ABOUT PRACTISE/ACCESS/PRACTICE:
Practise/Access/Practice brings together a group of artists to form a Knowledge Circle of peers working with disability and accessibility as core parts of their artmaking.
Over the course of 2023, the Knowledge Circle artists have met to share how they centre access in the way we create, think, and relate to others.
Access is a noun and a verb.
We PRACTISE access.
Access is culture.
Access is connection.
Access is felt experience.
Access is PRACTICE.
Throughout the year, the group has attended projects at PACT as test cases and met online to share ideas and support one another. In August and October, they will spend time in residence at PACT, exchanging practice and engaging in dialogue about community, intersectionality, professionalisation, and representation.
Stay tuned for a multimedia website from the Knowledge Circle to be launched at the end of 2023.
This project is co-facilitated by Imogen Yang and Justine Shih Pearson and supported by the government partner, the City of Sydney.
Image description: Nine residency artists and facilitators are smiling while standing in front of PACT’s vibrant rainbow-coloured mural.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Alex Craig
Alex Craig (they/ them) is a Queer Blind dance artist and maker. Exploring belonging, connection, identity and place, Alex works collaboratively, opening and holding space for a collective experience of dance and storytelling not centred on the visual.
Alex utilises choreography, poetic and score based texts, sound and creative Audio Description to create inclusive experiences that invite audiences to participate. They make work for live performance and for the digital space. Most recently, Alex has been continuing development of collaborative Blindness centred dance methodologies which support non-sighted spatial navigation and non-verbal communication between dancers improvising together; through receiving a 2022 Critical Path research residency. They have also recently been working with Jeremy Lowrencev and Imogen Yang at The church Space Alexandria, continuing development of a work exploring home and belonging through the sharing of culture, language and lived histories.
Alex is a member of the MindsEye collective, with collaborators Imogen Yang and Gabriela Green Olea. The collective is dedicated to creating inclusive participatory dance works which present unseen dance performances through visualisation, Audio Description and embodiment. They are currently developing Mystery Call; a digital work which utilises conversation and written movement scores to create connections stretching across space and time.
Digby Webster
Digby Webster is a Sydney-based visual artist with a career spanning 10 years.
Digby works across a range of disciplines. He is a founding member of the Ruckus Ensemble, a contemporary performance group who create large scale productions and has also been a production designer and performer on award-winning short films '‘The Interviewer’ and ‘Heartbreak and Beauty’ with Bus Stop Films.
In 2014 Digby was the recipient for artist in residence at Bundanon and his work was awarded a 'Winning Work' and selected by BiG-i Art Project 2016 in Osaka, to be included with the travelling exhibition throughout Japan and Hong Kong.
Digby has exhibited in solo shows and group shows including Tin Sheds Gallery, Riverside Theatre Parramatta, DNA projects Chippendale 'Two Sydney Painters' with Marc Etheridge and at the Opera House as part of Accessible Arts’ AART.BOXX 2007. He has been invited to exhibit his work at the Leichhardt Council library three years running and is a contributor to the Leichhardt Open Studio Trail.
Digby approaches art making as a part of his everyday life. He works in the mediums of oil pastels and acrylics. His work reflects strong evocative colours together with an expressive visual language of his own.
M. Sunflower
M. Sunflower is a culturally diverse First Nations Australian with disabilities. A descendant of the Aboriginal Warmuli people of the Dharug Nation, Lebanese post-war migrants, Chinese gold rush immigrants and UK convicts, M. Sunflower embodies the diverse ancestral legacy of Australia’s painful and complex colonial past.
She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Photomedia) from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, and is currently Co-Director at Firstdraft on the Board of Directors.
2021 projects included: a solo photographic exhibition in June 2021 as part of Artspace Ideas Platform, a Panel Talk for Arts Activated 2021, and exhibition works for Fairfield Museum and Gallery, Off The Wall Gallery, and Accessible Arts. She was a finalist in the Bluethumb Art Prize 2021.
Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses photography, video, multimedia and installation, which she deploys to bring visibility to issues and experiences related to identity, trauma and disability. A strong believer in art as activism, she is founder and curating contributor of Off The Wall Gallery, Sydney, an outdoor and online exhibiting initiative centred on creating opportunities for marginalised artists, including those living with physical and mental disability. She is a strong advocate for human rights and works actively to create opportunities and support for marginalised peoples of all identities.
Savannah Stimson
As a multidisciplinary artist and researcher, Savannah explores the broader practice of creative nonfiction writing, poetry, DJing and movement that synergises their experiences across time. This includes charting the relationships between inner world, body, and place, healing processes and multiplicitous becoming.
Savannah prioritises the body as a site for resistance and navigation, as well as a foundation of inherent knowledge, and explored this in a recent work ‘Animate Loading’ led by Riana Head-Toussaint at AGNSW (2022).
Jacqui O’Reilly
Jacqui O’Reilly is a Pākehā artist, researcher and musician from Aotearoa New Zealand, now based on Gadigal land in Sydney Australia. Jacqui works within an experimental context to explore new understandings of media arts practice using deep listening, live performance, moving image and electroacoustic composition.
Jacqui is interested in the creative act as acknowledgement of what has happened in the past, what could happen in the future and attuning with the more-than-human world. Her practice explores relations between people, place, media and perception to question what draws us closer or further apart from our social, cultural and environmental ecologies. This includes engaging with bicultural histories and current day relations between Māori and the settler coloniser in her homeland to learn from ways of seeing and listening beyond the colonial lens. It also includes acknowledging and learning from First Nations peoples as the cultural knowledge holders of the unceded lands in which Jacqui lives and makes her work.
Jacqui holds a BA Media Arts (Honours) from UNSW Art, Design & Architecture, Sydney Australia.
Cynthia Florek
Cynthia Florek is an artist with Peruvian and Polish heritage. Her art practice involves dance, movement, image making and holding space for community. In inheriting complex histories and having grown up on Darug Land, she has always been surrounded with culture and tradition. Cynthia loves any space that nurtures queer, disabled and BIPOC communities and is conscious of this in her work. Being nurtured by communities that encourage collective healing & collective joy, Cynthia gravitates towards softness and care, but also resilience and urgency as themes in her practice.
She is a member of Utp Rising and the Feminist Killjoys Reading Group. In 2021, she participated in the Critical Path x PYT Fairfield choreographic lab ‘Why is This Mine?’, and in the International Day of People with Disability Panel Discussion at Riverside Theatres. More recently; she has performed in Riana Head-Toussaint’s ‘Animate Loading’, has had her work exhibited at Pari Gallery and was a performer in Kate Sherman’s ‘Temporary Ecosystems’. She is currently developing ‘After After Noon’, an installation-dance-performance which explores the politics of rest – alongside afro-futurist thinking, exchanges of care and the romanticisation of queer friendships.