reVision Symposium
A discussion about contemporary arts practice with artists, writers and curators.
A national audience joined local and national speakers online in three sessions focusing on community, collaboration and ambition for the times we live in.
Featuring synchronised activities designed to enhance online viewing while engaging in meaningful conversations around critical optimism, collective action and building a healthy arts sector.
Held on Saturday November 13, 2021: 11am – 5pm
The Symposium was held online to spark conversation Australia wide.
The reVision Symposium was FREE for Guildhouse members, $20 covid hardship or $40 for non-members.
The Sessions
The symposium hosted three panels looking at; ambition and momentum during a pandemic; growing and sustaining community and collaboration and; utopian future – what does a healthy, sustainable, intelligent, experimental arts sector look like?
Session 1: ambition and momentum
Three artists discuss how they feed ambition and continue momentum despite changing parameters. Many artists have experienced in-person exhibitions move online, project dates move and opportunities dissolve. Join three artists as they discuss their responses, particularly with the presentation of solo exhibitions, and motivations during this time. Curator Hannah Presley guides the conversation.
Speakers: Honor Freeman (SA), Maree Clarke (VIC), Salote Tawale (NSW).
Chair: Hannah Presley (VIC)
Session 2: growing and sustaining community and collaboration
Growing and sustaining community and collaboration during the time of a pandemic has been difficult for many, but adversity has fostered opportunities for some to expand and reconnect in ways unimagined until now. Experienced in independent arts practice, festival management and the shared studio model, Amber Cronin leads a discussion around building connection and community.
Speakers: Sim Luttin (VIC), James Tylor (ACT), Clare Needham (VIC).
Chair: Amber Cronin (SA)
Session 3: utopian future
Andy Butler shapes a conversation questioning traditional modes of engagement and delivery in the arts and investigates the ambitions and ideals of the sector.
Three artists, wearing multiple hats such as festival CEO, mentor and collaborator discuss their experiences and aspirations for a critically positive, sustainable industry.
Speakers: Jamie Lewis (VIC), Catherine Truman (SA), Joel Spring (NSW).
Chair: Andy Butler (VIC)
Synchronised Activities
The symposium included live interactive activities to enhance the viewers experience. Create a costume or mask with The Bait Fridge that will then be used in a collaborative performance with the group to close the Symposium. Tanya Voges will incorporate the art of movement for both presenters and participants to move their bodies.
We encouraged participants to leave their video on and to come together with the national arts community. All activities were family friendly, so bringing them to the screen to join the experience was encouraged.
art of movement
Interdisciplinary artist Tanya Voges (SA) will bring an element of movement into the Symposium, presenting a mini workshop embodying wellbeing for all participants and presenters to participate in.
Participants will be working with what they have within the space they are joining in from, exploring the art of movement while thinking through the discussions they have witnessed and participated in. Using the body as a vehicle of thought, preparing for the next session.
create and perform
The Bait Fridge present a DIY BYO costume and masking workshop. By attaching what you have around you to your body, The Bait Fridge will prolong your life expectancy. Using your resourcefulness, improvisation and lateral thinking, you will stretch the limits of Zoom’s capabilities to create a small rectangular artwork using your webcam.
Once all participants are bejewelled with resourcefulness and have their choreographies all worked out, we will engage in a collective movement. We will all create a performance party to music. For twenty minutes Zoom will experience the most colourful display of hyper colour miscellaneous.
Create and Perform with The Bait Fridge is inclusive of all abilities and is an activity suitable for children and adults.
Welcome to Country:
The reVision Symposium was opened with a Welcome to Country from Michael Kumatpi Marrutya O’Brien, a descendant of the Kaurna (Adelaide Plains) and Narrunga (Yorke Peninsula) people.
The Speakers:
Session 1: ambition and momentum
Hannah Presley (VIC)
Chair
Hannah Presley is an Aboriginal curator based in Melbourne. She is a Director of Agency and was most recently curator of Indigenous art, National Gallery of Victoria. Presley was the inaugural Yalingwa curator at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, where she curated A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness in 2018 and was First Nations Assistant Curator for Tracey Moffatt at the 57th Venice Biennale.
