Jessica Calderwood: Artist Statement & Bio

Jessica Calderwood is a sculptor and image-maker that works with a wide range of media.  She is interested in using traditional crafts, both for their creative properties, as well as their historical references as ‘marginalized craft,’ including enamel, porcelain painting and fibers. Working through a variety of formats, including sculpture, wall work and jewelry, this recent body of work is meant to express frustrations and exaltations associated with identity as a female, as well as the nuances, and complexities of contemporary life. 

Calderwood received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and her MFA from Arizona State University, with an emphasis Metalworking. Her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally in curated and juried exhibitions. Calderwood’s large-scale sculptures and enamels were recently featured in a solo exhibition at the Racine Art Museum, titled Fictitious Flora. She has participated in artist residencies with the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Program, Ferro Corporation, and the Mesa Arts Center. Her work has also been published in Metalsmith Magazine, American Craft, NICHE, Ornament, the Lark 500 series, and the Art of Enameling. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Ball State University. 

David Collins: Artist Statement & Bio

For David Collins, painting and drawing streams from the ongoing closeness he feels with the environment. Loose and languid lines, much like the Mangrove roots that edge the Hawkesbury River surrounding the artist’s home, sprawl across the canvas in search of connection. Reaching out, they intertwine within the fold of intersections; drawing relationships between marks, colours, spaces and tones. 

In Collins’ use of line, the paint brush also acts as pencil, both utensils unified as one to be dragged across the composition in varying lengths and strengths. It is the act of tying painting and drawing together that evokes such expression, such earnest, that the familiar landscapes held dear to artist are revealed and mapped. As much as his work is about observing, it too is about feeling. We feel the vibrancy and quietening force of nature and as a result are better for it. In this way, there is also a sense of the serendipitous moment, of slowing and looking, of the inextricable relationship between the individual and the natural world - lost but perhaps not forgotten, available to you if you are available to it. 

 

David Collins is a landscape painter who has lived on an island in the Hawkesbury River, NSW, since 1987. He crosses the Hawkesbury regularly by row boat and this close contact with the river has had a deep impact on his work. 

Since 1990, David has held 16 solo exhibitions of paintings and drawings as well as participated in many group exhibitions.  David was able to further pursue a long time fascination with Chinese painting and calligraphy in 2004 when he was offered a residency and teaching position at the North West University for Minorities in Lan Zhou, China and between 2009 and 2014 he held part-time tutoring positions with TAFE NSW and Sydney Art School.

David’s most recent achievements have been –Finalist 2018, 2016 and 2015 Korea Australia Arts Foundation Art Prize; Highly Commended 2013 Wynne Prize for landscape painting from the Art Gallery of NSW; Finalist, 2016 Grace Cossington Smith Art Award; Winner, 2011 Painting Prize – Hornsby Art Prize.

David Collins: CV August, 2020 Download

Denis Clarke: Artist Statement & Bio

Painting for me is a bodily thing. It involves the relationship between one’s self and making contact with the tactile. Why tactile? Because I am touching materials and feeling out my experience of looking at a subject such as landscapes, people and buildings.

Drawing is the whole key. Not drawing for its own sake but drawing to explore ideas for connecting with the world. Finish is irrelevant. These drawings serve the purpose of the painting and illuminate my imagination to the possibilities of new compositions. I am interested in the physicality and directness of drawing which often finds its way into my works on paper as well as my paintings.

My interest is what I would call 'creating a process of informed experiment'. I allow myself to risk and play with media while aligning my senses with the observed. It is the otherness or feel of a subject which provides the impetus to experiment and find new solutions with mark.

For me, working before a subject is deeply complex and a chance to explore visual language. The test is to find graphic statements and abstractions which truthfully parallel perceptions and travel towards a resolved image. Previously Unseen explores my reactions and connection with the urban which has been an important aspect of my painting for many years. It is a reference to my wish to try and see the world anew.

Denis Clarke works across painting and drawing, exploring the relationship between himself, the bodily and the tactile. Interested in creating a process of informed experiment, his paintings extend conversations of subject, texture and paint fluidity that suspend perception and reality. His work layer playful exchanges between drawing and painting processes, finding new solutions with mark-making to explore the subject. Contextualised within the European neo-expressionist movement, Clarke’s colourful gestural works deconstruct improvisation, inviting new and playful languages of representation.  

Clarke completed post-graduate study at St Martins School of Art, London, and received the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship as well as Moya Dyring residency at the Cite International des Arts in Paris. 

Based in Sydney, he has spent periods working and studying in London and Switzerland, teaching at the Camden School of Art and the Hampstead School of Art, exhibiting at Gillian Jason Gallery, Boundary Gallery and James Colman Gallery, Knightsbridge, as well as creating set designs and costumes for the experimental Opera Factory, in Zurich and London. 

Clarke returned to Australia in 1998. 

He has held 17 solo exhibitions since 1975 and has collaborated with several premier arts organisations such as Opera Factory in London and Switzerland, Warwickshire Arts Festival in the UK, and most recently as the artist in residence at Wollombi Valley Arts Council. From 1999 - 2010 Denis was a sessional lecturer at the National Art School and tutor from 2011 ongoing. He also instructs master classes at Charles Sturt University, the University of Southern Queensland, the Mitchell School of Art and the McGregor School.  

