Tell us about your creative process. What drives your practice?

My creative process is founded in its conceptual terrain, which encounters ideas of identity, sense of self, human duality, and human perception within our contemporary contexts. Utilising a cross-disciplinary practice I raise questions surrounding who we are and what is integral to our sense of being. The idea that from our experiential engagement with the universal and human domains of existence, our identities are perpetually metamorphosing and evolving. The self will never be whole, but transient, remaining displaced and fundamentally fragmented. To represent these notions, I use predominantly portraiture and self-portraiture within surrealist and experimental modes of sculptural printmaking and photographic representation. Using myself as a subject, whilst sometimes confronting, allows an instant connection to self-exploration and reflection. This is exemplified by my use of mirror as a material.  My practice often engages with dimensionality, with my printmaking and photography, both traditionally 2-dimensional in form, becoming sculptural as a means of enhancing meaning. An example includes my experimentation with serigraphic sculptures, involving screen-printing my naked body onto mirrors, smashing the material, and then reassembling the bodily form from the shards, effectively representing my conceptual ideologies of the fragmented and unresolved self, which would not have been as strong if it remained on the pictorial plane. At the moment I am working on a surrealist self-portrait work for the 2019 Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award.

How have you found the transition from maker to curator? Does your making practice influence your curatorial vision?

My passion for art exists in its catalytic ability to ignite ideas, reflection, communication, and action. Offering a sense of verisimilitude; truthfulness and honesty – as this occurs within both artistic and curatorial practices, the transition from maker to curator has been quite easy! Interestingly, makers and curators align with a similar praxeology – you start with a concept, you research and scope its feasibility, you experiment, you make choices, and you result in a product or outcome. It’s a different hat, but only slightly different in design! My making practice in certain ways has influenced my curatorial vision, namely my pull towards notions of new materialism and sculptural affiliation. However, at the junction, disparities do exist between them. Whilst still engaging with notions of impermanence and instability, my curatorial practice is more concerned with the nature of being in the world and our environment. In acute ways, it is an exploration into our natural world and our changing relationship to the landscape, and how it impacts our identities and sense of place. My curatorial practice also encounters nuances of nature as behavioural; the way we communicate, exchange, our language, and our human/human interactions.

Are there any female printmakers | artists | curators that influence you?

Absolutely!  I am inevitably drawn to the enigmatic energy surrounding art produced by female creatives; an oscillation between vulnerability and sustainability, unapologetic and poetic. The female artist is a rebel and activist, challenging the patriarchal histories art is founded within. Ever since I was an adolescent, I have been influenced by the progressive woman and artist, Frida Kahlo. Not only was she a badass in her day, who broke down convention through her behaviour and attire, but her exploration of self through self-portraiture formally and conceptually relates to my own artistic practice; self-reflection and contemplation through explorations of the self and body. More poignantly, I think her magnetism comes from the rawness - the heart and soul she puts into her work, allowing herself to be exposed for self-understanding and articulation. Her many self-portraits act as explorations of her inner feelings and experiences, her pain and turbulence, and her co-existence with the natural world, aligning with my curatorial interests.

Contemporary artist Izabela Pluta also influences both my artistic and curatorial practices. Pluta engages photography as a method of interpreting and reconceptualising the function that images have in the present, investigating temporality, the environment and our sense of place and curiosity. What has influenced me most significantly from her practice is the materialism present within her work. She intersects photography with sculpture, textiles and installation, alluding to the shifting role of the photograph as embodying the physical object. Artistically, my practice took on this formality, the pull towards making my printmaking and photography 3-dimensional and visceral. She demonstrated the effective role of the substrate as an enhancement of meaning, and how the form exemplifies the conceptual rationale – i.e. my use of mirrors as a material to represent self-reflection. Curatorially, I have found myself drawn to works that engage with this premise, physicality and the thing itself;  the tactile object. This is seen through my past and upcoming projects in which I am inherently interested in interactive and immersive spaces, and sculptural forms. This will be particularly seen in my upcoming curated exhibition at Airspace Projects, Marrickville in November 2019, that presents expanded field photography that moves beyond the pictorial plane, the photograph as a personified object.

Finally, what exciting projects are you working on at the moment?

Currently, I am working on an upcoming curatorial project called ‘this is a conversation piece’, showcasing the cross-disciplinary works of emerging artist Jennifer Brady, one of More than Reproduction’s co-founders. This collaborative project iterates Brady’s interdisciplinary practice, utilising drawing, installation, and performance, to provoke a conversation. A communicative platform, exploring verbal and non-verbal interfaces, emulating her current research into the materiality and effect of language within the realms of post-punk and lo-fi aesthetics. What is exciting about this project is that Brady’s installation acts as a confessional and cyclic monologue, providing agency to communicate personal thoughts and emotions that are uncomfortable and confusing; a representation of thoughts, emotions, ideas, memories and feelings that are difficult to express, directly evoking a discussion around mental health. This project is developing well, and I am looking forward to seeing how it all comes together for early June!

I am also currently a member of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Youth Collective. The collective collaborates with the gallery to create a series of monthly programs, igniting young people’s creativity and accessibility to art and culture, whilst building a safe and open platform to foster a dialogue between young people from a range of social and cultural experiences. As one of nineteen members, this offers an exciting new direction of thinking for me, and I am enjoying cultivating new forms of cultural education, exchanges, dialogues, and accessibility for local youths.