Let’s get it on : My ‘straight’ (what even is ‘straight’? Who even is ‘straight’?) housemate made a bewildering comment on the way courting seems to work in my (queer art) world. ‘It’s very European. Very intellectual.’ I suppose you could see it as pretentious, or romantic, or pretentiously romantic, or romantically pretentious — exchanging […]
Embittered Swish is a performance art vehicle founded in 2016 whose first project was a trans adaptation and reformulation of Jean Genet’s 1943 novel Our Lady of the Flowers. Embittered Swish works across a fine art, theatre and club context and has shown work at Performance Space (PACT), Transgenre, La Mama Courthouse, firstdraft gallery, Australian […]
A new brain, a new way of thinking, a silicone mind fresh for moulding. Neural networks only know what they have been taught, a blank slate, a clean canvas. But they are so much more than just a surface or a new medium to explore; Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the future of art and offers […]
A few years ago I was interviewed with other trans artists by a cis white woman who makes self-reflexively queer art. When we were handed back the transcript, we saw that the word ‘trans’ — which we used with some flippancy in talking about our experiences of our bodies — had been appended with an […]
Marisa’s round table Annerley, Brisbane Amanda Hayman : This is the first time we’ve all been in the same room together, so I thought it would be good to start off with a little intro to the overarching project, Co-MMotion. Jenna Green : We established people+artist+place in 2017 because we wanted to see more live […]
Spring several years ago, fellow Canadian artist Lisa Visser and I embarked on a two-week road trip, driving 5,300 kms from Toronto across the United States to Los Angeles, during which time a collaborative project emerged. The purpose of this road trip was to move Lisa to California, so that she could carry out graduate […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about how survival is often linked to collectivity, specifically for people of colour, specifically for myself as a trans person of colour who owes so much of my survival to the collectives I’ve belonged to and the communities that have held me. I often think about what it means to […]
Curating a Pasifik space is unlike other art spaces. My mother taught me that if you pick a plant, treat it, dry it out and weave it into a mat it is still a living, breathing thing and it needs to be cared for. Mats need to be used, to be swept, sunned out if […]
My Mum Elvie would draw lines. Lines that represented the coastline, curved lines for the palm trees with smaller lines for the bushy branches and leaves. A big sun in the sky and waves in the sea. Mum would draw a turtle and ask me, ‘Ella, what is this?’ My earliest memory of creating art […]
My left hand hangs down, weighted by a gold wedding band. My palm cups a circular space. Intruding into this space, a child’s fingers poke at my fingertips. My right hand grasps firmly at a fat baby’s waist. The baby reaches towards a man, but I lean away from him, offering my feet on a […]
Parallel Park was borne out of a desire to explore the shared experience of being in a serious queer relationship for the first time. It is the collaborative practice of Holly Bates and Tayla Jay Haggarty, two Brisbane-based artists who met while studying visual art at the Queensland University of Technology. Since 2015 the duo […]
to know yourself andto know each other is the revolution The very existence of our collective this mob is simultaneously intriguing and threatening to outsiders. Collectivising when bla(c)k* is instantly politicised by others; we can be blak** but not too blak, and we still need to exist within the systems that silence and oppress us. […]
1: I speak from a position of solidarity with victim/survivors (I think about the temporality implied in this language and think ‘endurer’ may be more apt) past, present, and future. Those who have shared their stories, those who have not come forward and those who never will. 2: This letter was in response to news […]
This transcript began as a conversation between Alex Griffin, Rosie Funder, and Sally Olds, and was edited into its final form by Rosie Funder and Sally Olds. Sally Olds : To me the thing that became painfully apparent was that I didn’t believe in poly as a political form. And all my energy and, uh, […]
The Victorian Pride Centre was a hard-won project that would secure a future built legacy for the state’s LGBTIQA+ community. It proposed a single building for health service providers, youth advocates, and festival and entertainment networks, underpinned by a performance venue and exhibition space, and an archive. Located on Fitzroy Street in the seaside suburb […]
Between the subjugation and indifference of colonial governance, Ngurungaeta, William Barak leads the Wurundjeri people in a sustained decolonising movement, seeking land-rights at Coranderrk. They petition ministers, writing letters and walking to Melbourne to protest directly to the Premier. is goes on in the face of dispossession. And, in 1881 there is a rupture in […]
I have long been concerned with memories of colonial violence in the Australian landscape; places that have witnessed harm and continue to hold these traumatic memories in the present. Their existence was something I was attuned to as a child constantly travelling regional New South Wales with my family, visiting places and people, connecting with […]
American contemporary mythologies spring from American founding mythologies. The events of Columbus’ arrival, the American revolution, and the signing of the Constitution washed away terra nullius to reveal the American nation. The enduring desire to avoid facts or truths is evident in America today via the fervor for conspiracy theory.[^1] Nearly fifty per cent of […]
The archive is built to keep out water. The archive is built on the edge of the floodplain of the Moonee Ponds Creek on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Water is excluded from the archive because of the risks it poses to paper and other organic materials. Mould can germinate […]
Whakapapa is generally translated as genealogy. Whakapapa can mean to lie flat, to place in layers, to recite in order; or considered in parts as ‘whaka’ – cause to be, to become; and ‘papa’ which can mean – the Earth, or anything broad flat and hard. In te reo Māori ‘papa’ has many meanings associated […]
‘Did you know Barangaroo is named after a courageous and spirited Aboriginal woman?’ So says a section of the Barangaroo website titled ‘The Stories’, the question posed above an aerial image of a glass-walled building. Barangaroo is an urban redevelopment on the harbour of what is currently called Sydney; a place where the ‘past meets […]
A sunset over gentle oceans~ Bondi Beach Awakening Time-lapse shot of a waterfall~ Caressing Waters (alternatively Majestic Beauty, or, Waters of Life) The still course of a waterway,mirroring the bushland above~ River Reflections Uluru during a storm, at sunrise~ Heartland Revival People want peace in their lives and in their surroundings and nothing delivers as […]
We were trying to blast this myth that the non-Western Other exists in a time and place that is completely untouched by Western civilization or that in order to be authentic one would have to be devoid of characteristics associated with the West. It’s reasonable to say that non-Western cultures have a better understanding of […]
Beginning in March 2016, I undertook a two-year period of practice-led research as part of a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) research degree at Sydney College of the Arts. The origin of the research project lay in a self-reflexive inquiry into my attraction to working with steel and other metals in my art practice. Through […]