Her practice focuses on the development of creative projects with Aboriginal artists, working closely with artists, learning about the techniques, history and community that inform their making to help guide her curatorial process.
View our talk with Hannah as part of the Perspectives lecture series here.
Honor Freeman (SA)
Honor Freeman is an artist living and working in the Fleurieu Peninsula on Ngarrindjeri land in South Australia, whose practice utilises the mimetic properties of porcelain, crafting objects that belie their materiality and purpose.
Exhibiting since 2000, Honor’s work is held in numerous public collections including the NGV, Art Gallery of South Australia, ArtBank and Washington DC’s National Musuem of Women in the Arts. Her works feature in the publication 101 Contemporary Australian artists, published by the NGV, and the international publication Ceramics Masterclass : creative techniques of 100 great artists, by Louisa Taylor.
Maree Clarke (VIC)
Born 1961, Wamba Wamba/Latji Latji/Wadi Wadi Country, Swan Hill, Victoria. Lives and works on Wurundjeri/Boon Wurrung Country, Narrm (Melbourne). Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung, south-east region
Maree Clarke is a pivotal figure in the reclamation and promotion of south-east Australian Aboriginal art practices. Her continuing desire to affirm and reconnect with her cultural heritage has seen her revivification of traditional possum skin cloaks and her contemporary necklace designs using river reeds, kangaroo teeth and echidna quills. Her multimedia installations including photography, sculpture and video further explore the customary ceremonies and rituals of her Ancestors. Clarke’s work has featured centrally in many exhibitions across Australia, and is the focus of a major career survey, Ancestral Memory, at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne in 2021.
See more about Ancestral Memory here.
Salote Tawale (NSW)
Salote Tawale is a multi-disciplinary artist whose research explores identity within collective systems, focussing on immigrant histories. Tawale draws on personal experiences of race, class, ethnicity and gender formed growing up in suburban Australia. Tawale is currently completing a studio residency at The Clothing Store, Carriageworks and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Tawale has received the Inaugural Create NSW Visual Arts Fellowship and in 2018, undertook an Australia Council for the Arts residency in London, researching colonial archives of Fijian objects and images. Tawale is an associate Lecturer in Screen Arts at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney.
First break: create with The Bait Fridge
The Bait Fridge
The Bait Fridge is a multi-disciplinary collective from South Australia whose members collaborate under a unified banner to create works and performances which combine the practices of music, art, dance and theatre. The Bait Fridge incorporate elaborate costume construction, interactive art installations, experimental music, and audience workshops into their practice to create exciting performances and works.
Session 2: growing and sustaining community and collaboration
Amber Cronin (SA)
Chair
Amber Cronin (she/her) is a South Australian cross-disciplinary artist living and working on Kaurna Yerta. Cronin’s practice as an ecology of modalities resulting in projects (studio practice, gallery based work, socially engaged projects, facilitation, programming, workshops, research) that work together in fulfilling and meaningful ways. As a facilitator, her practice is deeply centred around community–grass roots and artist-led initiatives. Her studio experiments are gathered and displayed in combinations that facilitate meditations on connection and discovery, utilising elements of textiles, performance, moulding and casting. Cronin’s work often finds its genesis in the oscillation between global phenomenon and her own localised experience of the natural world.
As founding co-director of The Mill (providing arts programming adjacent to a community of studio spaces), Amber has been focused on creating a space for dialogue between visual arts and performance/dance. Her involvement with The Mill exemplifies her interest in audience driven works and community development through artist-led projects. Amber is a freelancer as program curator for organisations and festivals including South Australia’s Nature Festival, Papershell Farm and developing independent artist-led research projects. The relationships fostered through these roles are foundational to her relational arts practice.