Clarke has exhibited in numerous Art Fairs including ‘Line Art, Ghent’, The Brussels Art Fair, The 20th Century British Art Fair, Royal College of Art, and The Islington Art Fair. His work is included in private and public collections including: the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Fitzwilliam College Cambridge and Lloyds of London. 

Clarke has been represented by Stanley Street Gallery since 2014.

Denis Clarke: CV July, 2022 Download

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 Download

Nicole Taubinger: Artist Statement & Bio

To create my jewellery, I use objects of every day use, those which surround us everywhere, and are so close to us that we no longer see them. I find these and set them into a new context, so they become visible again. Objects consisting of polymers exist in beautiful colors and forms. If one observes them on a pile, tops of plastic bottles as well as many other items appear like gems, and are full of emotional tension. I try to design my jewellery in such a way that the material connects within itself, using classical jewellery working methods which I apply to the material. This material is still in an almost new state, yet has either been thrown out, or found in scrap yards, containers or recycling plants. Why not use items that already exist in a large amount, and follow their logic, instead of putting new ones into the world? Through my work, I want to primarily make something visible, and secondly, refer to how multi-facetted our society and its paradoxes are, which has become our second nature. Indigenous people historically used seeds and pits to create their jewellery; similarly, my jewels made out of polymers are the seeds and pits of our second nature.

Nicole Taubinger was born in Munich, Germany, to a Czech mother, and a Slovak father. She graduated from the Metalsmithing and Jewelry Department from the University of Oregon at Eugene, USA,  after which she first worked as a goldsmith in Munich for several years before starting her independent career as a freelance artist. Nicole lives in Prague, Czech Republic. 

Nicole Taubinger: CV January, 2020 Download

Shaelene Murray: Artist Statement & Bio

Shaelene Murray’s figurative sculptures speak of society, history, experience and nostalgia. By re-contextualizing materials and processes from industry and the domestic sphere, Murray explores archetypes of femininity, and the roles which women play in the context of social and domestic life. 

The long history of women sewing is given great reverence in Murray’s work. By amalgamating industrial materials such as stainless steel, which hold connotations of masculine work, and techniques derived from traditionally feminine crafts such as sewing; the artist positions familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts, evoking notions of the uncanny. For Murray, this material juxtaposition asserts that “strength and fragility can co-exist, [and] that women are stronger and more complex than the labels given to them by society.” In re-contextualising and personifying remnants of the domestic sphere ‘Kin’ constructs a portrait of the complexities of family life and acknowledges both the beneficial and indifferent legacies, of the women who “cut and sew the fabric of our lives.” 

Murray’s practice relies on the synthesis of material and subject matter; choosing “materials and processes for the readings they impart, and the emotional response they trigger.” Each work is born of a single strand of stainless-steel wire; twisted and folded into the desired ply and looped together stitch by stitch; imbuing the metal with a physical tension and memory. The material is then manipulated and hand-stitched, the components neatly sewn into a piece of clothing. Murray equates the slow and intimate nature of her process with mimicking the slow formation of personality. Through personality imbued stitch by stitch into the piece, the minute detail; laughing or crying, the concept of familial complexity is reiterated. 

Murray studied Ceramics at East Sydney Technical College and was awarded a First-Class Honours Degree in Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts in 1995. 

Her sculpture has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions include Kin (Stanley Street Gallery, 2019), A Tracing of Thread (Stanley Street Gallery, Darlinghurst, NSW, 2013), Bouquet (La Trobe Regional Gallery, VIC, 2005, Ironic Inversion (Lions Art Centre, SA, 2005), and Home on the Range, held at the Centre for Contemporary Craft, Customs House in Sydney, NSW 1998. Murray’s sculptural work has also featured in group shows with Stanley Street Gallery including On Point (2017), Salon of Infectious Ideas (2016), Portraits (2015) and Over Your Head (2014); as well as other institutions nationally, including sPIN (Australian National Capital Artist’s Gallery, Canberra, 2015), Pin-a-4 (Australian National Capital Artist’s Gallery, Canberra 2014), It is What it is (Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, Windsor 2014) and Soft Sculpture (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2009). 

Murray’s work continues to generate critical acclaim, selected as a finalist in the Western Sydney University Sculpture Prize in 2018, Deakin Small Sculpture Prize VIC in 2017, Aesthetica Art Prize UK in 2016, the Kennedy Art Prize SA and the Wynne Prize AGNSW in 2013 and 2015 respectively. Her work is held in the collections of East Sydney Technical College, Manly Art Gallery and Museum, and the Barbara and Oscar Feldman Collection, Detroit MI, USA and has been featured in Art and Australia Magazine, Art Almanac, and “Future Now,” an overview of Contemporary Artists from the Aesthetica Art Prize. In 2000, Murray was a guest speaker at the Glass Society of America Conference held at Long Island University, USA. 

Shaelene Murray is represented by Stanley Street Gallery. 

Shaelene Murray: CV January, 2020 Download