SALTMARSH CREATIVE ECOLOGIES

Ainslie Macaulay, a curator, facilitator, and educator from nipaluna/Hobart, Tasmania, boasts rich experience in art curation within galleries and public spaces. She's collaborated with artists and facilitated projects ranging from community initiatives to renowned festivals like Unconformity, Dark Mofo, and Mona Foma. Ainslie, also an independent artist, has showcased her work at events such as White Night and Geelong After Dark. Passionate about creative environmental and sustainable solutions, she aims to unite artists, nurture inventive responses to surroundings, and drive engagement. This involves research, potential partnerships, and planned activations over an extended period.

Andy Vagg, an artist, writer, and performer, delves into contemporary existence, examining its qualities and limitations. He scrutinizes the impact of our choices on social evolution and employs social contexts as platforms for transformative ideas, fostering positive societal shifts. Through his performances, Andy explores religion's role in today's secular world and its aid in navigating environmental and psychosocial changes triggered by industrialization, globalism, and consumerism. Coastal zones captivate him, serving as both ecological interfaces and symbolic junctions of colonial history. Andy's works grace public and private spaces throughout Australia, while his collaborations span educational and community settings, from schools to care facilities.

Bec Stevens, an artist captivated by flora, humanity, and locations, boasts training in Fine Arts, Environmental Design, and Horticulture. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, her core methods encompass drawing, listening, collaboration, and context-sensitive responses. She harnesses creative practice's potential to solve intricate issues ingeniously. Employing emergent strategies, she intertwines insights into the societal and geographical aspects of our surroundings. Based in nipaluna, lutruwita, she's been active in the creative realm for over two decades, contributing to communities, galleries, museums, and artist-run initiatives. She's currently engaged in a year-long Royal Hobart Hospital residency, crafting mobile gardens from repurposed hospital trolleys for patient visits.

Cassie Sullivan, a pallawah woman, cultivates a responsive, intimate, and experimental contemporary art practice that spans moving image, photography, writing, sound, installation, and printmaking. Her process-driven approach centers on sensory engagement with Country. Writing serves as a tool within her creative and cultural exploration, helping her understand life's flow and complexities. Sullivan delves into materiality to amplify intricate identities, with a focus on intergenerational experiences and trauma stored in bodily memory. She investigates the preservation and loss of indigenous knowledge in her identity and body. Sullivan's work has graced Tasmanian exhibitions, and she's a finalist for the Women’s Art Prize and Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize. Holding degrees from the University of Tasmania and RMIT University, she's established herself as a versatile artist.

Julia Drouhin amplifies imperceptible soundstreams to uncover social tensions through radio, installation, and collaborative performances. She's known for leaping on a mini trampoline with broken plates or licking rocks by the beach. Part of the Instrument Builder Project (IBP5) for Mona Foma 2021, she explored sound alongside the Australia Art Orchestra and studied water-based instruments for autistic children in Paris. Her Sisters Akousmatica project with Phillipa Stafford redefines radio arts, supporting marginalized groups. Julia holds a Ph.D. from Paris 8 France, focusing on broadcast impact in public space, and now engages with artists with disabilities and local youth in lutruwita/Tasmania, Australia.

Ben, born in Lutruwita/Tasmania, completed a Bachelor of Economics in 1972 before venturing into resin and fibreglass surfboard crafting. Transitioning to ceramics at The School of Art in Hobart by 1981, he lectured at the Tasmanian School of Art and played a pivotal role in the development of Southern Ice porcelain. Coordinating ceramics at TAFE Hobart from 2001 to 2012, he pursued a Master's in Art, Design, and Environment at UTAS in 2004, focusing on local materials. Founder of Ridgeline Pottery in 1981, his woodfiring and place-oriented craft gained recognition in leading Australian restaurants. Ben won the inaugural Vitrify Alcorso Ceramic Award in 2011.

Meg is a Tasmanian artist, educator and arts advocate with 25 years experience nationally and internationally. She is Samstag Scholar, an alumnus of the San Francisco Art Institute, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Space Program, New York. She has a studio-based Doctorate from the School of Creative Arts, University of Tasmania. Her artwork and research interests have evolved through cross-cultural experience including residencies in New York, Taipei, Thailand, Tokyo, South and Korea. Meg thinks through, and with, the visual medias of painting and drawing to engage with subjects from a different perspective.

Simon, a community-engaged practitioner for nearly four decades, has worked extensively with diverse global communities. He established an immersive residency project overlooking Pipe Clay Lagoon in Tasmania with Victoria Ryle after relocating there in 2016. In 2019, he completed a reflective practice PhD, focusing on fostering holistic creative practices. His approach encompasses personal endeavors, digital drawing, and book-making, as well as participatory projects displayed at renowned venues like Tate Modern and Carnegie Hall in 2018. Engaged in social practice, he leads the Tasmanian ArTELIER initiative and serves as Chair of Regional Arts Australia pro bono. Simon's writing an interactive drawing book on reflective practice and currently holds the position of adjunct Senior Researcher at UTAS. His recent Hobart exhibit, "You weigh more when you carry a book," featured videos, books, and prints.

