Brigitte Podrasky: Artist Statement & Bio

Brigitte follows an intuitively led practice, allowing forms to emerge organically through the process of making. Improvisation and chance are important elements of her practice as she recollects and combines emotion, memories and observations into mutating forms. Her skeletal-like ceramic pieces allude to the potential of growth through imitating the scaffolding of architectural structures whilst simultaneously referencing images of decaying ruins. Brigitte attempts to position her work through an exploration of double meanings and contradictory interpretation.

Brigitte Podrasky is an artist and designer working on Gadigal land. Working across ceramics, interactive installation and sound, Brigitte is interested in moments of transformation and mutation, when something exists in an undefinable state.

Brigitte Podrasky: CV November, 2022 Download

Claire Welch: Artist Statement & Bio

Small Dreams - Exhibition Statement

‘Dawn’ and 'watching it happen', explore the distortion of possible positive directions, which are warped by the anxiety and despair generated by negative media. Both works use monoprinting and reductive mark making techniques to create ambiguous bodily forms.

 

In our current state of uncertainty about our future we experience overwhelming apathy and despair. ‘Dawn’ explores this anxious state, an eruption of dark lines draws the eye to the strained body. The figure is entangled looking out to every horizon for hope.

 

‘watching it happen’ further explores this conflict. Presenting a chrysalis or a shroud, it emerges into life and draws away from it. The diptych exaggerates this conflict by loosely connecting the two halves, leaving a disconnect between them. The figure is caught in time between ambiguity and actuality. The open palmed hands both reaching out but still in a posture of self-protection.

Claire Welch’s printmaking practice revolves around ambiguous and tense bodily forms. Welch is an emerging artist based in Sydney, Australia. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School in 2020 majoring in printmaking. Welch has exhibited in selected group exhibitions, such as 'Rats' at 321 Project Space and 'Luxury Item' at DownUnder space. Welch received the Jocelyn Maughan Sketchbook prize in 2019 and the Bouddi Foundation of the Arts grant in 2016.

"In my practice I examine the body as being in a constant state of becoming; a progressive form. The anxiety I look to is in the slight but important dislocation between body and self. My printmaking practice focuses on this tension through ambiguous bodily forms. The technique of monoprinting is both immediate and unpredictable. This allows for unique textural lines and gestural marks in each print. The process can only produce singular prints rather than reproductions. In this way, my practice mirrors the constant state of change the body and mind undergo".

Claire Welch: CV November, 2022 Download

Neil Beedie: Artist Statement & Bio

“The world is, 

as you are”  

– my echolalia 

Neil Beedie is an emerging artist moving between painting, writing, performance and sound. With emphases on the ambient and isolated, Neil looks for the potential of the debris of history and ideology to revel and reveal in the imaginaries, convening mediations between image and guise to (en)counter and court trysts between the speculative, conflicted, the haunted, myth and the omitted.   

Neil has shown in Australia and New Zealand, most recently presenting a third solo exhibition that’s not the way out at LAILA, Sydney, and has performed in club spaces, collaborative large-scale projects, video works and the (now defunct) band Porcelain. A new series of theatrical episodes will debut under the alleged (& recurring) stage persona Nini Voss, at Day for Night, Liveworks Festival, 2022. 

Jacquie Meng: Artist Statement & Bio

My works explore exaggerated and self conceptualised self portraiture in a way that considers arranging the self, objects and landscapes in a way that is carnivalesque and grotesque.  The idea of the carnival liberates us from the constraints of everyday life, allowing for a fluid exchange of identities and roles.  This idea resonates deeply with the diasporic experience, where identity is often fragmented and multifaceted. I also consider site-specificity, and how the displacement of cultural objects impacts identity formation within diasporic communities. I believe that arts relationship to place can reshape perceptions of identity, and thus paintings not only exist as static objects but engage with the context of their display. 

A large consideration in the making of my work is ‘thing-power’, a concept that explores agency within objects, and how non-human entities can possess agency in determining meaning.  In these works the self is a clock, the eyes are pool balls, the dresser mirror is a portal to a playground, the pool table is a groomed garden with patterns of i-ching coins.  I am interested in the way that patterns travel across time and space and have spiritual meaning or idiosyncratic ones… or both. Scattered in my work are patterns from Han Dynasty tombstones, traditional fortune telling mechanisms and prints on fabric and clothing.

Jacquie Meng graduated from ANU with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (First Class Honours)/ Bachelor of Art History and Curatorship in 2022. She was awarded the Brett Whitely travelling scholarship in 2021, selected as a finalist in 2022 'the churchie' emerging art prize at the IMA, and PICA’s 'Hatched'. In 2023, she took part in residencies include Kunstraum in New York and Pilotenkueche International Art Program in Leipzig and in 2024 she was selected as the recipient of the Waverley Artist Studio residency in Bondi.

In 2023 and 2024 she represented Stanley Street Gallery at the 'Sydney Contemporary' and was also selected for the 2024 Canbera Art Biennial.  Meng also exhibited in ‘YEAR OF THE DRAGON’ at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art, ‘The Floor is Lava’ with Tiles Gallery and ‘Choose Your Fighter’ with Marvin Gardens New York.

Jacquie was awarded the 2024 Mosman Art Prize - Guy Warren Emerging Artist Award and was a finalist in the Lenn Fox painting prize.

Jacquie Meng: CV November, 2024 Download

Jemima Lucas: Artist Statement & Bio

Oyster - Unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies

Shells formed from calciums and carbonates, drifting on the ebb and flow Seized in the fine slick of their gills
Compounds hardening,
formed to protect vulnerable flesh

They rely on nothing but waste and their own sex Fucking themselves into existence
Over and over
Primitive prolificacy

Do they act in servitude to the ocean? Or in symbiosis
What purpose if not filtering specs of shit

Caught in their mucus
To then be swilled and slurped by foreign mucus where they’re digested and expelled. Faeces then pumped back into the ocean
The calcium of which is then to be feasted on

What comes of gills when petrified in aluminium? Another entity serving as support to a greater structure

It’s heart may have stopped beating when evaporated
Clad in scoria
But did it feel anything?
Do violent actions inflicted on one without a nervous system begin to be non-violent?

For surely bodies live and die; eat and sleep; feel pain, pleasure; endure illness and violence16 Will the memory of the shucking The evaporation, The petrification - Begin to register on your nervous system? Unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies .

My practice investigates productive powers between psychological and materially opposed gestures of control and release/power and agency. The material assemblages hold allegorical potential, situating the works as active conduits for the body. Through balanced expressions of perpetration and yield, antithetical forces negotiate their impact on one another.
Materials act as the primary point of departure in my practice; I would like to acknowledge the First Nations people on the lands from which I source them. The gravity of which is felt when I mix sand into a cement, mix scoria to invest, weld steel, pour latex and cast aluminium. All are mined from unceded indigenous land. I would like to pay respect to elders past, present and emerging.
tangible. 

Jemima Lucas: CV November, 2022 Download