Event Type: Exhibitions

Justine Wake

Justine Wake is from Meanjin, Queensland and her recent Arts Residency at Salamanca Arts Centre has focussed on harvesting the crops grown from seeds planted over the past few years of her family life and work as a psychotherapist.

The majority of Justine’s art making is a response to ideas and experiences that run through her mind as she goes about daily life. In these reflections, she is often interested in the experience of being ‘betwixt and between’ – who do we become when we are in a space that has no context or a space that exists only due to being between two different states.

“I am in middle age now, an interesting kind of in between time. As a psychotherapist I also spend a lot of my working life in this space with people- supporting emergence from unwelcome or uncomfortable places in between. I am intuitively and also professionally comfortable inhabiting this realm. To explore this in my imagery, I am drawn to the metaphorical richness of colour, the botanical world, animals and the elements.”
– Justine Wake

Jordan Cowan

Jordan Cowen is an indigenous multi-disciplinary contemporary artist/designer based on Muwinina Country. His artistic expressions over time have become grunge yet direct in aesthetics. Jordan composes works through processes of construction, destruction, decay, and reclamation. His practice has expanded from a continuous inspiration of ruins, archives, street art, and nipaluna’s urban environments. Grasping on topics that connect/concern culture, displacement, and temporality of place.

Matt Arbuckle

b.1987, Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau, New Zealand. Lives Tāmaki Makaurau/ Auckland and Naarm, Melbourne

Matt Arbuckle splits his time living and working as a practicing artist between Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, New Zealand and Naarm, Melbourne, Australia. He graduated from Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2009. Arbuckle has held solo exhibitions at Daine Singer (Melbourne), Two Rooms (Auckland), Vermont Studio Centre (USA), Bus Projects (Melbourne), Parlour Projects (Hawks Bay, New Zealand), Tim Melville (Auckland), Paulnache Gallery (Gisborne, New Zealand), Baustelle Gallery (Berlin). Group exhibitions include ChaShama (New York), Drill Hall Gallery (Canberra), Hugo Michell Gallery (Adelaide), TCB (Melbourne), Hanging Valley (Melbourne), The Pah Homestead, TSB Wallace Arts Trust (Auckland), Arbuckle has also participated in Sydney Contemporary, and Melbourne and Auckland art fairs.

In 2017 Arbuckle was the recipient of the James Wallace Art Fellowship to Vermont Studio Centre, USA. He has held recent solo exhibitions in 2020 and 2021 at Two Rooms (Auckland), Daine Singer (Melbourne) and Hastings City Art Gallery (Hastings, New Zealand). In 2021 he undertook a residency at Driving Creek (New Zealand). Arbuckle’s work is held in the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, James Wallace Arts Trust and Arthur Roe Collection.

Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler

Wona Bae
b.1976, Muan, South Korea. Lives nipaluna/Hobart and Narrm/Melbourne

Charlie Lawler
b. 1980, nipaluna/ Hobart. Lives nipaluna/Hobart and Narrm/Melbourne

Artists Wona Bae (South Korea) and Charlie Lawler (Australia) are a collaborative duo, who have been making work together since 2004. They are internationally recognised for their experimental and concept-driven installations and sculptures that navigate the visceral and symbiotic connections between people and nature. Central to their practice are the essences of minimalism, harmony and balance. Bae and Lawler present the natural world as active and central in an era of polarisation, inequality, inaction and apathy. Using a language of texture and reduction, their work combines immersive installation, sculpture, relief, sound and photography.

Bae and Lawler have held solo exhibitions at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2019/20); Backwoods Gallery, Melbourne (2022 and 2019); See You Soon Gallery, Tokyo (2017); and Koskela Gallery, Sydney (2016). They were commissioned to create a major new installation for The National at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021), and have undertaken other major installations throughout Australia, South Korea, Japan, Spain and the UK. Bae and Lawler have won the 2019 Yering Galley Award and the 2018 Yarra Valley Arts/ RACV Award. They have undertaken residencies at Artspace, Sydney (2021) and Gregans Retreat, Lisdillon, Tasmania (2020).

