Six emerging visual artists from New South Wales have been shortlisted for the Create NSW and Artspace 2024 NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging): Kalanjay Dhir, Remy Faint, Charlotte Haywood, Gillian Kayrooz, Kien Situ, and Talia Smith.
Co-presented by Create NSW and Artspace, the $30,000 fellowship is awarded to one NSW visual artist in the early stages of their career. It will enable the recipient to undertake a self-directed professional development program to expand their practice and career progression. The 2024 three-month-long exhibition will be presented at Artspace, The Gunnery, in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo.
2024 NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) finalists L–R: Remy Faint, Kien Situ, Kalanjay Dhir, Charlotte Haywood, Gillian Kayrooz, Talia Smith. Photograph: Anna Kucera
Dhir’s sculpture and video work draw on popular culture, sci-fi and myth and contemplate human consciousness and how this may change in the near future.
Faint’s practice is motivated by the desire to expand languages of painterly abstraction by examining its global histories. While often referencing collection-based objects and materials specific to his Chinese heritage, his works mediate cross-cultural and material frameworks to explore themes surrounding exchange, visibility and hybridised artistic production.
Haywood is an experimental interdisciplinary artist working across the senses. She has a highly collaborative and process-driven practice dedicated to eco-aesthetics and biodiversity. Engaging interdisciplinary and intercultural narratives, she cultivates places of care, vulnerability, reciprocity, regeneration, joy and participation; nurturing self-assembly.
Kayrooz’s practice is deeply rooted in alternative methods of truth-telling through image-making. Her artistic approach is firmly anchored in the communities of Western Sydney, reflecting her personal experiences, ongoing engagement and steadfast commitment to storytelling through collaborative and disruptive art-making methods.
Situ’s practice spans architecture, sculpture, film and installation. With a thematic focus on ruin, distance and time; it exists to challenge, deconstruct and meditate on notions of space, heritage and identity as the ‘other’ in society. Reflecting on his Sinospheric background (Chinese/Vietnamese diaspora), he is exploring the position of Asian-Australian and greater immigrant/refugee identities in Australia.
Smith is of Cook Island, Samoan, and Pakeha heritage. Her photographic and moving image practice explores notions of time, memory, familial histories and the way in which we connect with culture when removed from ancestral homelands.
Previous recipients of the Fellowship include Morgan Hogg (2023), Eddie Abd (2022), Dennis Golding (2020), Shivanjani Lal (2019), Claudia Nicholson (2017), Consuelo Cavaniglia (2016), Heath Franco (2015), Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran (2014), Jamie North (2013), Soda Jerk (2011), Khaled Sabsabi (2010), Diego Bonetto (2008), and Tony Schwenson (1988).
