GRAPHITE takes a fresh look at an art medium that has been in use for millennia. Curated by Belinda Yee, the exhibition revisits graphite through the lens of nine contemporary Australian drawers, each offering a unique perspective on the medium’s material potential. For seasoned artists who know graphite's shape-shifting character, this show celebrates a long-standing companion while foregrounding its lesser-known qualities. For new drawing enthusiasts and the general public, we hope the show is equally captivating. From Joyce Hinterding's energy-scavenging antennae to Matthew Allen's amorphous polished surfaces and Katelyn Geard's soft-as-a-whisper figurations, this exhibition is a celebration of graphite and an exploration of its diverse material potential.
GRAPHITE features the work of Matthew Allen, Fiona Currey-Billyard, collaborators Chris Casali and Graziela Guardino, Armando Chant, Katelyn Geard, Joyce Hinterding, Annelies Jahn and Belinda Yee.
Graphite - A Sketchy Outline
by Gary Warner
Graphite is an idiosyncratic form of crystalline carbon found naturally on Earth in three primary forms - amorphous (aka cryptocrystalline), natural flake and crystalline vein. It develops mostly from carboniferous deposits such as anthracite coal - the fossil remains of unimaginably ancient plants - metamorphosed under geological conditions of extreme pressure and heat. It is also one of the oldest minerals of the Universe; microscopic grains of graphite retrieved from space predate the formation of our solar system.
Artists and makers have used graphite since the Palaeolithic era, the dawn of human time. A Neolithic carved graphite pendant was found in Poland in 2014. Pottery sherds found in archaeological digs on different continents demonstrate independently developed uses of graphite for marking designs on surfaces and as inclusion in shaping clay to improve the thermal insulation of vessels used for cooking or crucible metallurgy. Industrial crucibles still include graphite for its thermal properties.
The largest known natural source of terrestrial graphite was revealed in England at rural Borrowdale in the mid-16th century. Herders found the slippery stone useful for marking their sheep. Pre-industrial military inventors found a different use as a slippery liner for cannonball moulds. Easier release from graphite-slipped moulds yielded improved spherical cast-iron shot that could travel further on better-aimed trajectories, an empire-building advantage for the British Navy.
Naturally, the Crown monopolised production from the Borrowdale site and ruthlessly controlled the supply of this miracle mineral. A British embargo on the export of graphite to France during the Napoleonic wars prompted Nicholas-Jacques Conte, a scientist serving in Napoleon’s army, to stretch limited graphite supplies further by mixing it with clay to make the first pencils.
For a few centuries, there was excited conjecture amongst Natural Philosophers as to what precisely this unusual mineral comprised. Was it a form of lead, like the Romans used for writing and marking? For centuries, the name plumbago, meaning 'lead ore’, was graphite's name in the Dutch colonial Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) mines where the purest crystalline graphite was extracted. In 1779 Swedish chemist K.W. Scheele proved the mineral was a form of carbon. A decade later, German mineralogist Abraham Werner coined the term graphite from the Ancient Greek for 'to write or draw'.
Since the late 19th century, graphite has been synthesised using a series of ever-evolving industrial and chemical processes. Today, in addition to the common pencil, which utilises low-quality graphite mixed with clay (14 billion made worldwide each year), high-purity graphite - natural and synthetic - is vital in a dizzying variety of technological uses, including the manufacture of steel, for encasing uranium in nuclear reactors, for lubrication of mining machinery, in gunpowder to stop the buildup of static charge, and for the production of efficient batteries. A typical EV lithium-ion battery contains approximately 40kg of graphite.
Late 20th-century consumer demand for portable electronics, such as CD players, video cameras and power tools, prompted the invention of small rechargeable batteries. Laptops, mobile phones, tablets and smartphones drive demand for ever smaller, more powerful, long-lasting batteries. Innovations with graphite have been central to the imposing ubiquity of these technologies.
