Moments of Silence: Art & Introspection
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When
- Where
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Address
Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd Paddington NSW 2021
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Hours
6–7PM
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Phone
+61 2 8936 0888
- RSVP
‘Moments of Silence’ is a curated walking tour, highlighting the work of artists and designers reflecting on introspection, isolation and the human condition. Through a diverse collection of ceramics and photography, each artwork becomes a witness to the human condition, sharing diverse experiences of time spent alone, in contemplation, solitude or even loneliness. In this creative process of sharing tales, these artists explore the creativity and fulfilment that can emerge from moments of seclusion and introspection.
‘Moments of Silence’ invites viewers to navigate the labyrinth of human experience and contemplate the silent conversations embedded within acts of creation.
Participating artists/designers:
Darcie Bentham
Emily Burke
Joshua Chek
Fiona
Angie Geng
Gavin Jowitt
Pei Jun Zhang (Penny)
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Curated by Carey Choi-wan Cheng, Alexander Fry, Avery Shi, and Zhiting Zheng
Darcie Bentham: The Reef Seat, 2023 (Jarrah Eucalyptus Wood, 100% New Zealand Wool, Velour Fabric)
Having completed her Bachelor of Design from the University of New South Wales School of Art and Design in 2023, Darcie Bentham seamlessly merged her passions for textiles, furniture, fashion, jewellery and homeware on an exciting interdisciplinary journey. Each of her creations is inspired by nature, reflecting playful, exploratory, and tactile narratives. Beyond aesthetics, she emphasises precision and craftsmanship, underscored by her fine motor skills. She is committed to sustainability and making designs that are mindful of our planet's future. Her work is shaped by positivity, open-mindedness, and resilience.
In the coral-brain seas where the patterns do sway,
The Reef Seat emerges, keeping troubles at bay.
For teens in a tizzy, in school or in therapy,
This seat brings a calm, as vast as the sea.
With a world upside-down from that Covid-19 fray,
Youths find in this chair a safe place to stay.
With nature and touch, it's crafted so neat,
Easing minds and hearts every time they take a seat.
From Aussie woods, recycled and true,
A finish so soft, with a whimsical hue.
With tufts and textures of deep ocean dives,
It's a coral-inspired dream where imagination thrives.
For where we do sit shapes how we feel,
This Reef Seat brings joy, its comfort is real.
Mindful and merry, with nature's own healing,
In its embrace, you'll find true oceanic feeling.
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Emily Burke: Little Windows, 2023 (Ceramics)
Emily Burke’s artistic practice explores the material expressions of memories through touch. Delving into the dialect between personal experience and material connection. Particularly in reference to her own experiences of solitude: memories of times she has spent by herself since childhood, where she has been able to find contentment and warmth.
Utilising repetition as a generative process, the work explores raw clay as an alternative documenting material; with its opportunity to capture gestures, imprints and other extensions of the body. The forms are intuitively made, instructed from her hands, they're fluid and bulbous, each with a carved window gazing or looking in, both interacting and conversing with each other. This catalogue of anthropomorphic clay forms, each as an extension of her, accumulating in an ever-enduring practice that expands across place and time.
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Joshua Chek: I've been there? Yeah you've been there, 2022 (Fujifilm Pearl Photograph Mounted on Acrylic)
Joshua Chek is an Australian-Asian artist and photographer working on Gadigal and Cammeraygal land. His practice investigates domestic loneliness and the decay of memory.
Memory is something we like to think of as being permanent, forever. Perhaps that is part of why dementia is so disturbing to us. My grandfather was diagnosed with dementia in late 2019. Progressively it becomes harder to interact with him as his personality is sapped from him. He cannot remember spaces outside of his own home and remembers little from the past fifteen years. As such, the work attempts to convey to the audience my relationship with my grandfather and how dementia has reframed how I connect with him. In listening to his stories, I can see how they shaped his experience and appreciate him as an entire person even as dementia erodes away what was (and will forever be) a great man.
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Fiona: 9 to 5, 2021 (Ceramics & Wood)
Fiona is a Swiss-Australian artist based in Sydney. Having grown up in Switzerland, she moved to Brazil in her early 20s and relocated to Sydney in her mid-20s. Fiona has been studying a double degree in Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales since her arrival in Australia. In her sculptures and prints, she thematises capitalism, social structures, globalisation, identity, taxonomies, feminism, and domestic life. Her creative practice is driven by experimentation and focuses on the importance of materiality and object significance.
‘9 to 5’ consists of a porcelain hammer head with generic imprints and a mass-produced wooden handle. The work thematises the intricate relationship between capitalism and the value of labour in times of mass production. The hammer is an object that symbolises paid labour, craftsmanship, and masculinity. By translating the object’s materiality into ceramics, the work questions those ideas. The ceramic hammer takes on feminine notions, alluding to unpaid labour in the domestic setting, while its aesthetics and reliance on mass-produced components challenge the concept of craftsmanship.
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Angie Geng: for a caregiver, from a caregiver, 2023 (35mm Film Photographic Series on Washi Paper)
Angie Geng is an Australian-Chinese artist who creates and live on Dharug Country. She likes to use words and images, using her own experiences as inspiration to feel things and connect with people. She explores all this through her practice of photography.
The work celebrates the sculptural artist that is the Alzheimer patient within the home and makes apparent the absurdity, loneliness and beauty that they carry in their works. The caregivers of these artists can be reminded to focus not just on the nightfall but the symphony of hues from the sunset.
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Pei Jun Zhang (Penny): It’s for your own good, 2023 (Wool, ceramics and other mixed media)
As an Asian female, Penny Zhang grew up hearing, 'We wouldn’t be so worried if you were a boy,' and accepted the anxiety-inducing safety rituals that were taught to her 'out of care,' 'for my own good,' and 'to keep me safe.' Her material choices are pivotal in conveying the work’s design justice intervention. She used wool felting to convey women’s soft yet firm characteristics while porcelain symbolises the inherent fragility of safety rituals.
It's for your own good is a series of objects that satirise the extreme lengths women go to in order to keep themselves safe in public. The research explores the issue of gender inequality that manifests in a broader social context, where women struggle to feel safe in public spaces due to socially accepted bias based on their gender. This project is her response, an attempt to challenge the normalisation of safety rituals that women feel compelled to adopt.
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Gavin Jowitt: Untitled, 2023 (Inkjet prints, pigment inks on cotton archival photo paper)
Gavin Jowitt’s work employs photography and moving image to focus on the seemingly mundane and ephemeral encounters with light as it enters our everyday spaces. He is interested in exploring the perceptual experience of how people look rather than what they are looking at.
By slowing down, observing, and documenting how light permeates and interacts with his immediate environment, Gavin Jowitt’s work draws attention to the typically overlooked and ordinary fleeting moments of everyday life. By examining the visceral experience of looking at something, or nothing, for prolonged periods of time, the work aims to disrupt traditional views about subject matter, shifting instead to perception and the act of seeing.