A Room with a View
“Je suis l’space où je suis (I am the space where I am).”
Seven out of seven days we are living between four walls. Many of us are finding ourselves re-discovering our homes and the objects within them as we search for comfort or deeper meaning in the face of adversity.
Perhaps you have a favourite reading nook bathed in a sliver of sun for 20 minutes each morning? Or, maybe a comforting place is a wall lovingly decorated with the heights of grandchildren? Things too are a comfort. Perhaps, a treasured tea cup is keeping you company while you read? Or, a beautiful piece of art or craft greets you each morning as you make your coffee.
Social isolation has sharpened the focus upon the everyday rituals of being human. Whether small or large, brand new or a return to old habits, our relationship with time, nature, things, space and other people is shifting along with broader societal expectations.
Questions are emerging or intensifying around: the role of educators, the arts and the caring professions; the definition and boundaries of the ‘at home’ workplace; the expectations of the family unit and the welfare state; and, the sense of urgency around climate change and and geo-political stability.
We’re launching
A Room with a View
A Room with a View is a virtual initiative aimed at keeping female creatives and audiences connected during this period of isolation by fostering a space for creation and self-discovery at home. At the centre of the project is everyday being and the idea of home as a place of safety and solace, where we might nurture our creative or inner selves.
Its aim is to explore big questions through the prism of small creative gestures in the home, made visible via the distinctive art-making and thinking of leading female creatives.
Our contributors are:
Exhibiting visual artists Ali McCann, Edwina Stevens and Jo Lane
Contributing writer Julie Koh
Designer Carolyn Ang
Curator and Creative Producer Emma Thomson
Guest speaker(s) from our network of community partners to be announced!
Why the focus on women?
For many, the emphasis upon the home as a place of safety and solace during the pandemic rings true. However, for victims of domestic violence, most of whom are women, this is not the case.
Research has shown that social isolation measures during COVID-19 have greatly heightened the risk of domestic violence for impacted communities. Women also continue to be disadvantaged in the workplace, making them more susceptible in times of economic hardship.
Along with being a driver of much-needed income for female creatives, A Room with a View has been conceived as a marker of respect, love and pride for woman's distinctive art-making and thinking.
It also highlights the vital importance of home - as a space for safety and solace - bringing attention to the need for greater support of vulnerable women in our communities.
After we have paid our creatives and covered print costs, our aim is for excess proceeds raised from the sale of our book to be donated to inTouch and Domestic Violence Victoria.
The exhibition will be presented in two parts.
In part one we will commence by selecting one work by each visual artist from our homes to profile in our correspondences newsletter followed by an invitation to attend a virtual studio visit with our participating artists.
The studio visits will not be literal visits. Instead, each artist will have 20 minutes to share their space, or an impression of it, along with insights into their creative process and a particular artwork of their choosing (complete or in-progress), in the format of a short video work made via their iPhone.
Our artists will be reaching for the metaphysical - that space between mind and matter - as a way of exploring how the current environment is informing their creative process and sense of self.
The video works will be progressively released as a series of artist ‘viewing rooms’, along with a long-form written interview with the artist about their featured work, influences and creative practice in general.
After each room has been opened, we will get together with each participating artist to talk about the making process and life in general in the time of COVID-19. Our conversation will be live-streamed, accessible by our correspondences subscribers.
Alongside our visual artists, subject to our fundraising, we hope to involve three more exceptional female creatives who have agreed to participate in part two of our project. Read on for more details below!
If our fundraising is successful, part two of the exhibition will include:
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Three new works by McCann, Stevens & Lane
Through the medium of their choosing, the artists will explore notions of time, nature, space - things that connect to their artistic tendencies and to the central ideas of the project.
The new works will be featured in a book (limited edition print and digital format) and in a series of online viewing rooms so that viewers might engage with the works outside of the book concept.
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A special book to be published in digital and print format.
Featuring the new works made by McCann, Stevens and Lane, the book will be designed by Carolyn Ang. The print version will have a particular reverence for materiality, our sense of touch and the idea of everyday ritual, while the digital version will pay particular attention to the art of sound.
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An original piece of writing by acclaimed author Julie Koh.
Situated in the period of social anxiety within which we find ourselves, the Koh’s piece will take its inspiration from this idea of the home as a place of safety, solace, self-discovery and labour / creativity.
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A making project for supporters at home.
Subscribers at home will be invited to make their own impression of a room with a view. An online viewing room featuring the submissions received will be opened in February 2021.
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An interview project featuring six women from different fields.
Selected from our partner network, the participants will be interviewed to discuss their room with a view, and their thoughts on our artists’ visions and the idea of the home as place of solace, safety and self-discovery and labour / creativity.
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A book launch event and exhibition in April 2021.
Participating creatives will be gathered together at (to be announced!) to celebrate the launch.
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Conversation series.
Guest speakers from our partner network from the charitable sector and commerce will join our artists in the exhibition space at (to be announced!) for two conversational events to talk about the the idea of home as a space of safety, solace, self-discovery and labour/creativity.
Our contributors
Ali McCann (Naarm / Melbourne) is preoccupied with the constructed nature of photography and the possibilities of creating alternate visual and psychological realities through the mode of still-life. Her aesthetics derive from outdated art history pocket guides, 1970s art-and-design text books, photographic instruction manuals, old amateur photography magazines, and also from the high school interiors of my adolescence. Nostalgic imagery and the representations of memory intersect ambiguously with the theoretical notions of visual perception and the aesthetics of education.
