LAYLI RAKHSHA
Iranian-born artist Layli Rakhsha’s research project is Diaspora and Home: contextualizing the idea of home in Australian contemporary art as visualised by selected Iranian artists.Rakhsha’s practice-led research investigates the ways in which Iranian artists living in Australia visualise the idea of home. Her project illuminates how memories from the past and imagination can influence how home is remembered based on the individual’s experiences of migration and displacement. Rakhsha’s studio research explores how home can be defined by personal experiences, social and cultural relationships and attachments to particular place. Her art project is based on exploring the idea of home though the medium of photography and printmaking.
ALANA McVEIGH
Accomplished ceramicist Alana McVeigh seeks to investigate how multiple streams of inferred and experimental sensory awareness and knowledge has impacted on Australian ceramic art making. Through her own creative practice and the development of an impressive body of work, Alana considers the visual, cognitive and sensual influences that entered Australian ceramic studio practice from China, Japan, Korea and Britain primarily during the 1940 – 1960s.
Alana draws on knowledge gathered during visits to Japan, China, Finland, Canada, Denmark, she explores concepts of tradition and experiencing within the making, as well as translucency, atmospheric light, and textures. The resultant exhibited works reveal haptic knowledge acquired over the duration of the investigation.
MARDI CROCKER
Mardi Crocker’s still life paintings explore the sensorial experience of the everyday through the depiction of familiar and overlooked objects.
Her project explores the potential of still life painting as a contemporary art practice to reflect the modern, lived experience of the everyday and pays particular attention to the nature of sensory perception in the realm of the everyday, considering the ways in which the overlooked can disappear or fade from view, be both seen and unseen, and felt and remembered through the body.
Mardi’s research seeks to enact an attitude and methodology of attention and immersion that aims not to pass judgement on this area of life, nor to rehabilitate it or give it new primacy, but rather to engender, and to offer, a newly attentive attitude to the everyday that allows for, and creates a space in which, the affective moments and textures of this area of life can come into view and be felt.
Mardi graduated from Curtin University with BA of Fine Art with First Class Honours in 2014, where she is also currently completing a PhD in art. Crocker has exhibited in solo and group shows at Spectrum Project Space, Applecross Art Space, Free Range Gallery and Paper Mountain, and currently tutors painting students at Applecross Senior High School as part of the Gifted and Talented Extension program.
KELSEY ASHE GIAMBAZI
Kelsey Ashe Giambazi is an interdisciplinary artist who draws on the symbolic language of pattern and the non-verbal communication of dress to present stylised multi-media portraits that narrate stories of the Australian landscape and cultural identity. Kelsey works within the conventions of Western-constructed exoticism, creating ‘imaginary aesthetic territories’ where a utopian depiction of cross-cultural diversity can be perceived.
Kelsey’s recent series of work are informed by a consideration of the spatial arrangements and textile print designs within Japanese ukiyo-e, ‘pictures of the floating world’) and traditional aesthetic philosophies such as wabi-sabi (beauty of things imperfect) and yūgen (subtley profound, mysterious grace). The works can be considered contemporary bijin–ga(beautiful women prints) and kachō-ga (bird and flower) prints which were a popular form of artistic expression in Edo Japan (1603-1868).
