Each year Gaffa invite a handful of recent graduates from NSW & ACT institutes to exhibit as part of our program, this year 'oh me oh my' will feature emerging creatives with a fresh perspective!
Alexandra Mills
This work represents three members of my grandmother's family through the clothes they wear in a photograph taken in 1910. By evoking these people through materials and context, rather than likenesses, these works are a form of 'circumstantial 'portraiture.
The images were made using materials that would have been available in 1910, applied in layers and removed or scraped back to reveal earlier images, evoking a sense of recall and loss.
They hang on the wall in a row as if in a hallway waiting for heir owners.
Alison Hartly
To draw means to act and participate. Wearing jewellery is also about participating, and the wearer has a unique relationship with the object worn. This series is about this common ground between jewellery and drawing. These brooches and neckpieces are moveable, intuitive lines to be manipulated by the wearer. I want to show a new way of drawing, being beyond flat and static, able to be worn, moved and transformed. These kinds of drawings also explore what it means to wear something.
Billie Robertson
I am interested in an object’s potential for agency.My process is largely dependent on chance, and I welcome factors that skew or inhibit my own influence. Clay as the core medium bounds these objects to the history of the vessel - but this is not their history, and they revolt against it. These unclaimed artefacts that represent no distinct time or place are grouped together in curious sequences. Silently restless, they resonate with another worldly purpose yet to be revealed.
Boya Yu
My work could belong to contemporary jewellery or we can say art jewellery. I hope to use metal smithing techniques to make quality metalwork by exploring nature’s shape, structure and colour. I am hoping through my works to showcase the contrast between organic and handmade natural elements and great complexity and subject simplification
C. Clare Evans
In my graduating body of work, I focused on the experience of moving through space and the visual cues we use to understand our bodies own location. Utilising the Moire effect in my weavings I simulate this experience in a controlled environment using light and shadows.
My weavings take their forms from architectural details and materials creating 3D works with a normally 2D process. The shadows cast by the weavings are as much a part of the work as the weavings themselves. Embracing the variation and changing of light through the transparent material, casting complex intersecting, often unexpected patterns.
Chantel Bann
Kažkur Tarp (Somewhere in between) addresses the anxieties of living in liminal states: spaces between defined cultural, social, personal and emotional categories that help inform and perform our identities, and aims to reconcile the complexities of a divided sense of self. By simulating a selective understanding of specific features of Lithuanian heritage and tradition, Kažkur Tarp refuses to become a mere exercise in conventional documentation of historical items and practices, sitting somewhere in between a denial of the material value and significance of costume or artifacts, and an assertion of their auratic qualities and symbolism.
Florentina Pergoleto
Unapologetically herself, her work touches on issues around mental health, nudity and the female body. Florentina aims to communicate her world view. Her artwork is deceptively childlike and betrays her unashamed innocence.
Georgia Mckenzie
‘Mother, Sister and me,’playfully expresses the artists connection to her family’s matriarchy. The weightless, faceless figures do not depart the human. Belly-buttons become motifs of connection to mother and human corporeal commonality. However, obscure this representation, the featured materials and skin render the bodies female, exhibiting the societal tendency to gender. This grotesque representation of the female body as outside the ‘symbolic order’ plays into Kristeva’s theory of abjection (placing the female body as abject). These figures act as reminders of the liminal zone of female relationships with society, to family and of the necessity of connection to the mother.
Isabelle Mackay-Sim
My work questions the validity of prescriptive body ideals and challenges the inary between beauty and ugliness. An abject appearance contrasts with a luscious surface, while the colour scheme simultaneously suggests pallid flesh and pink confectionary. These conflicting elements encourage the viewer to recognise and re-evaluate the imperfect body, fostering a sense of empathy between viewer and object. The abstract, fleshy quality of the work transcends gender, and invites each viewer to identify elements of their own imperfect anatomy within the ambiguous form.
Juliet Wong
My family’s values and knowledge of Chinese culture has always been passed down through verbal communication, but my poor language ability has hindered me from comprehending the importance of it.
To compensate, tacky and inexpensive forms of Chinese culture bought from the dollar shop are placed together as an attempt to connect with my heritage. These plastic trinkets act as a placebo for cultural experience and reflect my feelings of artificiality in relation to my Chinese identity.
