Congratulations to the following artists, 2024 Clothing Store artists-in-residence at the Carriageworks, Sydney: Akil Ahamat, Denis Beaubois, Jasmine Miikika Craciun, Newell Harry, Alana Hunt, Victoria Hunt, EJ Son, Shireen Taweel, Helen Grace, and Joel Sherwood Spring.
Since 2017, the program has provided artists working at the forefront of contemporary practice with studio space in the heart of North Eveleigh. In 2024, for the first time since the program began, artist studio rent is fully subsidised. The ten artists- in-residence were chosen by a selection committee comprised of Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley, Senior Curator of Visual Arts at Carriageworks, Stephanie Berlangieri, Associate Curator of Visual Arts at Carriageworks, and Agency Projects curator and proud Gulumirrgin (Larrakia) Jingili, Anglo and Filipino woman Coby Edgar.
2024 Clothing Store Studio Artists L–R: Helen Grace, Denis Beaubois, Newell Harry, Jasmine Miikika Craciun, Shireen Taweel, EJ Son, Alana Hunt, Victoria Hunt, Akil Ahamat, and Joel Sherwood Spring (not pictured). Photograph: Jacquie Manning
Meet the 2024 Clothing Store Studio Artists:
Akil Ahamat works across video, sound, performance, installation and games to consider the physical and social isolation of online experience and its effects in configuring contemporary subjectivity. Driven particularly by their research into the use of ASMR as a self-administered therapeutic tool in online spaces, Ahamat translates its restorative effects into affecting intimate audio experiences in the public space of the gallery.
Denis Beaubois works across the multidisciplinary fields of video, photography and performance. He was a member of the performance ensemble Gravity Feed as well as the Post Arrivalists and has performed with Japanese company Gekidan Kaitaisha in The Drifting View X in Tokyo.
Jasmine Miikika Craciun’s practice sits between mediums, experimenting with digital illustration, murals, textiles, sculpture and installation. As both an Aboriginal woman and second generation Australian, she navigates the complexities of identity with an artistic vision that transcends a single artistic medium. Central themes of place and home echo narratives of displacement, illustrating the impact on her identity and inviting viewers to contemplate the intricate dance between personal narratives and broader historical contexts.
Helen Grace is an artist, writer and teacher. She works with still and moving images and the archive as a living organism. Her work intertwines elements of art and politics as she draws on the past to reflect on the present.
Newell Harry’s projects have explored an intimate web of personal connections and histories spanning Oceania and the wider Indo-Pacific to South Africa’s Western Cape Province, where his extended family continue to reside. Newell is an avowed ailurophile, jazz nut, cricket tragic, retired rockhopper and ill-disciplined lay Buddhist.
Alana Hunt makes art and writes, finding ways for this material to move affectively through the public sphere and the social space between people. She has worked with journalists, filmmakers, human rights defenders and lawyers on works that unfold over many years, with gradual yet accumulating resonance. The iterative memorial Cups of nun chai (2010-20) was serialised in 86 editions of Kashmir Reader (2016–17). In late 2023, Hunt completed Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023) a film that examines the materialisation of non-indigenous life on Miriwoong Country in the town of Kununurra and its surrounds.
Victoria Hunt’s works across the visual and performing arts as a dancer, director, choreographer, dramaturg, photographer, and filmmaker. Hunt’s work delves into Indigenous epistemologies within diasporic concepts of identity formation and belonging. Her work is liminal and reinstates the power of Indigenous creativity within the politics of Rematriation by inserting the body into frameworks of power for future ancestors. Central to this practice is Whakapapa (kinship/transdimensional), Atua Wahine (sacred feminine principle), Body Weather and IndigiQueer revitalisation within creation practices. Her work is a gradual binding of intimate collaboration between artists, Elders and communities.
Joel Sherwood Spring is a Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist who works collaboratively on projects that sit outside established notions of contemporary art and architecture. His work attempts to transfigure spatial dynamics of power through discourse, pedagogies, art, design and architectural practice. It is focused on examining the contested narratives of Australia’s urban cultural and Indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation.
EJ Son is a multidisciplinary artist working across new media, sculptural installations, video and ceramics. They focus on provocation and humour as a device to interrogate the complexity of power in the construction of gender, sexuality and race. Son’s practice is often paradoxical, arousing the tension created by our subconscious tendencies towards binaries; they aim to deconstruct and create space for new feelings to be considered.
Shireen Taweel’s practice is speculative and multidisciplinary, establishing questions, possibilities and futures around the construction of community and cultural histories, and colonised and decolonised collections of movement. Taweel focuses on the construction of the sacred within future cultural landscapes, and the cross cultures of community, science and beliefs connecting humans to non-living and living objects within the passages of present and future migration. Employing copper artisan techniques, film and sound composition, Taweel works within a space of shared histories and fluid community identities.
The Clothing Store artist residency program has supported more than forty artists across six years to date, including Tony Albert, Frances Barrett, Sarah Contos, Dean Cross, Mikala Dwyer, Cherine Fahd, Brian Fuata, Dennis Golding, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Thea Anamara Perkins, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Salote Tawale, Jason Phu, Jazz Money, Kate Mitchell, JD Reforma, and Nell – with a number of former resident artists presenting major works at Carriageworks, including Salote Tawale’s first major solo exhibition, I remember you, recently presented from 17 November 2023 to 28 January 2024.
