Artist Talks

Laura Woodward

and

Ben Denham

Saturday 22 October, 3.30pm

10 Junction Street, Marrickville

Just 6 minutes walk along Schwebel Street from Marrickville Station

Come along to AirSpace Projects on Saturday 22 October, 3.30pm to hear Melboune-based artist and researcher Laura Woodward talk about her current exhibition, Resonate, and Sydney-based artist Ben Denham discuss his drawing machine and laser drawings.

Laura Woodward

Laura Woodward’s installation of kinetic sculptures and animations, “focuses upon those subtle, nuanced movements that can be found in organisms, in humans, and in machines, resonating across and between the animate, the inanimate, and the human-made: vibrations, tremors, twitches, pulses, rhythms, and the systems that underlie these movements. Motion, the basis of all life, is present not only in the visible, tangible realm, but right down to the atomic level. It is at the heart of our action and of our inaction, and it is the way in which we understand both time and the world around us. Investigating these movements through the development of new works, Resonate seeks to draw out the ways in which these various forms – organism, animal, non-animal, human, and machine – both resonate with and differ from each other.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication in which various contributors – including the exhibiting artist, an artist-curator, an artist-theorist, a poet, an anatomist, and an artist-philosopher – respond to the above conceptual stimulus. Offering texts, drawings, photographs and poetry, the contributions will interweave and overlap, exposing further rhythms, systems and resonances between and across the several practices at play.

Laura Woodward is an artist based in Melbourne. Woodward has been exhibiting sculptural, kinetic installations for over ten years. Her current artistic research involves the creation of looped systems embodied in these sculptural installations. The system’s inherent logic drives its formal and systematic emergences, opening up the opportunity for bodily resonances and experiences forged between artwork and viewer.

Woodward’s work has been nationally recognised through prizes, grants, public commissions, solo exhibitions and significant group exhibitions. She received Australia Council New Work Grants in 2010, 2013 and 2014; won the Agendo Prize for Emerging Artists in 2009; and was awarded the Vulcan Steel Postgraduate Tutorship Award and a Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship Award in 2007. In 2015 Woodward received a ‘Highly Commended’ award for the Art Gallery of NSW Studios in Paris Scholarship. Solo exhibitions include Ararat Regional Gallery, 2015; Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Southbank, 2013; and Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, St Kilda, 2010. Woodward’s practice increasingly involves the creation of large-scale sculptural works for the public realm, including her major upcoming commission Murmur for Marina Tower, Docklands.

Woodward is a lecturer in the School of Art at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Ben Denham

“I grew up in the Blue Mountains and studied visual arts at the University of Western Sydney. I currently live in Croydon Park, near the Cooks River, in Sydney’s inner west. I work with performance video and make machines that engage different parts of the body in the process drawing and writing. In 2002–03 I spent a year and a half in Mexico with the assistance of the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship. I maintain strong connections to Mexican art and activist culture. I completed my doctorate in 2009; my thesis considered the relationship between art and neuroscience, with a particular focus on gesture and linguistic embodiment. I work part time in web and media production for the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney where I’ve had the opportunity to shoot and edit a new production of one of Samuel Beckett’s films and to work on a documentary about the Sweatshop Western Sydney Literacy Movement. I also teach one day per week in the drawing department at the National Art School, Sydney.” Ben Denham