In Australia, graphite was noticed in the mid-19th century by land-clearing colonial settlers in South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula. Records indicate a small mining operation exported a few tons of graphite to London in 1866, but there was little further activity until the 20th century when Uley became the site of three successive graphite mining and processing ventures, the first commencing in 1907, the third closing in 1993. Each began with optimistic speculation but soon ended in fiscal failure. Today, with the speculation of fantastic wealth generation believed for the developing graphene industry, the graphite deposits of Uley are again being extracted. Graphene is a one-atom-thick layer of graphite. One atom! It is the strongest known substance on Earth and superconductive - a characteristic that makes it invaluable to innovations in computing technologies.
In the 21st century, as applications of the hyper-tech material graphene excite markets and scientists alike, earthy mineral graphite sustains innumerable multifarious industrial and scientific uses but also remains a material of fascination and locus of perpetual inventiveness for contemporary artists. Over in the creative space of expanded drawing, I will conclude with brief descriptions of three inspiring uses of graphite I've witnessed.
Matthew Barney - In November 2014, at the Museum of Old and New Art in nipaluna/ Hobart, US artist Matthew Barney invited members of a local women's AFL team to enact Drawing Restraint number 21 in his longstanding, ongoing series. The team deployed their collective strength to drag a 2286 kg block of graphite along the walls of the space that would present Barney's epic River of Fundament exhibition at MoNA in 2015. The immense block sat heavily on a wooden sled, redolent of those used in Dynastic Era Egypt to transport monoliths for mastaba and pyramid construction.
The deliberate and difficult action, performed after opening hours, created dense dark marks and deep gouges in the walls to circumscribe the white cube with a memory scar, an architectural distress in conversation with the imposing, abject and fabulous sculptural forms populating the gallery.
In an earlier Drawing Restraint action (#19), Barney designed a skateboard with a large, shaped graphite form fixed underneath the leading edge. The artist's condition for donating the board (it was later auctioned) to a skatepark project in a neglected Detroit neighbourhood was that it be ridden, to make drawings. Champion elder artist-skater Lance Mountain obliged, tearing around the park's banks, bumps, and bowls to leave incidental drawn traces of his energy, exertion, skill, and thrill.
Matthew Barney, Portcullis Block, 2014. Graphite, wood sled.
Sculpted carbon megalith, 2286 kgs at the Museum of Old and New Art, nipaluna/Hobart in the exhibition Matthew Barney: River of Fundament (2015), originally curated by Okwui Enwezor. Photo: Gary Warner
Emma McNally - UK artist Emma McNally creates what she describes as 'humming graphite sound fields' and 'weather systems of graphite'. In 2014, she was commissioned by Stephanie Rosenthal, curator of the 2016 20th Biennale of Sydney, to create work for exhibition on Wareamah/ Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour at the confluence of the Parramatta and Lane Cove rivers.
Working exclusively with various forms of artist's graphite - pencil, stick, powder, water-soluble - and erasers, she produced 12 drawings collectively titled 'Choral Fields'. Significant works on paper, each approximately 2m x 3m, they were displayed on the open-plan top floor of one of the many buildings of the defunct ship-building site.
Each drawing was presented in a free-standing timber frame painted white. The series was installed as a perimeter procession lining a purpose-built zig-zag platform with a wide entry and a sharp-pointed terminus. The viewer took a small ceremonial step up onto the grey-painted platform to walk around and along the angled shape, looking at the large panels in sequence.
Moving close to a drawing revealed an extraordinary range of marks, lines, traces, and paths suggestive of circuitry, telecommunications, code, molecules, stars, shoals, electronic pulses, particles and networks, defined within vast swirling clouds of smudge, erasures and rubbing. At the pointy end, the viewer became wedged between two of the large drawings, their peripheral vision enveloped in the lustrous surface remains of the artist's skill, intention and long labours.
Emma McNally, Choral Fields 1–12, 2014–16, graphite on paper, 214 x 304 cm each. Installation views at Wareamah/Cockatoo Island, 20th Biennale of Sydney, 2016 . Photos: Gary Warner
Joyce Hinterding - Australian artist Joyce Hinterding explores and exploits another of graphite's many curious characteristics—it can act as both an electrical conductor and an insulator or resistor. In her remarkable works, she shifts drawing beyond image and representation into a realm of revelatory function.