Kendall Manz
Studies in falling is the result of insistent material engagement. Dry thrown rings are propped in the kiln and softened during the firing process, slumping and entwining together with the glaze acting as a kind of glue. It is a process of orchestration, stepping back and allowing the material to re-negotiate its form, and then stepping back in to evaluate and re-work. There is a search fora certain tempo, moments of tautness and relaxation. lllusions of flow and plasticity exist despite the fixed nature of the ceramic material.
Manon Mikolaitis
Suspended Conversations: The Mourning of My Mother Past examines the potential for family photo albums and photographic archives to facilitate the construction of memory and function as a site of remembrance. As a personal reflection on loss and mourning, this work presents a construction of my mother’s past formulated through the process of memory work, revealing the possibilities for interpreting the photographic archive when the past is unknown or unattainable.
Mathew Freeman
Closest is part of a body of work focusing on intuitive flow of composition. The aim is to view the modernist approach through contemporary eyes and in doing so create evocative, sketch inspired, process sculptures. Through experimentation, under he guiding principle of “content as form”, this work addresses the questions of what it is to make for myself and why it is that I make.
Sheena Stedenovic Redmond
The Disapora bear fruit trees and the herbs that exist in family dwellings within Australia and in Eastern Europe. Both. These orbs are an essence of what is left and what can be retrieved from places that are left behind as families move to a new country and a new environment. Diaspora was largely difficult to cast and fire.My desire to perfect a craft was changed to letting the porcelain communicate subconscious feelings of nostalgia and experience. Consequently, the work unexpectedly became self portrait;Diaspora expresses my Slavic roots as well as my more malleable approach to life.
Song Ha Kim
When two or more planes meet, they create a new shape.
And when two or more shapes meet, they create a new space.
And when two or more spaces meet, they create a new relationship.
Natalia Stojevski
Natalia Stojevski's work is a study of the everyday and an exploration of agency in objects. Often left raw, she collects objects and moments, rearranging to create installations which hold an uncanny familiarity and sense of nostalgia. Stojevski reconfigures the disengagement of everyday experiences through intimate portraiture of mundanity. Object and image converge in old and new ways as she playfully experiments with exhibition modes.
Alexandra Mills
This work represents three members of my grandmother's family through the clothes they wear in a photograph taken in 1910. By evoking these people through materials and context, rather than likenesses, these works are a form of 'circumstantial 'portraiture.
The images were made using materials that would have been available in 1910, applied in layers and removed or scraped back to reveal earlier images, evoking a sense of recall and loss.
They hang on the wall in a row as if in a hallway waiting for heir owners.
Alison Hartly
To draw means to act and participate. Wearing jewellery is also about participating, and the wearer has a unique relationship with the object worn. This series is about this common ground between jewellery and drawing. These brooches and neckpieces are moveable, intuitive lines to be manipulated by the wearer. I want to show a new way of drawing, being beyond flat and static, able to be worn, moved and transformed. These kinds of drawings also explore what it means to wear something.
Billie Robertson
I am interested in an object’s potential for agency.My process is largely dependent on chance, and I welcome factors that skew or inhibit my own influence. Clay as the core medium bounds these objects to the history of the vessel - but this is not their history, and they revolt against it. These unclaimed artefacts that represent no distinct time or place are grouped together in curious sequences. Silently restless, they resonate with another worldly purpose yet to be revealed.
Boya Yu
My work could belong to contemporary jewellery or we can say art jewellery. I hope to use metal smithing techniques to make quality metalwork by exploring nature’s shape, structure and colour. I am hoping through my works to showcase the contrast between organic and handmade natural elements and great complexity and subject simplification
C. Clare Evans
In my graduating body of work, I focused on the experience of moving through space and the visual cues we use to understand our bodies own location. Utilising the Moire effect in my weavings I simulate this experience in a controlled environment using light and shadows.
My weavings take their forms from architectural details and materials creating 3D works with a normally 2D process. The shadows cast by the weavings are as much a part of the work as the weavings themselves. Embracing the variation and changing of light through the transparent material, casting complex intersecting, often unexpected patterns.
