Ivey Wawn

My practice revolves around the work that is necessary for each project that I embark on. It involves reading, speaking with friends and collaborators, moving in ways that are related to some of the ideas that I am concerned with at the time, and reading more, or writing, or drawing blueprints and maps to understand how the ideas are interrelated. It is inherently social, whether that is a sociality enacted between live bodies in physical space, or enacted with imagined bodies, or non-human bodies, or memories. It is a dance practice, and whilst sometimes not much dancing happens, it is always there as an intention, and sometimes, to me, that feels like what matters most.

For my residency I spent time doing different activities that felt appropriate for the space constraints and materials I had at home.

I would give myself a simple activity to follow, often involving the mirrors that I have collected for performances I have done. The activities involved tracing reflections of trees, or tracing the movements of clouds overhead, or moving my body to shift the sensation of warmth from reflected sunlight along different pathways on my body. I also spent time layering the documentation of some actions over other photos I had taken whilst walking through my neighbourhood.

Ivey Wawn (1990) is a dancer working and living primarily on Gadigal Land (Sydney). She makes performances mainly for live audiences and performs regularly in the work of other artists from a range of disciplines. She is committed to dance as a potential form of resistance; to social abstraction and commodification, making work about labour, being together, sensation, magic, and about the commodity form among other things. She is supported to continue working as an artist by a secondary income in hospitality and continues to study a Bachelor of Political Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney since 2016. Ivey’s work has been supported by Arts House, the Australia Council for the Arts, Critical Path, DirtyFeet, First Draft Gallery, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Liquid Architecture, Next Wave Festival, Performance Space, ReadyMade Works, Underbelly Arts Festival among other institutions. More importantly though, her practice is supported by the comradery, work and intentions of her friends and colleagues both inside and outside of artistic practice.

IMAGES | Ivey Wawn. Photo Matthew Syres | Courtesy the artist.

IVEY WAWN

Ivey Wawn