In the 1990s, Joyce wondered what would happen if she made a graphite drawing of an electronic circuit diagram - would it ‘work’ as an electronic component? On paper, she made a graphite and silver leaf drawing of a phase-shift oscillator and discovered the answer was yes. Evidence was provided through sound.
Since then, Joyce has continued to create and develop a remarkable series of energy-scavenging graphite ‘Induction Drawings’. One type in the series operates as an antenna that discloses the presence of invisible anthropogenic electromagnetic energies we are constantly immersed in. Joyce’s exquisite antenna drawings travel the world. Visitors are encouraged to touch them while listening to their amplified sonic register. A finger touch changes the electrical flow, altering the sound. Joyce once told me she only considered a drawing finished once it had returned from its travels, smudged by the investigative gestures of innumerable curious bodies.
Left: Joyce Hinterding, The Oscillators, 1995. Graphite, silver leaf on paper, wires, clips, dimensions variable.
Sound In Space: Australian Sound Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gadigal/Sydney. Photo: courtesy Joyce Hinterding
A recording of this installation and accompanying essay “The Oscillators, Sensitive systems and Abstract machines, the experience of” were published in Leonardo Music Journal, Vol 6 MIT press 113-114 1996 and the LMJ CD series Vol 6 1996; edited by Douglas Kahn.
Right: Joyce Hinterding, Large Ulam VLF Loop (graphite), 2011. Graphite, stencil, audio mixer, headphones, 200 x 200cm, installation dimensions variable. Collection of Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane. Photo: Gary Warner
Download a copy of the Group Show / GRAPHITE essay and Curator’s note here.
Ode to a Slippery Shape-Shifter
Curator’s note by Belinda Yee
Graphite can be a tricky medium because its slippery surface makes it difficult for other media to adhere to. Despite this complication, graphite has an undeniable charm. In powdered form it has a soft, luxurious quality and is perfectly suited to creating atmospheric tones that appear to float just off the drawing surface. As a liquid, graphite flows in diluted tones across paper and fabric, whether painted, dripped, poured or wicked. In solid stick or pencil form, it can be hard and precise, maintaining sharp edges where other mdia, like charcoal or pastel, would smudge and crumble. Graphite’s shale-like structure also allows it to catch and reflect light, appearing stunningly bright under oblique or raking light. One of its most intriguing characteristics however, is that graphite never sets or hardens; it remains unstable, ever-changing, and in flux. As an art form, drawing is often characterised by its mutability, a characteristic derived from drawing media like graphite, which remains changeable.
Graphite is ubiquitous in the form of lead pencils (despite the misnomer, as they are not made of lead). Pencils are democratic and accessible, easy to use and readily at hand. In this form, graphite serves as the medium through which thoughts are often expressed – a quick sketch, a shopping list, a hastily drawn map, meticulous notations or schematic diagrams. Fast communication, so central to graphite's uses, underpins its nomenclature as the Greek word 'graphein' from which graphite is derived, means 'to write'. Graphite is the perfect tool for thinking on the page and externalising thought. The circular, haptic thinking that occurs between eye-mind-hand and plays out through cycles of doing and undoing, thinking and rethinking, is ably facilitated by graphite's ready accessibility and the ease with which it is erased. Graphite is a versatile and beautiful material, and its shape-shifting character enables it to do different things for different people.
DRAW Space gallery is the ideal platform for showcasing graphite, a medium fundamental to contemporary drawing practice and an ancient material that continues to drive new and innovative thinking and processes. As the curator of GRAPHITE, I found the artists and their work recommended themselves almost simultaneously to the idea for the exhibition being hatched. Such is the diversity of uses and the extraordinary graphite based work produced in contemporary Australian drawing.
“… street drawing (graffiti) meets 17th-century mathematics to produce
a baroque-looking fractal induction antenna.”
In Joyce Hinterding's work, for example, she gives voice to the invisible electromagnetic energies swirling around us. For this exhibition, she has created a large graphite drawing inside the gallery window. Graphite's conductivity means the drawing is a simple loop antenna that exchanges electromagnetic energy with visitors as they touch the glass. Interaction with the work changes the volume of sounds accessible through the headsets provided. Hinterding describes the work as "street drawing (graffiti) meets 17th-century mathematics to produce a baroque-looking and fractal induction antenna. The outer line is a single loop antenna, and the inner lines are passive resonators acting as graphic amplifiers." (1) In this way, Hinterding's work uses an ancient medium to foreground the instantaneity of electromagnetic interaction and the omnipresence of the energy fields around us.