Since the early 2000s McCann has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and regional Victoria. Recent solo exhibitions include Having an Experience / Energy Organisation, St Francis, Melbourne (2019), Οι νέοι, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2019), Masks for Magicians, Caves, Melbourne (2018); Polytechnic, Tristian Koenig, Melbourne, (2018), An Introduction to Liminal Aesthetics, c3 contemporary art space, Melbourne (2017), and Throwing off the Hump, Kings Artist Run, Melbourne (2017).
She holds a Master of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts along with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the Victorian College of the Arts and a Graduate Diploma of Education, all from the University of Melbourne. She currently teaches photographic studies and Art History at an art and design college in the Northern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria (AUS). For a list of McCann’s extensive exhibition history and awards, refer here.
Edwina Stevens (Otepoti, Aotearoa/Narrm-Melbourne) is an audiovisual artist working across composition, live performance and installation focusing on field recordings, synthesized sound, found acoustic elements/instruments and obsolete tech. Taking an improvised approach to music and sound design, influenced by her involvement in the Aotearoa experimental noise scene and no formal music training. Her work investigates audiovisual processes of engaging with places that are improvisational, collaborative and incidental, exploring entanglements of the temporal, material and experiential through chance encounters, tangential processes and unanticipated outcomes.
Alongside her audiovisual installation practice, Stevens has played under the moniker of ‘eves’ since 2011 performing live visual and sound works across New Zealand and Australia (FFFFFF, eves).
Stevens is currently undertaking a Research Masters Degree at Deakin University, School of Communication and Creative Arts under the supervision of Cameron Bishop, Ann Wilson and cultural advisor Liz Cameron, researching possibilities in the methodologies of transmutation of place via the sound artist. For a list of Stevens’ extensive exhibition history in Australia and New Zealand, refer here.
Jo Lane uses her drawing practice to explore social and psychological subjects. Working between UK and Australia she is a ‘drawer’ first and foremost, using charcoal, graphite, coloured pencils, and any other material that is present-to-hand, honouring the texture, immediacy and honesty of drawing. Whilst immersed in fastidious mark-making and fibre use as metaphor, decision-making is reflexive, responding intuitively to the outside world, the inside world and the differing shades and depths of line forming on surfaces. The contrast between self and other and the systems of separation and unity that operate throughout humanity, drives the work.
British Psychoanalyst, Donald W Winnicott places some artistic motivation in the tension between the desire to hide and the desire to communicate. Her work erupts from this tension, between the private refuge of thought and the nature of external engagement that is drawing.
Lane holds a Masters of Drawing (Distinction), University of the Arts London (UAL), Wimbledon College of Arts, along with a Graduate Certificate Visual Art, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and a Diploma of Visual Art, Latrobe College of Art and Design, Melbourne. For a list of her extensive exhibition history and awards in Australia and the UK, refer here.
Photograph of Julie Koh by Hugh Stewart
Writer Julie Koh is the author of two short-story collections: Capital Misfits (Spineless Wonders, 2015 and Math Paper Press, 2016) and Portable Curiosities (UQP, 2016).
Portable Curiosities was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2016, the Queensland Literary Awards – Australian Short Story Collection – Steele Rudd Award 2016, the UTS Glenda Adams Award in the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Australian Science Fiction Foundation’s 2018 Norma K Hemming Award (Long Work). It was also one of The Guardian’s Best Australian Books of 2016, an Australian Book Review 2016 and 2017 Book of the Year, a Sydney Morning Herald Daily Life feminist reading pick of 2016, a Feminist Writers Festival Best Feminist Book of 2016, and an ABC Radio National 2017 Best Summer Read.
Koh’s short stories have appeared in The Best Australian Stories in 2014 to 2017 and Best Australian Comedy Writing, to name but two in a long list of publications.
She edited BooksActually’s Gold Standard 2016 (Math Paper Press), an anthology of the best short fiction from cult writers of East Asia, Southeast Asia and the diaspora.
She also co-founded the Australian experimental collective Kanganoulipo, is currently writing the libretto for the satirical opera Chop Chef, and collaborates on fashion projects with Tega Boniko. Koh has written two radio plays for ABC Radio National and is a sought after judge and speaker.
Designer Carolyn Ang is a multi-disciplinary designer specialising in editorial design and publishing, brand identities and art direction. Having a love for typography, photography and a minimalist simplicity, she takes a purposeful approach to craft considered design solutions—always with a focus on strategy and being content and concept driven. Ang was the enormously talented design creative behind the most recent edition of Going Down Swinging, to name but one of her recent projects. Her website provides an overview of this and other examples of her work including the Matters Journal (2019), which was awarded a Merit at the AGDA Design Awards. For an archive of Ang’s beautiful design work and awards, refer here.
Emma Thomson is a creative producer with an interest in socially engaged, situational and interdisciplinary practices. Her practice correspondences focuses on connecting diverse audiences, artists and art forms in ways that stimulate, inspire and question. Her aim is to create lasting people to people connections across cultures.
She holds an MA in Curation (1st class) from the University of Melbourne, along with qualifications in art history, finance and professional work experience as an accomplished project manager consulting with the Arts, Not-For-Profit, Government and Commerce sectors.
She recently curated Liu Bolin 刘勃麟/伪装 and Noémie Goudal / Telluris for the 2019 Ballarat International Foto Biennale. Her next major project is Silent Dialogue.
In the meantime, she is working on a variety of special initiatives which you can read about here. In addition to curatorial projects, Emma works with individuals, small arts businesses and organisations to provide project management support, drawing upon her professional work experience as a risk and projects specialist.