Sean Bailey
b.1977 Kaurna/Adelaide, lives Naarm/Melbourne

Sean Bailey’s paintings and sculptures are predominantly abstract, at once hard-edged and loose, precise and improvised. Bailey uses materials such as paint, paper, linen, wood, hydrostone and concrete to gather and harness a painterly energy, manifest non-representational forms and obscure collage and shapes drawn from his personal lexicon of painted formal, organic and symbolic imagery. Bailey is interested in the strict confines and parameters of the painting surface, seeing what can be conjured within the pictorial space, the process and chance of his practice, its limitations and also its potential to extend beyond the border of the picture frame.

Bailey’s solo exhibitions include: Sydney Contemporary; RM, Auckland; First Draft, Sydney; and in Melbourne at Daine Singer, Gertrude Contemporary, Neon Parc, West Space, T.C.B., Joint Hassles and Clubs Project Space. He has participated in group exhibitions at University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; Gambia Castle, Auckland; Special, Auckland; Amsterdam Biennial; Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney; CAST, Hobart; and in many Melbourne spaces including: Spring 1883 Art Fair, Gertrude Contemporary, Sutton Project Space, Hell Gallery, Bus Gallery, Utopian Slumps, T.C.B. and Seventh. As a musician he is known for playing in groups including Paeces, Wasted Truth, Vivian Girls, Lakes, TOL and TAX as well as running the private press label Inverted Crux. He has a BFA (2005) from the Victorian College of Arts and has been a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary.

Bronwyn Dillon
b. 1982, nipuluna, lutruwita/Tasmania. Lives nipaluna and Western Australia

Bronwyn Dillon is a proud born palawa woman with strong cultural connections. A muka nawnta — salt water sista. Dillon is a shell stringer and basket weaver, learning the ancient techniques, passed onto her by her elders. As well as being a cultural artist and knowledge keeper, Dillon is a mother to 3 pliri (boys), whom she is bringing up strong and proud. Dillon’s creations are inspired by her culture, her people, and Mother Earth. Each unique piece is created with strong cultural knowledge and explodes with positive energy.

Eloise Kirk
b. 1984, New South Wales. Lives St Marys, lutriwita/Tasmania

Eloise Kirk works predominantly with collage and poured resins, creating works about suspension, erasure and fragmentation. Often these works contain a central rock or geological form, severed from its context and suspended in resin. Kirk’s works contain landscape imagery sourced from books, which are collaged into her sculptures and paintings, with the torn edges of the books they are ripped from left visible. Her landscapes and mountainous forms are devoid of recognisable locations and references, but favour mountainous peaks, vertiginous slopes, volcanic and geological formations: they are the landscape of the sublime.

Eloise Kirk lives and works from her home studio in St Mary’s, Tasmania, regularly showing in Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart. Having achieved Bachelor of Visual Arts with first class honours, she subsequently completed a Masters of Fine Arts with an Australian Postgraduate Award at Sydney College of the Arts in 2013. Since then, Kirk has exhibited solo in Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart and Christchurch, Chasm Gallery in New York. Her works have been part of group shows at Darren Knight Gallery, Roslyn Oxley, Art Space (Sydney), and the College of Fine Arts (Canterbury, New Zealand), Safari Arts Festival and the Underbelly Arts Festival. Kirk was a finalist in the Fisher’s Ghost Prize, the John Fries Emerging Art Award, the Macquarie Bank Emerging Artist Award and the Grace Cossington Smith Art Prize. In 2014 Kirk was awarded a two month Moya Dyring residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris. In 2019 she was the recipient of SHOTGUN8, a mentorship program supported by Contemporary Art Tasmania, MONA and Detached. Kirk is represented by Gallery 9, Sydney.

