Curated by multidisciplinary artist Joanna Sulkowski, the exhibition challenges the perception of craft as a repetitive activity of making things by hand and offers a new perspective on the processes and materials-driven practice of a dynamic group of contemporary artists. Commissioned to create new work for the exhibition, HERE&NOW19 features a range of work, including wall-hanging textiles, large-scale installation and video.

The Bunbury Biennale is a state wide contemporary art event, initiated by the City of Bunbury Art Collection Committee in 1993 and is the second oldest Biennale in Australia. The aim of the exhibition is to attract the best of West Australian contemporary art and to acquire new works to expand and diversify the existing City of Bunbury art collection. It is the largest public art collection outside the art gallery of Western Australia.

I accepted the residency in order to undertake an exploration into the history of the emotions of Heathcote, something that has accumulated over the years. To find a way back into the past I felt compelled to research this (rich) history of the emotions of previous inhabitants. In this I was hoping to find a mark that I could use in my work and in so doing portray something of this history.

Collective States investigates points of connection between artists working across media in WA. The exhibition traces not only the diversity of expression and creation in contemporary art practice, but also the ability of artists to broadly explore different directions within their own art practices. The intent of the curatorial collaboration was to showcase a selection of mid-career artists whose enduring and dedicated practice has consistently led to exploratory investigations informed by decades of knowledge and research. While artists were not asked to work to a theme or pigeonholed by style or methodology, the exhibition has given voice to a series of personal and universal narratives revealing the influences and experiences that have shaped their artistic practice.

Collective States investigates points of connection between artists working across media in WA. The exhibition traces not only the diversity of expression and creation in contemporary art practice, but also the ability of artists to broadly explore different directions within their own art practices. The intent of the curatorial collaboration was to showcase a selection of mid-career artists whose enduring and dedicated practice has consistently led to exploratory investigations informed by decades of knowledge and research. While artists were not asked to work to a theme or pigeonholed by style or methodology, the exhibition has given voice to a series of personal and universal narratives revealing the influences and experiences that have shaped their artistic practice.

In the works, “bags” the artist refer to her collective memories, (migrating from South Africa) the bags is carriers of skill and emotions. Her take on the historical Sailor bag as point of departure, reference her post colonial inheritance. Susan specifically refers to the often long sea voyeuristic journeys of sailors, where they would embroidered there love ones names and images of importance to them, on these bags. The bag was the only item that was allowed with them on sea. As they were expert sailor makers these bags were filled with sail-making tools.

A solo exhibition by Susan Roux. Un/Stitch(ed) is an iconography of location, measurement and registration of territory. It represents a codified materiality of the tearing and assembly of landscape via the action of sewing. Layered thick textured paper allows met to elaborate the cartography of the worlds apart, unpublished and improbable. It draws the eye to the loss of any reference, identification and reality.

Through the time-consuming act of sewing and the near-instant destructive creation of tearing paper, I engage in a movement of constant tension between creation and destruction, between body and landscape, between anatomy and geology - altering and creating the notion of time and how it is measured. The materiality of the sculptures suggests an alternate past, a connection between anatomy and landscape fluid through time, from then and now, here and there.

My work in this exhibition deals with displacement as central theme, represented through sculpted figures and drawings, dealing with historical and archaic subject matter.  The figures portray exiles as goods in transit. Their movement impaired and their vulnerability exposed. Charged with emotion and with the aim of representing the interventional passage between the instant of displacement and being estranged in an unnamed space, the figures carry survival tools, which also served as my drawing tools, tracing and mapping my land of origin in landscapes of trauma and violence.