Armando Chant and collaborators Chris Casali and Graziela Guardino combine liquid graphite with fabric to create beautiful, delicate works. Armando's work, 'Diptych II (Vallée de Vénéon)' (2023), is sensitive and atmospheric, a quality he creates through layering graphite washes over embroidered canvas and through layering graphite, beeswax and varnish over photographic prints. His work holds in tension the sensation of knowing and not knowing a landscape, of being immersed in an image while simultaneously aware of its painterly surface. In contrast to Armando's stretched canvas, Chris and Graziela have created a free-form, hanging silk structure in "Evanesce "(2024). They are similarly interested in pulling at the memory of landscape but are more directly concerned with the state of the planet. Where the artists have carefully removed threads, they have destabilised the structure of the work, mirroring the stripping of natural resources from the environment. Armando's, Chris and Grazielas' works celebrate the way liquid graphite flows to create subtle, buildable tones and fluid forms.
Matthew Allen’s work Untitled (2023) is a mirror-like surface that creates blurred, shifting reflections of its surroundings. The process of making these graphite-mirror works is time-consuming and physical, it involves polishing a marble-like substrate followed by layers of graphite. The resultant surface is a luscious, amorphous plane. But it is also unfixed, imparting the sense of something equally precious and precarious. In its perfection, the polished graphite mirror sits like a threshold between here and somewhere dark, moody and unknown.
Katelyn Geard uses powdered graphite to create delicate, sensitively drawn figures. These are the only figurative works in the exhibition and bring attention to drawing's most instinctual use - as a tool to reflect what is around us, what we see and who we are. In I have something to say (2024), Katelyn uses powdered graphite and brushes to feel for form. The medium allows layers to build, and brushes make for soft, ethereal marks. Katelyn's drawings look like drawn memories; in the amorphous textures, there is an acknowledgement of time passing; the forms are not solid or certain, not locked to the present, but appear to be passing through.
Annelies Jahn also responds to the world around her but through a more measured, conceptual, non-objective approach. In GRAPHITE, Annelies' presents mapping works made with and of, graphite stick. It feels in these drawings like Annelies is 'working things out,' mapping the world systematically, as a way of understanding it, thinking it through, intuiting it. The work has two parts: a drawing on velum, DRAWN INTO FORM (2024), and a small, three-dimensional sculpture, CITé STUDIO FORM (2019). The former foregrounds graphite's ability to reflect light depending on the angle at which it has been applied. The sculpture transposes the drawing into three dimensions, highlighting graphite's soft, carve-able materiality.
“giving a soft object a hardness and metallic look ... a hidden quality, a kind of materialistic puri puri."
Fiona Currey Billyard spent her early years (0-6) in Papua New Guinea (PNG) but grew up in Australia where she later studied archeology. Her work examines the removal of meaning and power that occurs when objects are taken from their original people, cultures and locations as an outcome of colonisation. In GRAPHITE, Fiona presents a small fibre-based work covered in graphite, a knotted and crocheted object that trails off into long fibre strands. Fiona painted this work with a mixture of graphite, medium and her mother's hair before smoking the object with her father's tobacco. These personal ephemera are items of substance and memory for the artist, which hold a kind of puri puri (magic) and add a sense of beauty and abject discomfort. For Fiona, using graphite is a means of "giving a soft object a hardness and metallic look ... giving the object a hidden quality, a kind of materialistic puri puri." (2)
Belinda Yee works with time as a medium. She is attracted to the temporal paradox inherent to graphite – that it takes millennia to metamorphose in nature but can be used and erased in a second. In this exhibition, Belinda reflects on graphite's transient nature by presenting several one-second drawings. In her practice, Belinda is interested in decolonising time, which she attempts to do by foregrounding temporalities other than the quantified, measured and structured metre of industrialised time - preferring to foreground time as lived units of experience or change.
