Yixuan Geng: Artist Statement & Bio

Yixuan Geng's brooches are inspired by traditional Chinese painting. Not only do they show the oriental beauty, but also the philosophy of a positive attitude to life. The designer wanted to express a sense of joy through this work, and the work is also representation of the designer's life philosophy: to be simple and be happy.

Yixuan Geng is a contemporary jewellery designer who is passionate about jewellery making and conceptual innovation designs solutions of jewellery.

Yixuan Geng: CV December, 2019 Download

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 using 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 ceramic vessels 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.

Interested in the feelings and memory these throwaway objects evoke, Hayes comically uses trash to build vessels of Western cultural heritage. Our garbage becoming a biographic assemblage of certain value systems. The unimportant plastic bottle, the takeaway container and toothpaste ironically put on a pedestal, vitrified, forever set in stone. Almost sarcastically, the works are critiques of how material value is manufactured. But in the environment, it does not matter, material hierarchy does not exist, and both refuse to break down and return to the earth.

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 is currently living and producing work in Ngario Country, (Captains Flat) NSW Australia.

Career highlights - Winner of the 2024 Muswellbrook Art prize (ceramics), 2023 - invited to exhibit in 'Temperature' an international ceramic art exchange exhibition in Jingdezhen China as part of the Taoxichuan Autumn Art Fair. 2022 finalist in the Waverley Small Sculpture Prize.  Represented Stanley Street Gallery at the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, Carriageworks Sydney in September 2018 and 2023 as well as the 2023 Melbourne Design Fair. His trips to Jingdezhen China in 2011, 2013 and 2023.

Shaun Hayes: CV August, 2024 Download

Jackson Farley: Artist Statement & Bio

This new body of work is exploring our collective self through the lens of the artist's very selfish self! The works are a hyper-yuck renaissance resurgence that see accepted forms fragmented, repurposed, collaged, put back together and then broken once more. Thank god for the power of AI to give the artist some abs where needed! Jackson becomes his own muse in these works while cautiously navigating the AI landscape. Intentionally celebrating its most advanced and rudimentary aspects to create arresting imagery that references the place from which we have all come, while pondering as to what might come next. Each work acts as a snapshot into a neo-non-narrative of self; a minor moment in time of our impending collective self-work journey. Like when you want to stop nurturing your 'little me' you decide to kill it instead (with a light saber), indeed the little dance between our inner and outer 'me' that is constantly in flux. Ultimately the works aim to bring voice to the little feelings that we all face, but forget to talk about. Because literally, the only person who cares about your self-work journey is you! And your therapist (because you pay them to care).

Jackson Farley is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on unceded Gadigal land. His practice intertwines narrative and humour to point out the absurdities and pointlessness of fine art definitions and power structures. Using digital media, biro pens and ‘self-care’ pencils, Farley’s work is as sentimental as it is a parody, pondering naïvely on categories of art, material, and painting process.

Jackson completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with First Class Honours at the Sydney College of the Arts in 2017 and was awarded the University Awards for Drawing and Printmedia. He has also studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, USA and was awarded the China Cultural Centre residency in Chengdu, China in 2017.   

Jackson's work was recently exhibited in Indonesia and he will be exhibiting at the '24 Sydney Contemporary. Career highlights - selected as a finalist in the 2021 Dobell Drawing Prize #22; the recipient of the City of Sydney creative live/work tenancy program.  In 2019 - finalist in the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Travel Scholarship Exhibition; 2018 he was selected for the Blake Prize, a finalist in The Churchie National Emerging Art Prize in Queensland and a finalist in Hatched at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, WA.

Jackson Farley: CV August, 2024 Download