
For the fourth consecutive year – from September 12 to 15, 2019 – Studio A participated in Sydney Contemporary, Australasia's premier contemporary art fair, showcasing the region's largest and most diverse gathering of local and international galleries.
We were honoured to again be invited to exhibit in Paper Contemporary, a curated section featuring works on paper from leading galleries, print makers and art publishers in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
Studio A showcased a suite of artists including Emily Crockford, Catherine McGuiness, Lauren Kerjan, Meagan Pelham, Skye Saxon, Kristel Saxon, Thom Roberts, Greg Sindel, Phil Sidney and Guy Fredericks. Works ranged from drawings and paintings, to graphic novels and small sculptures. Guy Frederick’s premiered his new major paper and digital art installation Big Home for Beagles, which later featured in Studio A’s landmark exhibition, home, at Sub Base Platypus, North Sydney.
Studio A’s booth was a bustling hub of interested audiences, friends and fellow makers, and most importantly our artists’ works flew out the door!
Photographs by Jasmine Tate.
Skye Saxon’s Oddysee at Cement Fondu
On August 3, at Cement Fondu's project space, Skye Saxon unveiled Oddysee - the manifestation of a yearlong project working with artist Katy B Plummer.
Oddysee is a circus-tent, multimedia installation created and inhabited by ‘Skye Fox’ – Saxon’s spunky alter ego – and her band of skilful characters: ‘Hank Octomon’, ‘Babaluey’, ‘Fauramondo’ (the DJ Catfish), ‘Sugar Mama’ and ‘Katerina the Steampunk Ringmaster’, to name but a few.
Each character was lovingly willed into soft-sculpture-existence by Saxon and Plummer – reams of calico were stuffed, painted and sewn with coloured thread, and hand-dyed wool was glued to make the caboose of ‘Gutsman’, the hairy orangutan-gorilla. Each character inhabited the space with videos of Skye recounting their many adventures together.
Skye is a performance artist who draws on memories and dreams to create mystic characters and magical stories. Oddysee is the fullest expression of her vision to date.
Skye would like to thank Katy B Plummer, Kuba Dorabialski and Cement Fondu for helping to make Oddysee a reality.
A review of the exhibition, by artist and researcher Chloe Watfern, can be found here here.
Photographs by Emily White and Enzo Amato.
Crows Nesting & Peacock Wallaby - two exhibitions at Peacock Gallery, Auburn
Migrating birds frequently visit Auburn’s Botanic Gardens. In 2019 a flock of artists joined the migration.
From June to August 2019, seven Studio A artists – Katrina Brennan, Emily Crockford, Guy Fredericks, Lauren Kerjan, Daniel Kim, Catherine McGuiness and Damian Showyin – were the official artists-in-residence at Auburn Arts Studio, Peacock Gallery. There they took inspiration from the surrounding botanic gardens – spectacular, and replete with orange blossoms, parrots, peacocks and wallabies – to develop new work for exhibition. The resulting show, titled Crows Nesting, saw Lauren Kerjan exhibit Magical Birds, Damian Showyin a Peacock Person and Catherine McGuiness a series of garden-inspired characters: ‘cockadoos’, ‘sunbaking kangaroos’, ‘a little mermaid swimming in a pool’.
Inspired by the magic that can happen when diverse minds and hands meet, Studio A developed a second exhibition for Peacock Gallery, this one a collaboration with the Markers Circle (a collective of local artists and craftspeople), students from Auburn West Primary School and members of the broader community. Together they created an installation featuring a mythical, half-peacock half-wallaby, creature – the ‘Peacock Wallaby’. Studio A’s Guy Fredericks made the body of the creature and members of the local community contributed lovingly crafted feathers to make the cloak.
The two exhibitions ran from 10 August to 9 September 2019. An afternoon tea opening was held on August 10, with food from a local social enterprise. Over the course of the afternoon our communities came together to converse and share in the magic of the mystical Peacock Wallaby.
Click here for a short film on the project.
Thom Roberts Counts Trains - The National: New Australia Art 2019, Carriageworks
Thom Roberts identifies as a Studio A artist and a Countrylink Express train. Thom identifies himself and all those in his social network as a train type. He sees trains as people and people as trains. Accordingly, for The National Thom produced a series of 16 paintings depicting eight personalities, painted in both forms as person and train. The 'train-people' are friends, fellow artists and personalities that have left an impression on Thom. These paintings were captured and enlarged to looming proportions. The work now hangs strikingly from a repurposed truss at the entry to Carriageworks, 'a bedroom for trains' as Thom would say. As a train devotee this is particularly fitting.
The National 2019: New Australian Art is a celebration of contemporary Australian art. The second of three biennial survey exhibitions, it showcases work being made across the country by artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. Through ambitious new and commissioned projects, the 70 artists featured across three venues respond to the times in which they live, presenting observations that are provocative, political and poetic.
The National 2019 runs across Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art and Art Gallery of NSW until June 23.
Photographs by Karla Hansen and Mitchell Bingemann.
Lisa Scott, One Night Only at the Australian Design Centre
On March 18 at the Australian Design Centre Lisa Scott presented an intimate showing of her very personal work. A delicate textile and text based dress inspired by the artists' lifetime of journal writing. Encompassing Lisa's vulnerability and courage, the work juxtaposes her fairytale dreams with the often unsettling reality of lived experience.
Lisa’s mentor, artist Stella Rose McDonald, shared these words on the evening;
“Lisa congratulations on your night tonight. Your Dress, inscribed with the words from your ongoing journals, is beautiful. Thank you for sharing your life with us. It is an important act and one that many artists cannot do as fluidly and beautifully as you do.
Lisa writes as a daily practice. She writes about her life, her friends and family, about the many special occasions she shares with them and the many physical and emotional struggles she is faced with. Lisa’s writing is diaristic - detailing the minute details of her everyday. In working briefly with Lisa two years ago to re-imagine her writing and guide her to consider various new formal directions for her writing, I found myself appear suddenly on the pages as I entered Lisa’s life, and many of you who are here tonight will find yourselves there too.
Lisa writes breathlessly, with little concern for the tug a war between now and then, past, present or future. In Lisa’s telling of it, life overlaps in messy and important ways. Something happy can immediately follow something sad. Hope can stand next to disappointment. Life can be dark and beautiful. This is something we can all understand. Lisa writes with great compassion and hope, she writes in order to, in her own words, make people understand what life is like for people living with a disability; how much harder they have to work and live and be understood.
This is important work. Lisa does this work everyday through art making, through writing, through talking and thinking with others in her community. There is an emotional logic to Lisa’s work which traces lines of inheritance between Lisa’s past, her present and her future.
This exhibition traces the difference between private thought and public action, between the weight of experience and the joy and power of living and dreaming. Thank you Lisa and congratulations.”
Photographs by Georgia Quinn and Meagan Pelham.