Through the work of nine contemporary Australian artists, the exhibition GRAPHITE seeks to explore the breadth of the medium's material potential. It demonstrates the many ways graphite is used in contemporary Australian drawing, revealing a diverse wealth of engagement with this sometimes tricky, many-faceted material.
Email conversation between Belinda Yee and Joyce Hinterding, March, 2024.
In-person conversation between Belinda Yee and Fiona Currey Billyard, March, 2024.
ARTIST PROFILES
Matthew Allen
Artist Statement
Broadly speaking my work is about the generation of form and the enlivening of material. It is involved with such aspects as volume, depth and atmosphere, the intimacy of touch and the texture of surfaces, the dynamics of presence and absence and the making of a space of sensation.
My works are the result of a concentration of activity and a density of material - they are products of intensification. The act of compacting, burnishing and polishing loose graphite powder is a kind of transformation of matter - from a base natural state into a charged pictorial or aesthetic state where the material becomes a catcher and user of light and an interior realm unfolds. Through this process, I'm aiming for the work to have a certain quality that it radiates and which animates it and this quality has to do with vitality and presence.
Biography
Matthew Allen (b.1981 Auckland, New Zealand) lives and works in Sydney, Australia and attended the Sydney College of Arts, graduating with a Master of Visual Arts in 2006. He was the recipient of The Moya Dyring Studio, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Cités des Arts residency, Paris in 2012 and the Mark Rothko, Latvia residency in 2014.
Allen is included in collections such as Artbank Australia, Steensen Varming Collection Sydney, Wallace Collection New Zealand, Ipswich Art Gallery Collection Queensland and the Mark Rothko Centre Latvia. Matthew Allen is represented by Fox Jensen Gallery.
Instagram: @matthew_allen
Fox Jensen Gallery - https://www.jensengallery.com/matthew-allen/
Fiona Currey Billyard
Artist Statement
My Mothers Hair My Fathers Tobacco
When I first arrived at my recent residency at the Cite Internationale des Artes in Paris I visited the Musee du quai Branly. The museum houses a collection of objects from around the world and is a controversial collection where the provenance is often an issue and represents an artefact of Colonialism. In the public displays I discovered an object sourced from my birthplace, Aitape in Papua New Guinea. The object was a wooden statue of a fish and a man. As where I was born was a very small place I was intrigued as to how it had come to be part of the collection in this museum in Paris.
In the Museum archives I found that it was part of a collection made by an expedition known as the “Korrigans” from the name of their ship. Their expedition was one of the last commissioned in the 1930s to collect cultural objects. The explorers were aristocrats from the Netherlands. By the end of their expedition they had collected over 2800 objects of which only 600 found their way into museums the rest being sold to private collections.
I know that within PNG and their original communities, people, and contexts these objects are objects of power and puri puri which is magic. Within a public or private collection the objects appear as mere curios, devoid of their meaning and power. The work that I explore includes my own puri puri as a counter to these museum objects.
My Mothers Hair My Fathers Tobacco, incorporates my mothers hair in the graphite paint and the whole object is steeped in the smoke from my fathers favourite tobacco. As a child my mothers hair and nail clippings were collected by villagers to protect her from people practising puri puri and who may have meant her harm. That feeling of an object being too personal for others to possess, with an inherent tension between beauty and discomfort, is what I seek to achieve, just as the collected objects in the museum are too personal and significant for anyone to possess other than the people for whom they were originally intended.
Biography
Fiona Currey Billyard works in a variety of media, matching the medium and concept to present her works in the most expressive manner for the viewer. Recent works have included sculpture, photography, light installations, drawing, and painting. Not easily categorised by genre, Fiona’s work is layered and transformational combining the discipline of archaeological training underpinned by social justice and environmental issues to represent social and scientific data and materials in a meaningful and accessible manner.
Fiona Currey-Billyard spent her formative years in Papua New Guinea, tropical North Queensland and the NSW Central Coast, and references these influences in much of her arts practice. Fiona is a Masters fine arts graduate of the National Art School (MFA) and James Cook University (Bachelor Creative Industries (Hons), and in Archaeology from the University of New England (Dip Indigenous Archaeology). Fiona has also studied painting at the Charlie Sheard Studio School (1997).
