12 June 2014
Fitting into yourself from Leena Riethmuller on Vimeo.
My work investigates contextual and subjective bodily experiences that occur in response to dominant ideals for the body. My artistic outcomes take the form of live performance, video and sculpture. My interest lies in observing and experimenting with mainstream’s engagement with the body in the areas of popular culture, hygiene and medical practices, bodily maintenance and beauty trends and the influence of religion and philosophical discoveries. I have limited the majority of my research to the place and time in which my body lives, a time where the body is particularly individualised and capitalised upon. Through my work I aim to critique bodily engagement and look at new or alternative methods to engage with the body. I have been influenced by the work of body philosopher, Richard Shusterman, who believes that by connecting with and understanding ourselves better, we can connect with and understand others better too.
Artist Website
12 June 2014
Ruth McConchie is a visual artist currently based in Brisbane. McConchie’s practice focuses on arranging relations between memory, personal histories and the sensuous orders of materials to form elaborate object-based environments. McConchie completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2008 and a Master of Arts by Research at Queensland University of Technology in 2014. She has exhibited at LEVEL, Boxcopy, No Frills*, Accidentally Annie Street Space, Metro Arts Galleries, Blindside and Firstdraft gallery. In 2013, McConchie was awarded the Melville Haysom Memorial Art Scholarship and was included in the Institute of Modern Art’s ‘Fresh Cut’. McConchie is a co-director of inbetweenspaces polyamorous living lab, which developed work through the Kickstart program for the 2012 Next Wave Festival .
Artist’s Website
11 June 2014
I work in three-dimensional sculptural forms that are made through working with found materials that tend to be mass-produced including things like: rope, electrical cable, bandages and tape. I examine these materials through play and intensely work them to transform each into a self-involved knot, which is then installed in a gallery space with the help of framing devices. My creative process is improvisation rather than design so my works are produced through reading and responding to the material I am presented with. In some ways they are a productive form of fidgeting. Due to the repetitive, often obsessive, process of making my works seem to contain a bundle of stored energy in their cores resulting in a perceived solidity of mass. I employ specific techniques and sensibilities to determine the final work and these take time to complete so the end product is very considered.
Artist’s Website
11 June 2014
Courtney Pedersen is a Brisbane-based artist, writer and academic. Her work is primarily concerned with the nexus of personal experience and the public realm, with particular interests in feminism and social history.
Artist statement:
This current body of work, Summers with Hilma, takes the seascapes of Queensland and the Scandinavian coastline as its formal departure point. By bringing these images into conversation with the geometric abstraction of Swedish mystic painter Hilma af Klint, the avant-garde film making of Viking Eggeling, and the cinematic concerns of Ingmar Bergman, I am creating imaginary geographies that approach a place where I belong.
10 June 2014
In my practice I make constructed environments out of found and made objects. I interpret materials through the lens of the diorama, using processes of play and chance to make work. Because of this fluidity, my work shifts between video, photography and installation. These mediums allow me to explore different types of narrative that can occur using a combination of found sound, toys, images and sculpture. By juxtaposing these things together, comic effect is used to subvert meanings and expectations.
10 June 2014
My creative practice has evolved through my interest in exploring contemporary ideas about nature and its cultural representation. This interest stems from my own mediated experiences of engaging with the physical environment. I am currently undertaking my Honours in Fine Art at the Queensland University of Technology and my current practice is concerned with exploring the distinction between representation and reality. This distinction is explored through the use of representational images such as landscapes, which act as pictorial devices that structure our internal and external realities. Combined with the use of text and image, I am also interested in the arbitrary and constructed nature of language and images, and the slippages and processes of negotiation between ‘reading’ and ‘seeing’.
Artist’s Website
8 June 2014
My visual art practice stems from a very personal sense of curiosity and affection that I feel towards the everyday (and often minute) traces of human inhabitation. It explores my attraction to physical residues (dust, dirt,debris) and various discarded or abandoned objects, through an intuitive desire to collect, sort, arrange and repeat. The artworks within my practice reflect an interest in the act of looking; questioning how it is that we perceive the spaces and objects that surround us by creating a balance between close proximity and obscurity. I am particularly interested in engaging with my attraction to perceptions of insignificance, through the scope of digital and 2-dimensional media.