Grant Nimmo
b. 1979 Naarm/Melbourne. Lives Naarm/Melbourne)

Grant Nimmo has held solo exhibitions at Daine Singer (2021, 2016); Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland (2019); Fort Delta, Melbourne (2018); Westspace, Melbourne (2014); Chapter House Lane, Melbourne (2014); Sawtooth, Launceston (2013); Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne (2013, 2011, 2010); Stockroom Kyneton, Victoria (2012); TCB Art Inc (2011); Rearview Gallery, Melbourne (2010); and Evan Hughes Gallery, Sydney (2009). He has participated in group exhibitions at galleries including the National Gallery of Victoria, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Spring 1883, Bus Projects, Westspace, TCB Art Inc, Art Athena Athens Art Fair, Seventh, Anna Pappas, Death Be Kind, Korean International Art Fair, Melbourne Art Fair, and Gertrude Contemporary. Nimmo has a Bachelor of Fine Art from Monash University. His work is held in collections including the National Gallery of Victoria and Artbank.

Kate Tucker
b.1980 Canberra. Lives Melbourne/Naarm

Kate Tucker’s works are created through a collage-like accumulative process of layering, where paintings are cut and combined, with some pieces left raw and others subjected to continuous iterative changes. Alongside large new paintings are a series of hybrid painting/ sculpture works that have complex ceramic bases holding and supporting paintings. There is an interchangeability between material characteristics of painting and sculpture, textiles and printing, and a play between what is holding and what is being held, with an emphasis on literal and metaphoric supports.

Kate Tucker is a Melbourne/ Naarm-based artist. Her recent projects include solo exhibitions at Daine Singer, Galerie Pompom, Art Stage Singapore, Chapter House Lane, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Platform and Helen Gory, and group exhibitions at NADA New York, Sutton Projects, Dutton Gallery, Caves, Tristian Koenig, SPRING1883, Incinerator Gallery, Bus Projects and LON Gallery. Tucker has been a finalist in the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, The Substation Prize, Albany Art Prize, Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize, The Churchie Emerging Art Prize, Geelong Acquisitive Print Awards, and The Archibald Prize. Her work is held in collections including Artbank, Shepparton Art Museum and Bendigo Art Gallery. Tucker graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2009.

Alice Wormald
b.1987 Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau, New Zealand. Lives Melbourne/Naarm)

Alice Wormald creates paintings depicting strange constructed spaces where surface and depth, representation and abstraction and naturalism and artifice converge. The works often emerge through the process of image collection and collage. She exercises a controlled sense of representation, grounded in concerns around the act of painting and the physicality of paint itself, while reflecting a hallucinatory experience of space and nature.

Alice Wormald completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with first class honours at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne in 2011. She has held six solo exhibitions at Daine Singer, as well as solo exhibitions at Gallery 9, Linden New Art, Blindside and Shifted. Her work has been exhibited in Synthetica, a NETS touring exhibition at Wangaratta Art Gallery, Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery, Counihan Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery, Latrobe Regional Gallery and Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. She has also been included in exhibitions including Accession, Bundoora Homestead (2018), Analogue Art in a Digital World, RMIT Art Gallery (2018), Gardening is not a Rational Act at c3 Contemporary Art Space (2017), Visiting Painting at Horsham Regional Art Gallery (2016), Imagined Worlds, Town Hall Gallery (2016) and Vertigo, an Asialink touring exhibition at Galeri Soemardja, Bandung, Indonesia, Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Taipei, Taiwan and POSCO Art Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2014). Other group exhibitions include Sydney Contemporary, Spring 1883 Art Fair (Sydney 2017 and 2015, Melbourne 2020, 2018, 2016 and 2014) and New Horizons at Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale (2013).

Wormald is the winner of the 2022 Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize and the 2022 Grace Cossington Smith Early Career Award. She has also been a finalist in the Bayside Art Prize (2020, 2017), Darebin Art Prize (2017, 2015), Bruny Island Art Prize (2016), City of Albany Art Prize (2015), Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (2018 and 2014), the John Leslie Art Prize (2016, 2014 – Highly Commended, 2012), the Macquarie Group Prize for Emerging Artists (2013), and the Banyule City Prize for Works on Paper (2013).