Instagram: @fionacurrey
Web: https://www.fionacurreybillyard.com
Chris Casali and Graziela Guardino
Artist Statement - “ Evanesce ”
The memory of the land is a central theme in this artwork, as both artists navigate the relationship between materials and the environment. Their shared concern for the state of our planet has made “ Evanesce ” a place of inspiration for their inquiry into the impact of human activity on the world around us.
Both artists have chosen to work with recycled fabric as a medium, using it to symbolize the transformation of landscapes. The fabric is painted and then threads are removed to create a sense of memory - a representation of what once was and is now disappearing. This process mirrors the way in which our forests and their inhabitants have had to adapt to changing environments.
In addition to recycled fabric, graphite is used to represent the fading but not the complete disappearance of the landscape. As a stable and enduring material, graphite can still fade over time, echoing the gradual changes taking place in our natural surroundings.
Through their artwork, the artists aim to bring awareness and understanding to the environmental changes occurring around us. They hope to provoke thought and inspire action in the face of these challenges. The memory of the land, as well as the potential for change, is intricately woven into their art, serving as a reminder of the importance of preserving and protecting our planet.
Biography
Chris Casali is a Sydney-based artist. Formal study attained includes a Master of Fine Art with Excellence from the University of New South Wales (2018); a Diploma of Fine Arts from the National Art School, Sydney (1994) and a Diploma of Graphic Design from Enmore Design Centre, Sydney TAFE (1998).
Casali’s work has been featured in solo and group shows in Australia and internationally, including Mexico, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Italy, and China. She has been represented in numerous art prizes including the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (Finalist, Professional Category, 2023); Dobell Drawing Prize 22# (2021); KAAF Art Prize (2019); 3rd Taiwan Watercolour Award Exhibition (2019); Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (Winner - Emerging Category, 2019); Splash McClelland Contemporary Watercolour Award (2021, 2018); the Biennial International Marche d’Acqua Watercolour Prize (2018); the Kedumba Drawing Award (2015, 2016); The Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize (People’s Choice Award and Highly Commended, 2016); Tim Olsen Drawing Award (2016); Fishers Ghost Drawing/Printmaking Award (2014) and the Winsor & Newton Emerging Artist Prize (Highly Commended, 2013).
Her work is held in public and private collections in Australia and internationally, including the Paper and Watermark Museum, Fabriano, Italy; the Kedumba Collection of Drawings; the Macquarie Group Collection; and the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Collection.
Web: chriscasali.com
Instagram: @chriscasali
Biography
Brazilian born Australian artist, Graziela Guardino has completed a Master by Research (with Distinction) at RMIT University in Hong Kong. She has exhibited throughout Australia, Brazil, India, Hong Kong and Singapore. In 2017 Graziela was chosen as the recipient to represent RMIT University in the La Salle College of the Arts residency in Singapore. Guardino’s artworks are part of art collections around the world including Alessandro Stein Collection in Milan and Los Angeles, La Salle College of the Arts, Singapore, as well as Private collections in Brazil, Italy, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, United States, London and India.
Graziela is a finalist for a number of prestigious art awards including The Churchie Emerging Art Prize, Muswellbrook Art Prize, The Fisher’s Ghost Award and Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize. In 2021 Guardino was the winner of the Waverley Art Prize in Sydney, Australia. In 2024, Graziela was chosen to be part of the Artist in Residency program at Bundanon in Australia, granted by Bundanon Trust.
Web: www.grazielaguardino.com
Instagram: @grazielaguardino
Armando Chant
Artist Statement
My artwork captures the ethereal essence of landscapes by examining the intricate interplay between light and darkness, image and surface, through an atmospheric perspective.
This series takes inspiration from an glass stereoscope negative depicting a valley in France, the Vallée Veneon D'Isere. Despite being unfamiliar with the location and having no personal connection to it, these images present a familiar vista, documenting a past era of image-making. The valley serves as a nexus between two mountain forms, inviting encounters with the merging of land and sky, atmosphere and solidity, calm and turmoil, peace and imminent danger, evoking shifting moods and emotions. This delicate balance and the tensions it engenders form the foundation of my work.