Founder of Kids’ Own Publishing Partnership, Ireland (1997) and Kids’ Own Publishing, Australia, 2003, has pioneered publishing books by children through artist-led community partnerships, presenting on this practice worldwide. She is currently undertaking a PhD at UTAS on the culturally transformative power of publishing with children drawing on 30 years experience as a teacher, facilitator, advisory teacher and teaching artist. Victoria is co-director of all that we are, a space for residencies and gatherings that connect communities through creativity in Tasmania. Victoria is Australia’s inaugural representative Catalyst for the new International Teaching Artist Conference (ITAC) Collaborative alongside 12 other international artists.

Victoria is also co-director of all that we are, a residency space in southern Tasmania for connecting communities through creativity.

www.kidsownpublishing.com

www.kidsown.ie

Clifton Saltmarsh reverberates with a tangible energy that I particularly feel when I sit and paint here en Plein air. As I locate myself within the marsh and turn my attention to the slow process of recording my sensations of place in paint, things are revealed. I notice more; particular vegetation, rocks, the changing light - but also sense a living energy pulsating - echoing the play of the tide as it slowly ebbs and flows - my mind wanders to thoughts of First Nation people who regularly gathered here to eat and socialise - it’s a special place that I long to return to again for further study.

In 2022 my imagination was captured by a juvenile Bar-tailed Godwit that flew 13,000km non -stop from the Atlantic to the East Coast of Tasmania. These birds have the knowledge to follow the magnetic lines of the earth and find food and shelter in what were some of the world’s richest bird feeding grounds.

Over the past two years I have participated in an artist in residence program at Clifton Beach in Tasmania. The lagoons of the area are home to many species of wading birds including the migratory Bar-tail Godwit. Contacts at Bird Life Tasmania helped me locate the bird in the area.

I consider the qualities of this bird, while fragile and vulnerable from the elements, they also hold characteristics of endurance and intelligence through an innate knowledge of feeding zones, and flight paths. I bring the birds to mind while making in the elements using clay and flotsam in Pipeclay lagoon.

https://greatalpinegallery.org.au/artist-profile-heather-leatham/

Lucille is an established Australian Contemporary Artist who has returned to full time creative work since 2015. She has been following a body of work and research in Tasmania since 2019 when she was invited as Artist in residence at UTAS – School of creative arts for 2 months and also Artist in residence at The Wilderness Gallery, Cradle Mountain Resort. Cradle Mountain-St Claire National Park

Lucile’s work is Documentary Observation Photography and Photo-media. She has been researching, walking and documenting landscape in relation to FIRE – Past, Present and preventative. This work also includes Aboriginal Cultural and Cool burn land management incorporating Water, land, habitat and wind. The project started in 2018 prior to The catastrophic Fires of Black summer 2019-20 when a group of Elders from Yuin region, South west NSW started with Bundanon Trust to initiate their traditional Cultural Burn program. That cultural burn land program and burn was said to have saved the area under threat in 2020 when the Fire jumped the Shoalhaven River during the Black summer Fires.

Nicola Kinloch, a multidisciplinary artist. Best known for her photographic work, Kinloch captures a candid, natural perspective of the world around her. Drawn by themes of the gaze, public versus private, displacement, and ecology, much of her work has been inspired by her travels both locally and abroad. The inquisitive quality of her photographs evoke a subtle perspective on nuanced cultural and environmental topics that often go unnoticed. Her art encapsulates raw, emotional moments that create an authentic space for her subject matter. Her portraiture, wildlife, and travel photography have all been short-listed candidates for photographic awards, including the Olive Cotton Award, Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year, the Magnum Photography Award, and the International Colour Award. Today, Kinloch is preparing to show her photography at the Florence Biennale, in Italy in October 2023.

Kuenlin's creative endeavors span a diverse array of mediums, including installations, sculptures, soundscapes, printmaking, and video. His creative emphasis is primarily centered on the perceptive relationship between sound and the environment. Through immersive explorations of historical sites and the comprehensive documentation encompassing images, sound, and other diverse mediums, he navigates new pathways of understanding that emerge between his own being and the environment. His creative process often revolves around field investigations, serving as a method of material collection that he harmoniously integrates into a multitude of creative forms. Through these various modes of expression, he effectively communicates his observations.

www.tsaikuenlin.com

Seattle-based artist, scholar, educator, and designer, Naomi Kasumi, was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan. Kasumi is currently both Professor of Design, and Director of the Design Program. She started Her career as an assistant professor in 2003 she established the Digital Design Program in the Department of Fine Arts at Seattle University. The program is now named the Design Program and is situated in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design. Kasumi became a full Professor in 2019.

Since Japan’s Tsunami disaster and her own near-death experience in 2011, she has been interested in working on a csocially engaged art projects involving local community members, villages, schools, etc, collaboratively working with community on a common goal and celebrate the process of making art.

She is globally active installation artist, and her solo and group exhibitions are broad in scope. They include galleries and educational institutions nationally and internationally.