Kirtika Kain’s Western Sydney apartment on Dharug Country is crowded with boxes of materials and new canvases. She came back from a residency in Italy in late 2022 and since then she’s been living alongside her work, preparing for her solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 and for the Biennale of Sydney next year. The cohabitation has been intense and sometimes messy, but Kain says studio life is teaching her new confidence.
Within her warehouse studio in the industrial area of Coburg North, Melbourne, with her dog Merri in tow, Isadora Vaughan creates sculptural installations that sustain a visceral tension between incongruent materials and forms. Her work is showing at STATION Gallery Melbourne.
“At times, your emotions might be conflicted by the outside world, and what is happening around you, but the heart and the mind are always intimately connected.” Karen Black takes us into her practice and thoughts, and her inspiring Sydney studio.
Ceramicist James Lemon creates often irreverent, yet sublimely aesthetic, ceramic works. Ahead of his solo at Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney, and his showing in ‘Melbourne Now’, we visited his light-filled studio, talking about his process, insects and religion, faith and humour.
Sarah crowEST is particularly known for her “strap-on paintings”—large, wearable objects on stretched cloth that can be exhibited or worn. Ahead of her inclusion in Melbourne Now and her solo at LON Gallery, we caught crowEST in the final days of her residency at Billilla Mansion in Melbourne, where she talks through the importance of sustainability.
Julia Gutman works with textiles donated by family and friends, creating layered figurative tableaux. We stepped inside her studio in Lewisham in Sydney’s inner west, learning how connection is central to her practice.
Kate Rohdes’s whimsical sculptures are simultaneously natural, unnatural, and even supernatural. In a space shared with her fluffy ginger cat Lion and her 6-year-old son, Rohde’s warehouse in Melbourne’s Northcote is a busy site of creativity and play.
“It was like an open studio and an exhibition space and a home space, everything kind of intermingled in a really lovely way.”
An artist, curator and academic, David Sequeira’s multidisciplinary practice has spanned over three decades, with colour as its driving force. From his home studio in West Melbourne—where he creates across his house—he discusses his all-encompassing approach to art making, as well as his bold exhibition, All the things I should have said that I never said, and its relationship to his Indian background.
“And being on Country has given me permission to speak loudly,” says artist Leanne Tobin, “to tell the truth about what has happened to the Dharug, to my family, and also to make work about the shared need to care for Country.” We visited the artist in her studio ahead of her current showing at Biennale of Sydney.
