Tor Larsen: Artist Statement & Bio

Tor’s artwork is inspired by film making processes in which a scene is defined by a camera frame enclosing environments, objects/props that viewers mentally and occasionally physically interact with. His disturbing and surreal creations are infused with a sense of lost history, changing social/philosophical values as well as well as darker subconscious themes.

The choice of materials has always been important for Tor. His preference for found and recycled materials and objects imbued with their own history, is crucial to his conceptual development, often informing the construction, ultimate shape and meaning in a given work.

Also crucial to his create process; is the juxtaposition of unlikely materials, objects and ideas as a means of stimulating thought and emotional responses in the viewer, sometimes affected through mechanical interaction with a work where the viewer becomes part of the process of its realisation.

Much of Tor's work attempts to recapture pasts; real, imagined or simply felt as well as to project a virtual and potentially threatening future into the mind of the viewer.

As an artist, Tor gained early exposure to tools and processes in his parent’s jewellery workshop. His first jobs were as a model and prop-maker which led to further employment in the film industry building miniature scenes and creating visual effects. In 1998, he completed a diploma in production design at the AFTRS, following which he worked for various companies and productions on the Gold Coast and in Melbourne as an art director and visual effects coordinator, eventually becoming a producer in Sydney. In 2015 Tor completed a degree in political economy at Sydney University. More recently he has been making jewellery, small sculptures and miniature installations that reflect his political, social and historical/cultural interests as experienced through the cinematic frame. His most recent exhibition was held with his parents and sister, Two Generations: Larsen & Lewers Pia Larsen, Tor Larsen at Spot81 gallery, Sydney in 2016.

Tor Larsen: CV January, 2020 Download

Amy Dynan: Artist Statement & Bio

"I use the framework of beauty to explore the relationship between humanity and nature. My large-scale pastel paintings merge photorealism with abstract sensibilities to document moments of sublimity, transition and fragility in nature. The dynamics of light and dark work as a metaphor for the opposing forces in nature and in ourselves, creating landscapes that hover between land and sky, material and ethereal.

For me, drawing is a lens through which the spectrum of our existence is revealed, and a means to marvel at how lucky we are to feel it fully. To this end my work documents nature in flux and celebrates the beauty of what we stand to lose.”  

Amy Dynan is an award-winning artist, renowned for her nuanced balance between conceptual rigour and classical drawing skills. She completed her Master of Contemporary Art and Master of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts in 2017, developing a strong conceptual framework of beauty as a means to explore human relationships with the natural world.

“As a visual artist, research can offer a deeper, more profound connection to the significance of one’s own art practice in a field beyond the studio. I knew that my passion for drawing, combined with rigorous institutional and art world scrutiny and support would provide the necessary framework to further my aesthetic.”

Dynan has held two sell out solo exhibitions at Stanley Street Gallery, ‘Water’ in 2019 and ‘Skytalk’ in 2021. Dynan has been a finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize the Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize and the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize. She has been selected for art residencies in France, Norway and Iceland (2018), Hill End (2017, 2020), Mornington Peninsula (2020) and Bundanon Trust (William Fletcher Scholarship) (2024).

Amy Dynan: CV November, 2023 Download

Claire Primrose: Artist Statement & Bio

When we think of a place, we imagine it not in its entirety, but rather as integral parts; feelings and images pieced together to create the impression of a whole.

In Primrose’s practice, she mirrors this concept, the serendipitous recreation and abstraction of these views encourage our eye to piece together the changing actions of material, much like Primrose herself does so in her studio - so that we too, may feel a sense of place. She pieces together the remnants of these places; a collection of memories, samples and studies which are then reworked into the applique of paint. Through a process of layering; she scratches, sprays and applies a mixture of mediums in a way that not only conjures up feelings of awe and wonder felt only by arriving at a greatly-anticipated scenic view, but does so in a way that allows the colours, layers and gestural mark-making to actively illustrate the scene before you.

Claire Primrose is a painter who works primarily with mixed media. Primrose graduated with a BA in Visual Arts (majoring in printmaking) at ANU, Canberra, in 1997. Based in Queanbeyan, she has also completed a Graduate Diploma in Secondary Art Education and has taught both Visual Art and Dance at various high schools in Canberra for ten years. She has been represented by Stanley Street Gallery since 2015.

Primrose has participated in various group and solo exhibitions both locally and nationally; including being selected for DIRECTION NOW> national touring exhibition with 10 other artists who also focus on abstraction. She was the winner of the 2017 Waverley Art Prize – Drawing. Most recently she has been selected as a finalist in the 2019 Wyndham Art Prize, SA; the 2019 Hunters Hill Art exhibition and the 2019 Highly Commended and People’s Choice Winner in the Wingecarribee Landscape Prize, Bowral.  She has also been selected as a finalist in the Paddington Art Prize, The Fleurieu Biennale, The Kedumba Drawing Award, The Tattersall’s Club Landscape Prize, The Hawkesbury Art Prize, Morton Bay Art Prize, the Norville Art Prize, the Whyalla Art prize and most recently, the Paul Guest Drawing Award.

Claire was awarded winner of the Queanbeyan City Council Regional Art Prize in both 2009 and 2015, the Goulburn Regional Art Award in 2016 as well as the Capital Chemist Art Award Tuggeranong in 2015. She has also been awarded a Highly Commended in the Queanbeyan City Council Art Award in 2010 and the Hawkesbury Art Prize in 2012.

Claire Primrose: CV January, 2020 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

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