Sim Luttin (VIC)
Curator & Gallery Manager, Arts Project Australia
Co-founder Art et al., Inclusive International Platform
Artist, Craftsperson & Contemporary Jeweller
Sim is an arts professional, curator, artist and contemporary jeweller. As Curator & Gallery Manager she has led the gallery and exhibition program at Arts Project Australia for 13 years. She fosters innovative curatorial projects, including Art et al., and brokers collaborations between artists, galleries, and arts institutions, growing APA’s exhibitions publications, artwork leasing, sales and image licensing programs. She has travelled extensively having curated, written, and represented APA and its artists at international forums. She was a member of the Supported Studio Network (SSN), was vice-chair of the Craft Victoria board and is currently on the Public Galleries Association (PGAV) board, and Melbourne Advisory Group, Decentring Australian Art. Sim has a passion for supporting neurodiverse artists to be seen, represented, and connected in contemporary art and culture ecologies.
Clare Needham (VIC)
Clare Needham is a curator and creative producer based in Kyneton, Victoria. Clare has realised many large and small scale exhibitions and events, socially engaged projects, public programs and commissions working in collaboration with a breadth of Australian and international artists, fellow curators, cultural collections and diverse community groups. Since 2012, she has been a curator at Bendigo Art Gallery leading the development and delivery of exhibitions from the historical to the contemporary.
Clare is a founding member and Co-Director of Kyneton Contemporary Inc. a regionally-based arts collective dedicated to cultivating quality arts practice, meaningful community and audience engagement and capacity building in regional Victoria with a primary focus on the Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial.
Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial 19 – 27 March, 2022:
https://kynetoncontemporary.com
Hanna Tai’s KCAT project:
https://kynetoncontemporary.com/artists/hanna-tai
Kyneton Contemporary Inc. publication – Force Fields: Art, Architecture and Audience – documenting the inaugural Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial held in 2018:
https://kynetoncontemporary.com/store/force-fields-book
James Tylor (ACT)
James Tylor is an Australian contemporary multi-disciplinary visual artist whose practice explores Australian environment, culture and social history. These mediums include photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, sound, scents and food. He explores Australian cultural representations through the perspectives of his multicultural heritage that comprises Nunga (Kaurna), Māori (Te Arawa) and European (English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch and Norwegian) ancestry.
Tylor’s work focuses largely on the history of 19th century Australia and its continual effect on present day issues surrounding cultural identity and the environment. His research, writing and artistic practice has focused most specifically on Kaurna indigenous culture from the Adelaide Plains region of South Australia and more broadly European colonial history in Southern Australia. His practice also explores Australian indigenous plants and the environmental landscape of Southern Australia.
Second break: art of movement
Tanya Voges (SA)
Interdisciplinary Artist Tanya Voges creates choreography for theatre and gallery spaces which invite audiences to engage, participate, feel immersed and explore trace. Tanya works and resides on the unceded lands of the Peramangk peoples of the Adelaide Hills. She is a graduate of VCA, with BA in Dance and was a member of Tasdance 2004-9 and has danced throughout Australia and internationally.
Engaging with collaborators of various disciplines Tanya brings her experience in dance, drawing, community engagement and dance film making to make multimedia performance works, live dance pieces and dance for screen.
Session 2: utopian future
Andy Butler (VIC)
Chair
Andy Butler is a writer, curator and artist based in Naarm (Melbourne). His writing on art and politics has been published to wide acclaim, appearing in The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, Art+Australia, Overland, Runway and more, as well as in publications for institutions such as the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, MUMA and Buxton Contemporary.
Butler is the program curator at West Space, one of Australia’s preeminent independent art organisations. With an interest in investigating structures of power, and the political, cultural and interpersonal legacies of Western history, his recent curatorial projects include Those Monuments Don’t Know Us (2019) at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre and Always there and all a part (2017) at BLINDSIDE.
Jamie Lewis (VIC)
Based on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne, JAMIE LEWIS is a Singaporean-Australian artist, curator, dramaturg and facilitator. She creates and curates site-responsive performances that engage audiences as participants, and communities as artists; and often works with autobiographical stories, conversation and food.