Her work is held in the ACU, Artbank, Bayside Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery, Darebin City Council, Macquarie Group, Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Fiona Myer, Artisit and Joyce Nissan Collections.

CURATOR

Daine Singer
b.1980 Victoria, Australia. Lives Naarm/Melbourne

Daine Singer is a curator and art dealer. Since 2011 she has run her own independent gallery, representing a group of fifteen artists from Australia and New Zealand with a dynamic program that includes solo exhibitions by gallery artists, as well as projects by unrepresented artists and occasional curated exhibitions. As an adjunct to the exhibition program, she has also published four limited edition artist books through her independent small press, VERSION: Lane Cormick NOHARDATTACK, Jordan Marani EGGS, Kate Moss Wild Thoughts and Peter Davidson Words/ Lines.

Curatorial projects external to her gallery program include Experimenta Utopia Now: International Biennial of Media Art (curatorium, touring Australia 2010-2011), Dream Weavers (CAST Gallery, Hobart 2010), Draw the Line: the Architecture of Lab (National Gallery of Victoria 2009), The Nauru Elegies (DJ Spooky and Annie K Kwon, Experimenta at Blindside and Shed 4, 2010) and Big Screen Shorts (Federation Square 2010).

Before opening her own gallery, Singer has held positions including Gallery Manager at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Associate Curator at Experimenta Media Arts, and Curator at the Museum of Chinese Australian History. She has a BA (art history and history), Grad Dip in Arts Management, and Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne. Singer currently sits on the Business Advisory Council of the City of Yarra and the MLC Friends of Art Committee, previously she has been a board member of Blindside. She has been a mentor to the University of Melbourne’s Arts Career Mentoring Program, the Seventh Gallery Emerging Curator Program, Wundergym, Contemporary Art Tasmania’s Shotgun program, and The Smith Family’s iTrack Mentor program.
www.dainesinger.com

Hayley Millar Baker

 b. 1990, Melbourne, AU 

Hayley Millar Baker is First Nations (Gunditjmara/Djabwurrung) woman born in Melbourne, Australia (1990). She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2010) and Master of Fine Arts (2017) at RMIT University in Melbourne. 

Through examining the role our identities play in translating and conveying our experiences, Hayley works across photography, collage, and film to interrogate and abstract autobiographical narratives and themes relating to her own identity. Her oblique storytelling methods and methodologies encourage us to embrace that the passage of identity, culture, and memory are not linear nor fixed. 

Hayley’s works are held in significant public institutional collections across Australia and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Hayley has been a finalist in several prestigious national art prizes including the Ramsay Art Prize (2019 and 2021), Bowness Photography Prize (2021), John Fries Award (2019), and international prizes including Hong Kong’s Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2021), and United Arab Emirates Vantage Point Sharjah 9 (2021), and has won the John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship for the National Photography Prize (2020), the Darebin Art Prize (2019), and the Special Commendation Award for The Churchie National Emerging Art Prize (2017). She was selected as one of eight artists to exhibit in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Primavera: Young Australian Artists (2018) and has been awarded several residencies including the Artist-in-residence at Monash University Prato, Italy (2022), the First Nations Residency at Collingwood Yards (2021), the Photography Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria (2019). Hayley was a feature artist in PHOTO2021: International Festival of Photography (2021) and has exhibited in other art festivals including the International Ballarat Foto Biennale (2017), and Tarnanthi (2017). Hayley will present a new commission for the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia (2022). 

In 2021 Hayley presented her first early career-survey ‘There we were all in one place’ at UTS Gallery, curated by Stella McDonald. The exhibition brought together five pivotal bodies of work from Hayley’s early career for the first time and will tour Australia in 2022. 

Millar Baker’s work is held in significant collections across Australia: Australian War Memorial, Canberra; Melbourne Museum, Melbourne; Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Melbourne; Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne; Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), Albury; State Library of Victoria, Melbourne; University of Technology Sydney, Sydney; University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney; Warrnambool Art Gallery, Warrnambool; Shepparton Art Museum (SAM), Shepparton; Deakin University Art Gallery, Melbourne; Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Horsham; City of Melbourne, Melbourne. 

