“Our country and culture has been there all the time, it is our strength, our dream, and our stories. No one can take that away from us. So, we’ve got to tell that story and share it.” – Jimmy Frank, Tennant Creek Brio
“Sometimes it’s like I have a big spinning sort of feeling in my body: hard to soft, angles and sharpness, then really beautiful and cuddly and soft.”
“I do something every day, even if it’s only a scribble. But of course I still have doubts. There is no certainty in this game. There are no rules.”
Alex Seton is known for his marble sculptures. These carved stone works often mimic the soft folds of fabric, but they have a hard political edge.
“How good can we get something to look, that’s got no value, really?” says artist Natalie Thomas. “I use $2 shop paint generally. I just look around at what I’ve got access to and use it, see how good I can get it.”
Trent Walter has run Negative Press, a publisher of limited-edition prints and artist books, for over a decade. Now, for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Negative Press is home to a new piece of equipment—the Heidelberg GTO 52, an offset lithography press—and a new collaboration with designer Stuart Geddes to produce a publication, NIRIN NGAAY.
“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.
“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
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.
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