Committed to diversifying practice, Jamie seeks alternative models in her work and a re-imagining of leadership, governance, and structures. Jamie is currently CEO / Executive Director at Next Wave. She has previously been the Program Manager at TNA (Theatre Network Australia), on the Board of MAV (Multicultural Arts Victoria), and was in the 2018 cohort of Australia Council for the Arts’ Future Leaders program.
Catherine Truman (SA)
Catherine Truman is an established artist working across the disciplines of art and science. She is a co-founder and current partner of Gray Street Workshop, an internationally renowned artist-run workshop established in 1985 in Adelaide, South Australia.
Truman’s practice is renowned for its diversity and depth and incorporates, objects, contemporary jewellery, digital imagery, film and installation works with a focus upon the parallels between artistic process and scientific method.
During 2019 Truman was artist in residence at the State Herbarium and Botanic Gardens of South Australia and the Flinders Centre for Ophthalmology, Eye and Vision Research, School of Medicine, Flinders University undertaking The Visible Light Project: experiments in light and perception. Working alongside botanists, horticulturalists and an ophthalmologic photographer Truman researched the parallels between the ways in which the human eye and plants process light.
Catherine Truman’s major solo exhibition titled Shared Reckonings was presented in the Museum of Economic Botany and the Dead House in the Botanic Gardens of South Australia as a part of the 2021 Adelaide Festival and explored a creative response to these paired cross-disciplinary residencies.
Joel Spring (NSW)
Joel Sherwood-Spring, a Wiradjuri man raised between Redfern and Alice Springs, is a Sydney based Masters of Architecture student and interdisciplinary artist currently focussing on the contested narratives of Sydney’s and Australia’s urban culture and indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation.
Joel began working with Future Method in 2017. Future Method Studio is a collaborative and interdisciplinary practice working across architecture, installation and speculative projects.
Closing: perform with The Bait Fridge
The Bait Fridge
The Bait Fridge is a multi-disciplinary collective from South Australia whose members collaborate under a unified banner to create works and performances which combine the practices of music, art, dance and theatre. The Bait Fridge incorporate elaborate costume construction, interactive art installations, experimental music, and audience workshops into their practice to create exciting performances and works.
The reVision initiative is generously supported by the Day Family Foundation, the City of Adelaide and Guildhouse donors through the 2021 Annual Appeal.
Images (L-R):
Arts Project Australia. Photograph courtesy Sim Luttin; Tarnanthi 2021 featuring works by Maree Clarke, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Photograph Saul Steed; Arts Project Australia. Photograph courtesy Sim Luttin; Under my Skin, The Delta Project, Next Wave Festival 2016. Photograph Sarah Walker; ISOLATE, Holy Rollers Psychache, 2018. Photograph Sam Roberts; The Bait Fridge. Photograph courtesy the artists; Mickey O’Brian, 2021. Photograph Sia Duff; Hannah Presley. Photograph Hayler Millar-Baker; Honor Freeman, 2021. Photograph Alex Beckett; Maree Clarke with Ancestral Memory, 2021, Melbourne © Maree Clarke/Vivien Anderson Gallery/National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Photograph Eugene Hyland; Love from here, 2021, Murray Art Museum Albury, NSW. Photograph Jeremy Weihrauch; The Bait Fridge. Photograph courtesy the artists; Amber Cronin. Photograph Thomas Borgas; Arts Project Australia. Photograph courtesy Sim Luttin; Clare Needham. Photograph courtesy the speaker; James Tylor. Photograph Tony Kearney; Tanya Voges, Birth. Repeated. Postcards from Motherhood Exhibition at The Mill. Photograph Sam Roberts; Andy Butler. Photograph courtesy the speaker; Jamie Lewis. Photograph Leah McIntosh; Catherine Truman. Photograph Grant Hancock; Joel Spring. Photograph courtesy the speaker; The Bait Fridge. Photograph courtesy the artists.
James Dodd
Fran Callen