Hayley Millar Baker is represented by Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne, Australia. 

Jessie French

Based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, the work of Jessie French explores speculative futures through algae-based bioplastic and water-based ecologies. Housed within an ethos of consumption, sustainability and regeneration, her practice invites others to engage with the possibilities of a post-petrochemical world. Through experimenting with other materials, she explores the potential of closed-loop systems of (re)use and conscious consumption and interaction with objects. In 2020, French founded OTHER MATTER, an experimental design studio working with algae-based bioplastics which engages others in the possibilities of new materials though objects, experiences and futures.

Loren Kronemyer | Artist Talk, Facilitator

Loren Kronemyer (b.1988) is an artist living and working in remote lutruwita (Tasmania), Australia. Her experimental artworks are aimed at exploring ecological futures and survival skills through hands-on immersion and deep learning. In 2021, she learned to hand-build millet brooms from Tumut, the last factory in Australia, setting up her own self-sufficient replica of their factory in the project Millennial Reaper (Fremantle Biennale, Melbourne Art Fair). In 2018, she learned to shoot arrows, then became a coach so she could train her audience to shoot at her artwork for the project After Erika Eiffel (ANTI Festival of Live Art, MONA FOMA). In 2016, her collaboration Pony Express created Ecosexual Bathhouse, a touring queer sex club for the entire ecosystem. In 2017, Kronemyer was the first artist in residence at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. She collaborates frequently with laboratories and received the first Masters of Biological Arts Degree from SymbioticA Lab at the University of Western Australia.

Ross Coulter

Ross Coulter is a visual artist with a BFA (Hons) and MFA (Research) from the Victoria College of the Arts. He has exhibited both locally and internationally at a number of gallery spaces. As the recipient of the 2010-2011 George Mora Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria he undertook a project that involved the release of 10,000 paper planes into the Domed Reading Room of the State Library of Victoria. His photographic series titled “Audience” (2013-2016) was exhibited at the NGV in 2017. In 2018 Ross developed and presented a photographic series titled “Corporate Portraits” that was presented at the Warburton Arts Centre. His recent artworks have been an exploration of photographic portraiture, performance and community participation. Ross has received numerous awards, artist residences and grants.

Dr Meredith Turnbull

Meredith’s practice focuses on the world of things as the form-creating basis of culture. She is interested in making and material, and the experiential and temporal register of forms. Her practice engages various disciplines and approaches to making, writing and curating. Her artworks engage diverse scales, art historical traditions and genres – and manifest in connections between the body and; sculpture, images, decorative objects and jewellery.

Recent projects include Closer, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne University, 2018 and SHE TURNS at c3 Contemporary Art Space, Hardbody Sculpture at Daine Singer and Softbody Sculpture at Pieces of Eight in 2017. Turnbull has held solo exhibitions at Station, MADA Gallery, Pieces of Eight, Bus Projects, The Other Side, West Space, the Centre for Contemporary Photography, TCB and The Narrows. She has exhibited in group exhibitions at galleries including the Heide Museum of Modern Art, the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne University, the National Gallery of Victoria, Craft Victoria, Jam Factory, Adelaide, Melbourne Art Fair, the VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery and the George Paton Gallery. Recent curated projects include Material Exchange at c3 Projects (2017), Form and Flex (2015) and Rock Solid (2011), Pieces of Eight, Melbourne, A Condition of Change, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne (2011), Risk Potential, Die Ecke, Santiago (2010) and Once More with Feeling, VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne (2009).

Meredith Turnbull completed a Bachelor of Art (Honours) in Art History at LaTrobe University in 2000, a Bachelor of Fine Art (Gold and Silversmithing) at RMIT University in 2005 and a PhD at Monash University in the field of Sculpture and Spatial Practice in 2016. In 2016 Turnbull was co-editor (with Shelley McSpedden) of un Magazine issue 10.1. From 2006 to 2010 Turnbull was Gallery Manager and Curator of the VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery. She was editor of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s online magazine ACCAMag from 2004 to 2005 where she also worked as a Project Manager and Assistant to the Artistic Director. Meredith has lecturered in Art History at RMIT University specialising in Contemporary Art and C20th Craft and Design. She currently Coordinator of Bachelor of Fine Art First Year in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University.

