About the author
Bixiao Zhang
Bixiao Zhang is a digital artist and Ph.D. candidate at RMIT University living in Naarm(Melbourne). Her practice-led research, a fluid entity termed “The ElectroPoetics,” proposes a performative approach to digital media and algorithmic architecture driven by the convergence of Chinese Shanshui(mountain-water) Thought, feminist eco-poetics, and electro-dynamism. Her performative “Shan-Shui” practice situates dynamic digital substrates for transversal modes of engagement and co-current mattering, an approach that accentuates tacit resonance as primordial modes of care. Bixiao mainly engaged in public art projects and residencies in the Asia Pacific before 2020, such as residency at Hong Kong Cattle Depot Art Village (2017), Goethe Institute x Creative Fes Shenzhen (2019), and JMMK #12 Media Festival Indonesia (2020), Hua Niao Island International Art Festival, China (2021). These projects are interested in the influence of the digital environment’s emergent ontogenetic patterns on a specific physical site. Bixiao won the 2021 Dean’s Award for her research project. Her latest projects include an artist residency at the Centre for Projection Art (Australia), a research residency at Post Humanist Art Network (San Francisco), and exhibitions at Bunjil Place, the Chinese Museum, and Federation Square (Melbourne).
Sarah Tomasetti
Sarah Tomasetti’s art practice is grounded in the revival of pre-modern techniques and materials such as fresco and encaustic that require the slow sensing of moisture, temperature and molecular interaction. Her practice explores how temporal processes of compression and erosion in the studio can echo cycles of land formation and disintegration through the development of the ‘stone-skin’ as both substrate for painting and fluid sculptural form. Recent works explore the inevitable enfoldment of painting into the geological strata of the Anthropocene. Sarah’s work is held in numerous public and private collections in Australia and overseas and she won the John Leslie Prize for Landscape in 2020.
Clare McCracken
Clare McCracken is a site-responsive artist, early-career researcher and the coordinator of Art History, Theory & Cultures in the School of Art at RMIT University, Naarm/Melbourne. Her practice-led research sits at the intersection of art, cultural geography and urban theory. She employs innovative, performance methodologies to research how mobility systems coproduce space, place, and landscape across generations in Australia. In 2019 Clare won an RMIT University Research Award in the Higher Degree by research Impact category for her PhD research. Recent publications include Lisbon Dreaming in Dystopian and Utopian Impulses in Art Making (2023) and Killing Snowmen: Big Things and rural Australia’s existential crises in Mobilities Humanities (2022). Recent creative outcomes include Cruskits and Crows, a video essay exploring pandemic and climate change mobilities, and Squishy Taylor and the City-Wide Ghost Plague, a story adventure for kids constructed around themes of urban wilding. More at: www.mccracken.com.au
Fiona Hillary
Fiona Hillary is a Naarm-based artist working in the public realm. Her passion lies in site-specific practices and the human/non-human relationships that reveal themselves across time. Exploring scale through publicly shared moments of awe and wonder; working with site, neon, sound, human and non-human companion species, her work focuses on temporary, fleeting encounters in and of the everyday. Most recently Fiona’s research understands climate change through her reading of bioluminescent dinoflagellates as the ‘shimmer of the biosphere’. Fiona has made and curated permanent, temporary, collaborative, performative works for a range of commissioning organizations. Fiona is the Program Manager of the Master of Arts – Art in Public Space and Co-Director of the School of Art research group Contemporary Art and Social Transformation at RMIT University.
Heather Hesterman
Heather Hesterman is an interdisciplinary artist working with installation, print-based media, community, education and landscape design. Recent projects are concerned with the intersection of topography, botany and the abiotic within natural and constructed sites. Informing visual processes with scientific data, Hesterman re-examines our relationship to Landscape as political, ecological and cultural.
Alex Harrison
Alex Harrison is a Phd Candidate in the School of Art. She is a trained anthropologist who has never practiced. She is an untrained performer, dramaturg and director who has practiced for 22 years. She is also a mother – definitely untrained. She used to listen to her feet when she danced and probably still does. This has its limits as well as advantages. She has made visible lots of devised physical theatre, dance and performance. She has created, choreographed and served as dramaturg for producers such as Sydney Opera House, Carriageworks and Dancehouse, companies such as Legs on the Wall, Brown Cab Productions, Nigel Jamieson, Branch Nebula, A Good Catch and the National Theatre of Scotland and festivals such as Dance Massive, Nottdance Festival UK and many other arts festivals across Australia, Canada, Asia and Europe. From solo, full-length work to large scale international collaborations these strange and special treasures disappear into glimpses, as all performance does.
Vanessa Chapple
Vanessa Chapple is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher, theatre director, filmmaker, children’s play specialist, somatic movement practitioner, musician, educator, and environmental activist. Her present doctoral research in the Creative Agency Lab, School of Education, RMIT, investigates the body as a site of listening. Posthuman, feminist, new materialist thinking and process philosophy infuse her eco-somatic, performance praxis. Her research aims to reveal, through hybrid aesthetic means, the effects and affects of cellular movements and living-system micro-choreographies present within relational exchange in the more-than -human creative ecologies of participatory arts and public pedagogy.
Martine Corompt
Martine Corompt is an artist academic working in the intersections of public art, animation and moving image. Since 1995 Martine has exhibited widely in individual and group exhibitions, locally, nationally, and internationally exploring aspects of reductive representation, and the conditions of visual perception. Exploring the representation of the natural and unnatural landscape contributed to the theme of her PhD research project titled: Cartoon and the Cult of Reduction completed at the VCA Melbourne University in 2017. More recently Martine collaborated with Sound artist Camilla Hannan on the ACMI audience lab project The Waiting Room and has recently completed a City of Yarra public commission for the Mary Rogers Netball Pavilion Richmond titled Momentum.
Cassandra Tytler
Cassandra Tytler is a video artist and researcher with a particular focus on performance practices. She works across digital media, performance, and site-specific practice. Her research interests lie in the performance of video and its encounter within place, to create a relational and aware politics of resistance to normalising narratives of exclusion. She has screened, exhibited, and performed nationally and internationally. She is currently a Forrest Creative and Performance Fellow, living in Boorloo (Perth) and working at ECU with the Centre for People, Place & Planet within the School of Education and WAAPA.
