Varia Karipoff is a former editor at Art Guide Australia. She holds a BA in International Studies, is fluent in Russian and naturally, is fond of poetry.
“It’s pretty rudimentary,” Bryan Spier says of his garage studio. “I never shut that door, it feels too claustrophobic. I just rug up [in winter], I wear like 20 jumpers,” he half jokes.
Amanda Marburg is “a painter, not a sculptor,” she maintains. Her works might have a starting point in film or fairy tale, or riff on a moment in art history, but it’s the modest ‘sketch’ in plasticine that lends a distinctive look to her work and has her reiterating her vocational calling.
“A keystone work in No Black Seas is a collectively authored large-scale sculpture made from over 50 sand-casted glass [pieces],” says ACE Open artistic director Patrice Sharkey.
Olga Bennett is a Moscow-born, Melbourne-based artist whose practice encompasses an array of mediums that are united by the artist’s keen enquiry into the idea of knowledge.
Gregory Hodge’s illusionary paintings trick the eye into seeing lavish, three-dimensional swirls of paint.
“The space has this strange affecting thing as well; it magnifies, it frames. It’s almost like the proscenium arch. We’re performing, but the world’s performing outside the archway. To work here is to be seen, but to see as well.” — Ceri Hann
“I was aware that the scale of my work is relative to me. I had created a habituated practice relative to my body size and it was something I sought to extend. I wanted to create larger, more immersive scenes in painting.”
In a liminal space between a stairwell and a wall – for all intents and purposes a corridor – we find Warren O’Brien at work. He is wearing lime-green tradesman earmuffs and a long dustcoat; his clothes, right down to his New Balance sneakers, are speckled with paint.
There is a fascinating duality at play in Lewis Carroll’s darkly absurd masterpiece, which is not lost on Launceston-based artist Junko Go.
Millar-Baker uses digital technology to carefully render place through photographic assemblage, layering details found in a landscape to create an alternative narrative.
“My first exhibition about Black Mountain College was The Hereafter at Galerie pompom in 2017; the day after the show opened I found out that I had the job in Mildura. I was going to this remote place to teach – there was a weird synergy.” – Kylie Banyard
For four days, much of Australia’s ceramics community will descend on Princes Wharf in Hobart for a series of panel discussions, presentations and artist talks with international luminaries and local potters alike.
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