Meredith Turnbull is represented by Daine Singer, Melbourne

Roma Turnbull-Coulter

Born in 2014, Roma Turnbull-Coulter is an emerging artist living on Boon Wurrung country. Her art practice includes painting, drawing, photography, video, performance and sculpture. Roma is in Grade 1, (when not being home-schooled due to COVID restrictions). Roma’s first exhibition was in 2016 when she was invited to collaborate with her mother Dr. Meredith Turnbull in the group exhibition Mum at the Stockroom in Kyneton, curated by Claire Needham. Roma has exhibited with her parents in the annual c3 fundraiser, Faux Studio, in 2016. In 2018 and 2019 she exhibited with her contemporaries from Monash Caulfield Childcare Centre at Monash University Museum of Art for her Childcare End of Year exhibition. Mathew Ware, director of Muse du Strip, invited Roma and her father Ross Coulter in 2019 to create an exhibition for his gallery which was titled Roma + Ross.

Yumemi Hiraki 

Yumemi Hiraki is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Nipaluna. Her practice delves into the interactions between memory, nostalgia, history and connection to place, while re-examining the relationship to her Japanese heritage. Viewing herself as a resident of cultural gaps, her works evokes a familiar yet foreign sense of longing, belonging and holding on, while hinting at life’s inevitable continuity and ephemerality. 

Yumemi is originally from Hiroshima, Japan. She completed her BFA(Sculpture and Spatial Practice) at the Victorian College of the Arts and has been an active Arts Worker while exhibiting and developing her practice in both Naarm and Nipaluna. Yumemi has a growing interest in community-based arts, mentorship and education, and currently also works as a Youth Arts Officer at the Youth Arts and Recreation Centre. 

Wendy Yu
Artist

Wendy Yu is an interdisciplinary artist actively practising in the fields of dance and urban media placemaking. She is a Masters graduate in Interaction Design and Electronic Arts at the University of Sydney and intends to further her research on creative interfaces between dance and city spaces through further research.

Her works of urban media placemaking have seen installation in Atlanta USA, the Powerhouse Museum Sydney, Carriageworks, the Inner West City Council, Woollahra City Council, numerous  arts festivals in Sydney, Melbourne, Poland, St. Petersburg, Beijing, Berlin, including Beijing Tech Arts Festival 2021, where she also gave a lecture on dance and computational design.

Wendy has also given lectures of dance and computational and interface design in Berlin as part of Stammtisch Arts Festival, Melbourne as part of Lucy Guerin and Temperance Hall, Sydney as part of Ausdance Australia and March Dance Festival.

Wendy Yu has undergone residencies with the Municipality of Woollahra, the Inner West City Council, Ausdance dance artist in residence residency program, March dance residency program, Bundanon residency program, Centre for Projection art residency etc. where she conducted theoretical research dance’s position in urban media art.

Bethany Reece (she/her)
Dancer

Bethany is a contemporary dance artist born in lutruwita/Tasmania. She began her training in 2016 at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). In 2018 Bethany was awarded the Palisade award for ‘most outstanding graduate’. Throughout her studies Bethany travelled to Taiwan as an exchange student with the Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) in 2017, and the following year toured the works The Resistance and Panthea by Brooke Leeder and Natalie Allen. In the same year Bethany staged her first choreographic work, This Transitory Weight. In 2019 Bethany was awarded a Bachelor of Arts (Dance) with First Class Honours from WAAPA and was a member of LINK Dance Company under the directorship of Michael Whaites. In her time with LINK she performed in works choreographed by Niv Marinberg, Scott Elstermann, Raewyn Hill, and Michael Whaites, and toured both nationally and internationally.