Chantel Bann
Kažkur Tarp (Somewhere in between) addresses the anxieties of living in liminal states: spaces between defined cultural, social, personal and emotional categories that help inform and perform our identities, and aims to reconcile the complexities of a divided sense of self. By simulating a selective understanding of specific features of Lithuanian heritage and tradition, Kažkur Tarp refuses to become a mere exercise in conventional documentation of historical items and practices, sitting somewhere in between a denial of the material value and significance of costume or artifacts, and an assertion of their auratic qualities and symbolism.
Florentina Pergoleto
Unapologetically herself, her work touches on issues around mental health, nudity and the female body. Florentina aims to communicate her world view. Her artwork is deceptively childlike and betrays her unashamed innocence.
Georgia Mckenzie
‘Mother, Sister and me,’playfully expresses the artists connection to her family’s matriarchy. The weightless, faceless figures do not depart the human. Belly-buttons become motifs of connection to mother and human corporeal commonality. However, obscure this representation, the featured materials and skin render the bodies female, exhibiting the societal tendency to gender. This grotesque representation of the female body as outside the ‘symbolic order’ plays into Kristeva’s theory of abjection (placing the female body as abject). These figures act as reminders of the liminal zone of female relationships with society, to family and of the necessity of connection to the mother.
Isabelle Mackay-Sim
My work questions the validity of prescriptive body ideals and challenges the inary between beauty and ugliness. An abject appearance contrasts with a luscious surface, while the colour scheme simultaneously suggests pallid flesh and pink confectionary. These conflicting elements encourage the viewer to recognise and re-evaluate the imperfect body, fostering a sense of empathy between viewer and object. The abstract, fleshy quality of the work transcends gender, and invites each viewer to identify elements of their own imperfect anatomy within the ambiguous form.
Juliet Wong
My family’s values and knowledge of Chinese culture has always been passed down through verbal communication, but my poor language ability has hindered me from comprehending the importance of it.
To compensate, tacky and inexpensive forms of Chinese culture bought from the dollar shop are placed together as an attempt to connect with my heritage. These plastic trinkets act as a placebo for cultural experience and reflect my feelings of artificiality in relation to my Chinese identity.
Kendall Manz
Studies in falling is the result of insistent material engagement. Dry thrown rings are propped in the kiln and softened during the firing process, slumping and entwining together with the glaze acting as a kind of glue. It is a process of orchestration, stepping back and allowing the material to re-negotiate its form, and then stepping back in to evaluate and re-work. There is a search fora certain tempo, moments of tautness and relaxation. lllusions of flow and plasticity exist despite the fixed nature of the ceramic material.
Manon Mikolaitis
Suspended Conversations: The Mourning of My Mother Past examines the potential for family photo albums and photographic archives to facilitate the construction of memory and function as a site of remembrance. As a personal reflection on loss and mourning, this work presents a construction of my mother’s past formulated through the process of memory work, revealing the possibilities for interpreting the photographic archive when the past is unknown or unattainable.
Mathew Freeman
Closest is part of a body of work focusing on intuitive flow of composition. The aim is to view the modernist approach through contemporary eyes and in doing so create evocative, sketch inspired, process sculptures. Through experimentation, under he guiding principle of “content as form”, this work addresses the questions of what it is to make for myself and why it is that I make.
Sheena Stedenovic Redmond
The Disapora bear fruit trees and the herbs that exist in family dwellings within Australia and in Eastern Europe. Both. These orbs are an essence of what is left and what can be retrieved from places that are left behind as families move to a new country and a new environment. Diaspora was largely difficult to cast and fire.My desire to perfect a craft was changed to letting the porcelain communicate subconscious feelings of nostalgia and experience. Consequently, the work unexpectedly became self portrait;Diaspora expresses my Slavic roots as well as my more malleable approach to life.
Song Ha Kim
When two or more planes meet, they create a new shape.
And when two or more shapes meet, they create a new space.
And when two or more spaces meet, they create a new relationship.
Natalia Stojevski
Natalia Stojevski's work is a study of the everyday and an exploration of agency in objects. Often left raw, she collects objects and moments, rearranging to create installations which hold an uncanny familiarity and sense of nostalgia. Stojevski reconfigures the disengagement of everyday experiences through intimate portraiture of mundanity. Object and image converge in old and new ways as she playfully experiments with exhibition modes.