Drawing inspiration from art critic John Berger's observation that 'When we see a landscape, we situate ourselves in it,' I explore how we engage with unknown places by creating atmospheric and indeterminate ('negative') pictorial spaces that convey the tension between personal and collective memories and their resonance.
This atmospheric quality highlights the significance of artworks that exist between image and object, exploring the nuances and intersections of art practice. My work transcends individual pieces, forming a series where visual and compositional formats repeat, generating creative and perceptual tensions through processes of erasure and negation, revealing surfaces and sites of interaction.
In this way, the in-between connects diverse methods of visual image or surface generation and the relationships between elements, artist, and viewer. Conceptually and aesthetically, these paired elements harmonize or oppose each other, so that their tensions and resonances coalesce to become singular, an 'in-between' site, where the line between imagination and reality is blurred, not defined or fixed, but nebulous and ethereal.
Web: //https://armandochant.com
Instagram: @armando_chant
Dominik Mersch Gallery - https://dominikmerschgallery.com/artist/armando-chant/
Katelyn Geard
Biography
Katelyn Geard is an emerging multidisciplinary artist living and working in Nipaluna/Hobart. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours at The University of Tasmania in 2022.
Her practice is primarily drawing and photography. She uses digital and experimental photography techniques and powdered graphite, brushes and pencils to create hyperreal figurative drawings. She is interested in art as a form of communication and expression. Her works are representational and introspective explorations of embodied identity and experience. She is interested in the human body as something that feels and can be felt, and something that holds, interprets, and expresses emotions. She is currently exploring body language and gestures as a means of communication.
Katelyn has held a solo exhibition in Melbourne and has participated in group shows across Tasmania including the inaugural RISE exhibition at Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in 2023. She has been awarded the IRIS Award Student Prize and UTAS College of Arts Law and Education Executive Dean’s Acquisitive Award. She has also been a finalist in art prizes across Australia including the Tasmanian Portrait Prize, Tasmanian Women’s Art Prize, The Henry Jones Art Prize and The Lloyd Rees Art Prize. Her work has been acquired by the University of Tasmania and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and is in private collections in Australia and the Netherlands.
Web: www.katelyngeard.com
Instagram: @katelyngeard
Joyce Hinterding
Artist Statement
Koch Triangle: Energy Scavenging Antenna (2014-2024)
Over many years, I have been listening to the energy in the very low-frequency part of the radio spectrum and have been captivated by an open-ended exploration into energy-scavenging antennae that take the form of Induction drawings that exploit the conductivity inherent in graphite. Stencilling an antenna drawing onto the street-level architectural glass at DRAW Space with an industrial form of graphite provides the opportunity to monitor the movement of electromagnetic energy from inside to outside. People can add their biological energy into the equation by physical contact or proximity, touching the graphite inside or outside the glass. Part of the scavenged energy lies within the audible range, effectively making drawings that sound.
This Induction drawing was first exhibited with David Haines as a part of a larger collaborative work called Carbon Black Electromagnetic Jurassic in 2014 at Roodkapje, Rotterdam and is an extrapolation of a Fractal loop antenna based on a Koch Snowflake. Generated by a mathematical algorithm that describes naturally occurring structures, this loop contains experimental passive and parasitic elements that are fortifying and potentially amplifying.
Biography
Joyce Hinterding lives and works in the Blue Mountains NSW, Australia. Her practice is internationally renowned for exploring acoustic and electromagnetic phenomena with custom-built field recording and monitoring technologies, including VLF antenna and experimental graphite drawings. She often collaborates with artist David Haines to produce large-scale immersive video and real-time interactive 3d environments and experimental sound performances. Joyce is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney and lecturers at the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts.