In 2020 Bethany became a developing artist with Co:3 Australia, and worked as an understudy for the production of Leviathan, a collaborative work with Circa performing both Leviathan and Stephanie Lake’s Colossus in Perth Festival 2020. Bethany has since returned to build her practice in lutruwita/Tasmania. Bethany received a Regional Arts Fellowship in 2020 to develop a new work that is in continued development. In 2021 Bethany was a collaborative choreographer on DRILL’s Leviathan, and dance artist with Second Echo Ensemble in the development of Charlie Smith’s Outside Boy. Bethany also worked as a performing artist in the Faro Experience at MONA in 2021, and as a casual lecturer delivering the unit Movement For Performers at the University of Tasmania. In 2022 Bethany performed in Rachel Ogle’s And The Earth Will Swallow Them Whole in the Perth Festival to great critical acclaim. Bethany is invested in work that is community centred, inclusive and has a social justice focus. Bethany believes dance has the ability to inspire a sense of belonging, and she is passionate about sharing this experience with dancers and nondancers alike.

Kyall Shanks
Dancer

Kyall is a Naarm/Melbourne based contemporary dance artist. His career has focused on finding a balance between performance, choreography and teaching work, and he is passionate about using the skills from these areas to increase the accessibility of dance through youth and community work. Since receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts Dance from the Victorian College of the Arts he has danced for Tasdance, Antony Hamilton Projects, Chunky Move, Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures, Opera Australia, The Delta Project and Liquidskin Dance Company. In 2017-2018 Kyall undertook an 8 month international residency program with DanceBox in Kobe, Japan, and then spent 3 months in Sweden as a member of ilYoung 2018. Through various programs and projects Kyall has engaged with community youth groups and schools as a teacher and choreographer, examples of this being the Arts Centre Melbourne/Matthew Bourne ‘Lord Of The Flies’ project, the 2019 Dance Massive work ‘Simulcast’ and Stephanie Lake’s 2020 mass community work/film ‘Multiply’. He works as Artistic Director to preprofessional youth dance company Yellow Wheel and through teaching work has represented the Victorian College of the Arts, Chunky Move, Ausdance Victoria, Arts Centre Melbourne, DRILL, Transit Dance and The Space Dance and Arts Centre.

Emma Porteus
Panel facilitator: ‘Dance in Urban Media Art’

Emma holds a Bachelor of Contemporary Arts (Honours). She believes deeply in the positive power of art to transform individuals and communities positively. Emma has over 15 years’ experience working as a performance-maker and producer of dance, community, and festival projects throughout Australia and internationally, including with Vrystaat Festival (South Africa), ANTI Festival (Finland), Sydney Festival (NSW), Dancehouse, FOLA, Melbourne Fringe Festival, Next Wave (Vic), Tracks (NT), Dark Mofo, Mona Foma, Tasdance, Ten Days on the Island, Festival of Voices, Junction Arts Festival, and Tasmania Performs (Tas). In her current role as Executive Producer of Situate Art in Festivals, she is really interested in performance and art-making models that connect people and places. She helps artists create and produce tourable live, visual art, and festival events that can be delivered in any community, in any country, to produce rich experiences that speak directly to the place, the people, and communities who help create it. 

Adam Wheeler
Panel facilitator: ‘Dance in Urban Media Art’

Adam is a Tasmanian born, Stompin and Victorian College of the Arts Alumni. Adam has performed for Chunky Move, Jo Lloyd, Circa Nica, 2NDTOE and Opera Australia and has made work for Lucy Guerin Inc (Pieces for Small Spaces), Stompin, QL2, Steps Youth Dance Company, fLing Physical Theatre, Tasdance and Chunky Move. As an Artistic Director, founded Yellow Wheel and 2NDTOE. Led AYDF in 2014 and 2017, The Space School of Performance Arts, Short+Sweet Dance and is currently the Artistic Director of Tasdance. Adam is curious about interdisciplinary making, providing pathways for artists to develop practice, and getting the community moving – all from his regional home of lutruwita/Tasmania.