2024 VERGE PROJECTS ARTISTIC PROGRAM
KIRSTEN BECCARIS, JESS FITZPATRICK, YALAN GAO, ELOISE TILBURY, BEE WALKER
“TIME SCULPTURE”
ARTBOX, LEVEL 4 FISHER LIBRARY
Time Sculpture, Small Sculptures from “Sculpture: Form and Material,” 2024. Installation view. Photography by Estelle Yoon.
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
Students in the Sydney College of the Arts course “Sculpture: Form and Material” were asked to create a “Small Sculpture” using materials at hand. The result was a range of works whose common theme or thread would seem to be time and inheritance. Each semester brings different preoccupations to the surface in the work of emerging artists and this class proves no exception. The deeply personal works can be read biographically, as the artists explore legacy and memories of childhood, but also take shape as distinct forms, highlighting the interplay between interpretation and experience.
This class was tutored by Zoe Robertson.
Peri Wilson-Morris, CtrlC 2024, glass, photography, 2024. Photography by Estelle Yoon.
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
The Copy features Sydney College of the Arts second-year students reimagining ceramics, glass, and textiles. It's a study in duality: tradition versus innovation, fragility against resilience. Porcelain and banquet settings question functionality while invoking historical context. The painstaking creation of glass beads illuminates the incremental growth inherent to creative practice. Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence is explored, framing replication as both an homage and a step towards new beginnings. Each artwork is a dialogue around authenticity, suggesting that the act of copying is an integral part of creative evolution.
This class was tutored by Jane Gavan.
ASHRAY KUMAR
”BEING, DOING”
LANEWAY CAFE, WENTWORTH BUILDING
Ashray Kumar, In contemplation, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.
ARTIST STATEMENT
In contemporary Indian society, where binaries often reign supreme, this series is an exploration of liminality—the space between prescribed roles and authentic selfhood. Being, Doing looks at, and attempts to subvert, traditional representations of the masculine, challenging the binary constructs which limit the range of acceptable expressions of oneself in society.
@_ashrayyy
HUAN HU
“DROWNED”
MANNING, LEVEL 1
Huan Hu, as part of series Drowned, 2024, digital photograph. Image courtesy of the artist.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Shot in Tasmania, Thailand and China, Drowned acts as a photographic capsule of Hu’s time living and travelling in foreign countries. Whether the countryside or the city, Hu speaks to the experience of being passively placed in unfamiliar environments, perceiving these spaces as leached of both colour and noise.
@ash_hhhhu
EVAN JAMES
“LITTORAL ZONE”
MONITORS, WENTWORTH LEVEL 1
Evan James, Littoral Zone 1, 2024, still from two-channel video installation, 56:24. Image courtesy of the artist.
ARTIST STATEMENT
A littoral zone is the boundary between continents and the ocean, or land and a body of water.
The imagery of Littoral Zone toes a shore between the landmass of analogue reality and a rising ocean of synthetic imitation.
Observing the qualities of light, reflection and colour found in Australia’s southeast shorelines, captured and simulated vignettes search for the underlying pattern and forces behind the ocean’s optical phenomena.
A procedural system arranges and juxtaposes images from the artist’s archive captured at sites including La Perouse in Botany Bay and the tidal rock pools of Port Macquarie. Digital studies follow the rhythms and colour palettes established in these captured impressions.
The conversation between digital and natural subject matters counterposes an imperilled ecosystem's material existence with its simulated afterimage.