PRACTISE / ACCESS / PRACTICE
PRACTISE/ACCESS/PRACTICE is a gathering and connecting of the inner worlds of a community of artists and practitioners through understanding at the crossroads of art and life.
This gathering of moments, connection and a series of conversations is a process that grows and nurtures access through access. Inner worlds connect and softly unfold to open radical care and preservation of collective works, performances, collaborations, methodologies, and disclosures. Artists take form in a creative community shifting, morphing, and expanding like lungs with breath. We tend to POP!, crackle, and move like arthritic joints: slowly and with care.
To practise access as practice is to embellish culture with rich knowledge and connection. A flourishing within multiple intersecting dynamic forms emerges. It reaches into difference through intimacy, eliminating private suffering through its colourful relations, not without hurt, grief, or exhaustion, but together with joy, light, wonder, and love as endless possibilities.
Whether sharing space online or in person, we remain present for our full, messy selves and choose not to suffer in private. In other words: we are here with all of it, we grant one another permission to be our full selves.
Bring vibrant colours and patterns into the future. Every single cultural touchstone you have ever loved was created by an artist. Follow your dreams and keep doing what you’re doing now and make sure you’re ok. We need this world to be inclusive, we need this world to be vibrant.
From late 2022 to the end of 2023, PACT brought together a group of artists to form a Knowledge Circle of peers working with disability, chronic illness, and accessibility as core elements of their artmaking.
These artists represent diverse fields of practice, from painting to dance, music, writing, multimedia installation and more. We invited artists who have contributed to building the culture of PACT over several years through their participation in previous PACT projects to continue their relationship with us.
The project we made together – Practise/ACCESS/Practice – honours these artists as knowledge holders and experimenters in how to centre access in the way we create, think, and relate to one another. Artists are practitioners of relationship – whether between crayon and paper, or concept and method, or time and space, or you and me.
Led by the Knowledge Circle artists, we built a safe space for exchanging creative practice and engaging in dialogue about community, intersectionality, and representation. We met online, we attended performances together as ‘test cases’ in creative access, and we shared space in residency at PACT. We attempted to model kindness towards ourselves and allowance for fatigue, loss, sadness, and anger. We made connections and fought isolation.
Access does not belong only within the purview of disability; disability sharpens our insights into the effects of inaccessibility.
Access is not a toolkit of technologies or tick boxes.
Access is an issue of universal justice.
Access is a noun and a verb.
We PRACTISE access.
Access is culture.
Access is connection.
Access is felt experience.
Access is a PRACTICE.
Whether you know it or not, you too are practising access – you are making choices about who is included and who is excluded; you are supporting others and asking to be supported in turn. Making visible these relationships is what these artists do, against often inhospitable environments, with creative force. We invite you to learn from them, as we have together, and expand your access practice too.
– Imogen Yang and Justine Shih Pearson
Explore the artists’ work by clicking on each image
Alex Craig is a Queer Blind dance artist and maker. 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.
Savannah is a Kenyan-Irish Australian interdisciplinary artist exploring the broader practice of creative nonfiction writing, poetry, soundscape and movement. Supported in their work by unceded Gadigal and Bidjigal land, they ground their practice in embodied resistance and an exploration of what emerges in the liminal space between mediums.
Jacqui O'Reilly is a Pākehā artist, researcher and musician from Aotearoa New Zealand, now based in Sydney. Her practice explores relations between people, place, media and perception within contexts of the ‘more-than-human’ world. She is interested in the creative act as acknowledgement of past happenings and as reparative futuring.
Digby Webster is a Sydney-based visual artist with a career spanning 16 years. Digby works across a range of disciplines and 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.
Cynthia Florek is an artist with Peruvian and Polish heritage. Her practice involves dance, movement, image making and holding space for community. Being nurtured by spaces that encourage collective healing and collective joy, Cynthia gravitates towards softness and care, but also resilience and urgency as themes in her practice.
M. Sunflower is a culturally diverse First Nations (Dharug) Australian with disabilities. Her interdisciplinary practice embraces photo-videography, sculpture, painting, fashion and installation. She uses art as activism and advocacy for human rights, bringing visibility to issues related to the body, identity, trauma and disability.
GALLERY
The Knowledge Circle artists gather around a wooden table drawing on brown and white sheets of paper with coloured pens and pencils.
Isabella and Digby sit on bleachers in conversation. Isabella's hands are wide open, fingers stretched. Digby left hand is in a plastic cup filled with silicone.
Savannah and Cynthia sit next to each other on the floor. Savannah looks dead into the camera, one hand in a silicone mould. Cynthia is looking downward towards the silicone mould.
Cynthia sits at a wooden table surrounded by art supplies including multi-coloured papers and multi-coloured markers. Cynthia smiles while holding a brown paper bag in one hand and is reaching into a red bag.
Digby paints with his index finger - pink and yellow hearts on a white piece of paper
Cynthia and Sunny sit next to each other, working at a wooden table. Cynthia is reaching out their right arm towards a glue stick. Sunny holds a watercolour palette.
A wooden table filled with paint, paper, cups, bags, glue sticks, zines, and mugs. Sunny is using a waterbrush and watercolour paint to add to an existing artwork.
Sunny holds out her artwork with her right arm, her left arm is placed on her hip. The artwork is a collage of blue and orange swirls, magazine cutouts of fish, a sea urchin, a corset, a bed, a spoon, and bits of text.
Image of artwork. The background exhibits a body of water with numerous fish placed on top. A cut-out of a bed is the predominant image with a giant spoon laid across it. "Prepare now for a riot of flowers" is written in bold black lettering. The edge of the paper has been cut into fringe.
Isabella's hand grips a container holding a sculpted silicone mould. Sunny's hands are holding shears that are in the process of snipping a plastic cup away from the mould.
Knowledge Circle artists sit in a circle with Azzam. A monitor is placed on a seat with Savannah on call. Azzam's gestures with his arms, his fingers outstretched.
The Knowledge Circle artists, Daley and Aunty Jacqui stand in a line in front of PACT's rainbow coloured street mural.
Alex explores space, right arm reaching towards the camera.
Sunny holds her phone to the camera, showing her poem in a comment section on Instagram.
The Knowledge Circle artists, Azzam, Chenoeh and Sharlini stand in a line shoulder to shoulder, eyes closed. Cynthia is laying down on a couch.
Sunny is on the ground, arms outstretched, a long sheet of crumpled brown paper is spread across the top of her body.
Cynthia is dancing in front of artworks pinned in against the wall. Their back is to camera and their hands are cupped against their forehead.
Cynthia holds scissors and cuts a pink ribbon while laying on a bed in Pact's gallery space. The bed, which is Cynthia's artwork for the exhibition, has hot pink sheets, light pink roses and a green, yellow and pink multicoloured pillow. Shear pink and orange materials hang over the bed.
Three people stand in a group and face white wall in PACT's gallery, looking at images and biographies of the artists. One person stands with their hands behind their band while another holds their sunglasses up towards their face as they are observing the plaques.
Two images show Digby wearing his custom-painted multi-coloured suit, shirt and hat. In the image on the left, he is facing the camera with a. neutral expression and leaning back on a silver railing. In the second image, his back faces the camera to show
Four people stand inside PACT's white box for the Practise/ACCESS/Practice exhibition. One person folds their arms as they look at the images on the wall. Next to Cynthia's bed, three of the individuals stand in a circle in conversation. Three people stand in a circle in