Joyce has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally; she was awarded the Australia Council Emerging & Experimental Arts Award (2019), and her individual and collaborative work was featured by the MCA in a survey exhibition, Energies Haines & Hinterding (2015). This was followed by an extensive monograph exhibition titled Résonances Magnétiques - Haines & Hinterding at La Panacée, Centre for Contemporary Art, Montpellier, France (2016). She has exhibited in numerous international Biennales, including the 23rd Biennale of Sydney – Rīvus (2022), the 13th Sydney Biennale of Sydney, The World (May Be) Fantastic (2002), the 7th Istanbul Biennial (2001) and the 9th Biennale of Sydney, The Boundary Rider (1992). Her graphite works have been exhibited in the exhibition Graphite at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, USA (2012), Objects & Energies: Joyce Hinterding, Agnes Martin, Linda Matalon, NAS, Gallery, Sydney (2014), Hot Electrons and Astro Flora, at Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney (2016) (2018) and Spectre-Electromagnetic, Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona, Spain (2011). She and David represented Australia in the 26th Bienal de Sao Paulo: Image Smugglers in a Free Territory, Brazil, (2004), won the Ann Lander New Media Art Award at The Art Gallery of NSW (2011) and received the Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica in the hybrid arts category (2009). Her work is held in numerous public and private collections.
Web: https://www.haineshinterding.net
Instagram: @Joyce Hinterding
Sarah Cottier Gallery - https://sarahcottiergallery.com/artist/haines-hinterding/
Annelies Jahn
Artist Statement
These graphite drawings have developed over 4 years during and after a 3-month residency at Cité Internationale des Art in Paris.
Following a site-responsive intervention constructed with found objects, a series of measured spatial drawings were made documenting and analysing the composition. Connections were made intuitively and systematically. Through 2-dimensional processes, 3-dimensional forms were revealed, and so became drawn into form.
Graphite as material, carved from drawing sticks, was used to realise small 3-dimensional sculptures. The hand-drawn mark on drafting film rendered graphite to its original qualities – a crystalline form of carbon flakes – metallic, shifting light and perception.
Biography
Annelies Jahn is a multi-disciplinary artist with a Master of Fine Art from the National Art School. Her work has been exhibited in Australia and overseas and she has had residencies in Sydney and Paris. Annelies has work in the National Art School Archive and in private collections. She lectures at the National Art School and has previously been a director at STACKS Projects Inc. and ES74 Gallery.
Annelies’ work investigates ideas of space, relationship and temporality, as experienced through objects and place. The contingency of these perceptions is observed via the agency of measure to become the process of art making.,
Instagram: @anneliesjahn
Belinda Yee
Artist Statement
I approach time as a material component of my work and generally choose media that perform their inherent temporality. I like working with graphite because I am drawn to its temporal paradox: it takes millennia to form in nature, we have collected graphite particles older than our solar system, and yet it is so easily erased that it seems temporary or transient.
In this performance piece, I work with powdered graphite because it is an evocative and tactile material. This graphite is the material waste from sharpening my drawing tools throughout a Master's degree in drawing. I apply this graphite to my body and there is a merging of time through the movement of my body, the graphite, and my breath. These things come together to create an experience of time and are a meditation on time.
Whenever I foreground natural, lived or experienced temporalities, the aim is to recalibrate or reframe the experience of time. The intention is to refocus away from the metered, structured temporality of the clock and to decolonise time by creating spaces of refuge from industrialised time.
Biography
Belinda Yee is an interdisciplinary artist living on Gadigal land. Her practice is one where the formal resolution of work, be it in drawing, painting, video or performance, is driven by the conceptual underpinning of the work. She is currently exploring processes for decolonising time and the inherent bias associated with new data-driven, generative technologies.
Belinda has an MFA from the National Art School, a BVA from Sydney College of the Arts and a Bachelor of Industrial Design (Honours) from the University of Canberra. Belinda has been a finalist in several national prizes, including the National Works on Paper Prize, the Ravenswood Australian Women's Art Prize, the Fisher Ghost Award, and the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing amongst others. In 2023, she won the Environmental Art and Design prize and received an ArtsPay Grant for her work on ‘digital genocide.’ Belinda has exhibited in Australia, Hong Kong and France and has work in the National Art School and the Capella Hotel collections, amongst others.
Belinda is also a curator with these curatorial credits: Magic Sauce / Locust Jones, Moving Freely / Tania Lou Smith, the International Performance Drawing Series and a show for over fifty artists with disabilities called A Kind of Magic / Studio ARTES. Belinda is a founding director of Draw Space (drawspace.org) in Sydney.
Instagram: @belindayee
Web: http://belindayee.com