TRACTION

Online 11 Dec 2020

PRIME Speakers | Vicki Couzens, Mig Dann, Sara Lindsay

Convenor | Josephine Mead

PRIME

TRACTION is a four-part discussion series that will examine ideas of modification and renewal within creative practice, the needs for upholding artist’s rights, the power of mature knowledge, and new modes of education and exchange. 

Under the umbrella title of TRACTION, BLINDSIDE will present four artist-focused professional development online presentations: PIVOT, ACCUMULATE, GAIN and PRIME.

PRIME is a conversation around notions of matriarchal power and maturity within the arts.

Vicki Couzens is a prominent artist and Gunditjmara Keerray Woorroong woman from the Western Districts of Victoria, who plays an active role in promoting the culture of her people. She has served on the boards of the Koorie Heritage Trust Inc and the Victorian Corporation for Aboriginal Languages. A number of Vicki’s paintings have been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria. Additionally, she has played a prominent role in major public art projects including birrarung wilam on the bank of the Yarra River in Melbourne with other Indigenous artists Treahna Hamm and Lee Darroch. She had a central role, as Artistic Director, of the statewide Possum Skin Cloak project which was presented during the Melbourne Commonwealth Games in 2006.

Mig Dann is an artist currently undertaking a practice-led PhD in the School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne. Her art practice is multi-disciplinary and autobiographical, exploring and expressing issues of childhood trauma. Her work is informed by memory and forgetting, absence and presence, feminism, queer culture and decades of lived experience. She is particularly interested in how public art can create new and innovative relationships to existing sites.

The way the past is remembered is through the present, and because those past memories are always shifting she is exploring how the concepts of memory, time and identity can be identified through the present encounter with materials and the sculptural object. Making memory visual and working with it as a set of possibilities is a strategy that she is investigating through installations that combine objects, sound and moving images, in order to explore the poetics as well as the politics of memory and personal cultural history. @migdann

Sara Lindsay is an artist and educator, working predominately in tapestry. She received her initial training at the Australian Tapestry Workshop where she held the positions of weaver and studio manager. She received an MA (Fine Art Research) from RMIT. She is currently developing a project to thank the nurses of the world - distributing garments that receivers embroider and then wear on their daily walks.
@slindsay.skirts

Josephine Mead is a visual artist and writer based in Naarm (Melbourne). She is currently working as an Artistic Director for BLINDSIDE. She works through photography, sculpture, installation and writing to explore personal notions of support. Her recent work has positioned female family members as support-structures, considered the body as a site of discursive practice, explored notions of deep listening, and examined the temporal and sonic nature of writing and photography. She has held solo exhibitions at c3 contemporary art space, TAB Gallery (Turkey), Bus Projects and the Monash and RMIT faculty galleries. She has shown work in group exhibitions at a wide range of venues, including Blindside, Stockroom, Craft Victoria, Stacks Projects, Counihan Gallery, Five Walls, St Heliers Street Gallery, Kings Artist Run, Seventh, Blue Oyster Space (New Zealand) and as part of the TOMI Arts Festival (Japan). In 2018 she undertook the Arquetopia Foundation Residency (Puebla, Mexico), the Kings Emerging Writer’s Program, the Macfarlane Fund Residency (Kyneton, Victoria) and was published by Art+Australia and un projects. In 2019 she was awarded a Career Development Grant through the Australia Council for the Arts to undertake the Tasarim Bakkali TAB Residency (Istanbul, Turkey) and the Córtex Frontal Residency (Arraiolos, Portugal). In 2020 she commenced the ZK/U Residency at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin, Germany). She is a current Room to Create studio artist at Collingwood Yards (supported by City of Yarra) and is a founding member of the Image Collective.

IMAGES | Vicki Couzens | Mig Dann | Sara Lindsay| Courtesy the speakers.