Elizabeth Rankin: Artist Statement & Bio

Rankin’s abiding concern as an artist has been investigating uncanny true crime tales that emerge from Australian society. Her interest in such stories comes from an awareness of the disjunction between personal and official histories. As a child her life was influenced by her father’s post-traumatic reaction to his service in World War Two. His enactment of “his stories” bore little resemblance to official commemorations. The memories her father recalled were in the present rather than the past. In such narratives, time collapsed and the past was not the past. Due to her father’s dark stories, her work has focused on the abject and the uncanny. Rankin perceives her drawings to be a sort of visual prose through which she describes Australian criminal mysteries. Broadly speaking, Rankin’s work fits the genre of noir.

Elizabeth Rankin is a Sydney based painter, drawer and animator. She is a 2018 doctoral candidate at the National Art School, Sydney. She has exhibited both in artist run spaces and in commercial galleries (Robin Gibson and Dominik Mersch) and last year completed a residency at the BigCI in Bilpin. Her work has been recognised in drawing and painting prizes including the Mosman Art Prize, NSW The Parliament En Plein Air, NSW and the Marie Ellis Drawing Prize, QLD. She has worked as an intern at the National Art School drawing department in both research drawing and animation. She has had several solo exhibitions including Show, Tell 2018 at 220 Creative Space Gallery, Woolloomooloo, Sydney and Did you kiss the dead body? 2017 at ES74 in Alexandria, Sydney which showcased her Master of Fine Art by Research project which she completed at the National Art School, Sydney.

Margarita Sampson: Artist Statement & Bio

Human life to me has always been part of a rich and interconnected world, rising and falling, living and dying, interdependent: the mouth of a flower is also my mouth, the surface of a prickly pear is like testicles and soft anemone forms are like our own soft tissues. Healthy and unhealthy; reaching maturity and falling away. In my work, allusions to multiple forms are drawn but not cemented. For me, the power of the work comes from a rich soup of inferences which the viewer provides from their own experience. I say, “is this not unlike...” and you say “yes, but also...”.' The works bring up questions, invites narrative and suggests possible futures with any number of outcomes.

Margarita Sampson was raised on Norfolk Island, and the varied sea life made an indelible impression on her as a small child. As an adult, her sculpture and jewellery work draws upon this rich visual vocabulary. All works are meticulously hand-made by the artist, comprising of hand and machine sewn textiles. In Sampson's Infectious Desires series, the found furniture is sawn and altered, re-carved and gilded, before being overlaid with textile 'landscapes'.

Born in Nowra, NSW (1970), Margarita Sampson grew up on Norfolk Island, attending COFA in Sydney with a BA & M.Art in painting (1990, 92). She began textile sculptural work in response to the first Sculpture Sea (1997) & a photograph of her initial work ‘Urchins’ went become one of the defining images of the exhibition in its early days. Her following work “Fish Curtain’ received the People’s Choice in 1998. Her textile work is often inspired by her childhood summers spent moving between aquatic & terrestrial realms on Norfolk, and embraces hybrid soft forms that transition between human, animal, vegetative and mineral states. 

After some 15 years away from Australia, Sampson returned in 2011 and won the Object section of the Waterhouse Art Prize in 2012 with her work ‘Anenome Incursions: Zsa-Zsa', and subsequent works been finalists in the Wynne prize, the Blake Prize, twelve Sculpture by the Seas Exhibitions and most recently won the Hillview Indoor Sculpture Award 2018.  Her solo show ‘Infectious Desires’ at Stanley Street Gallery in 2015 received international press coverage and critical acclaim. 

Sampson’s work often takes a domestic object and imagines a paradigm of excessive growth, where the soft parts grow and overtake the host, a reflection on current environmental unbalances and possible ecosystem collapse. The work is also very personal, as the objects contain lush openings, curvaceous forms, are provocative and often feminist; meditating on the artist’s aging body within society and spiritually reflecting the artist’s Buddhist practice. She currently lives in a meditation retreat centre. 

Sampson works with commercially available textiles and found objects for her interior works, but also draws on her jewellery practice for work utilising enamel and copper, and wood and steel for large outdoor works.

Margarita Sampson: CV January, 2020

Shaun Hayes: Artist Statement & Bio

The collection of plastic objects that inform Hayes’s sculptures are evocative of certain memories and feelings, capturing these ephemeral moments in time. Hayes contemplates the nature of today’s throwaway society and through the use of seemingly unimportant, everyday objects, humorously highlights the importance of being more conscious of the enduring impact waste has on the environment. Drawing on the aesthetics of traditional Chinese ceramics combined with contemporary objects, his adorned vessels echo a blending of past and present, old and new as well as illustrating the material similarities between plastic and ceramics.

Through methods of repetition, rearranging and joining of cast objects paired with a tonal colour palette, Hayes’s sculptures are reminiscent of fantastical and comical imagery whilst also highlighting the tensions of growing up in conversation with existing in a wasteful, thoughtless consumerist society.

Shaun Hayes is a ceramic artist who investigates the relationship between throwaway objects and their ability to instil a sense of reflection on memory, creating a deeply nostalgic and sometimes humorous representation of time and place.

Hayes received a Bachelor of Arts (Visual), with Honours majoring in Ceramics from the Australian National University School of Art in 2013. He was awarded an artist residency at Strathnairn Arts in July of 2014 and is still currently producing work there. His trips to Jingdezhen China in 2011 and 2013 continues to be an influence.

Shaun is represented by Stanley Street Gallery and was selected to represent them at the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, Carriageworks Sydney in September 2018.

Most recently Shaun was selected as a finalist in the 2020/2021 Woollahara Small Sculpture prize.

Shaun Hayes: CV September, 2021