Inner West Creative Trails
Midjuburi Precinct
Saturday & Sunday / 13 & 14 August 2022
10am – 5pm
After a two year Covid Break, The fabulous Inner West Creative Trails event is back and we have an action packed schedule lined up with an exhibition, performance artists, resident artists, and art students all working and ready to interact.
This exhibition was supported and sponsored by the Inner West Council.
Scroll down for full details on participating Artists
Saturday
10 am – 5 pm
Gallery Exhibition / Domestic Mayhem . Large scale art works from Chris Dolman & Carmel Byrne
Studios / Resident Artists . We have six studios where Artists can work and develop their practise. Join our current resident artists Maggie Jane, Diana Ng, Isobel Johnston & Carmel Byrne and see what happens behind the Gallery in our Studios.
Studios / Acts of Holding Dance . Wendy Yu is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersections of dance and urban media art. Utilising dance and computer systems, she designs interactive works and builds large-scale immersive experiences to public spaces.
11 – 11.20am
Gallery / Artist Talk . Scratch Director & Artist Carmel Byrne will give a talk on how and why she set up Scratch.
11 am – 2 pm
Studios / Shivah . A performance art piece by Tom Isaacs that explores the intersections between mental health, intergenerational trauma, spirituality, and mourning through reflections on my family history.
1- 4 pm
Studios / Demonstration . Students are on Week 4 of our 7 week Painting for Beginners Course and the class will be in session for this event. No public participation for this session but you can see what goes on in an art class at Scratch Art Space.
Sunday
10 am – 5 pm
Gallery Exhibition / Domestic Mayhem . Large scale art works from Chris Dolman & Carmel Byrne
Studios / Resident artists . Maggie Jane, Diana Ng, Isobel Johnston & Carmel Byrne.
10.30 – 10.50 am
Gallery / In Conversation . Artists present their works and take questions from the Gallery audience.
1 – 3 pm
Studios / Almost Life Drawing . See what a life drawing session looks like with some of our regular drawing group at the easels. We’ll have a few to spare with drawing paper and equipment spare if you want to try to draw our special guest model Benedicta Gensen (in a leotard).
1.30 – 2.30 pm
Studios / Bioromantic . A performance piece by Katya Petetskaya who will be responding directly on the day to Gallery and visitors to the Creative Trails Event.
3 – 5 pm
Wrap Up / Join us for a drink to wrap up the weekend.
Artists
Tom Isaacs
Tom Isaacs is a Sydney-based contemporary artist and curator working primarily in the fields of performance and textile art. His practice draws from psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, religious and ritual practices, and art history to explore themes of mental illness, mortality, and the human condition.
Tom recently completed a practise-led PhD at Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University, researching the relationship between ritual, psychoanalysis and body art, and how these different streams of thought address the problem of alienation.
Recent exhibitions and performances include: Carnivale Catastrophe curated by Fiona Davies and produced by Modern Art Projects Blue Mountains at Cementa22; LIVE DREAMS: THRESHOLD curated by Victoria Spence and produced by Performance Space and Carriageworks; and Inaugural curated by Mark Wotherspoon at Ellipsis Gallery.
Wendy Yu
Wendy Yu is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersections of dance and urban media art. Utilizing dance and computer systems, she designs interactive works and builds large-scale immersive experiences to public spaces. Elevating forms of dance such breakdancing, which has typically been segregated to the streets, to the contemporary abstract art landscape. Representing the athletes and histories of local dance communities by creating inspiration and awe amongst viewers of a wider and more diverse background.
University of Melbourne | The Victorian College of the Arts | Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance)
University of Sydney | Master’s of Interaction design and Electronic Arts
Katya Petetskaya
Katya Petetskaya is a visual artist working across performance art and painting. Born in the Soviet Union, she grew up through the change of regimes in 90’s Russia which continues to have an impact on her practice today. Petetskaya’s works represent deeply emotive responses to her own personal history as well as society’s broader trends and trajectories. In many ways, as a result of these influences and concerns, Petetskaya’s work embodies a way in which she is able to interpret, process and better understand the accelerated changes of a world that is constantly in the process of reaching yet another tipping point.
Petetskaya has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions as a visual artist and performance-based artist at festivals and events in Sydney, Leipzig, Venice, Athens, Saas Fe and The Hague, as well as having participated in numerous international residencies in Guna Yala (Panama), Saas Fee (Switzerland), Chikatsuyu (Japan), Izhevsk (Russia) and Leipzig (Germany). Now permanently residing in Australia, Petetskaya was a finalist in the Grace Cossington Smith Art Award (2021), the Paddington Art Prize (2018) and the Contemporary Art Award Australia (2015).
Petetskaya’s works are held in private and public collections in Australia and overseas, including the Macquarie Group Collection and Leipzig International Art Programme. Petetskaya holds a Master of Art (Painting – Award with Excellence) from the University of New South Wales Art and Design.
Chris Dolman
Chris Dolman’s cross-disciplinary practice is imbued with incongruent and self-deprecating humour. This is not to say that it is not also sincere.
Incorporating painting and printmaking, objects, sound and video, he conjures work that draws on personal experience, art history and popular culture to explore ontological themes of vulnerability and loss; accidents and failure; and the abject qualities of the joke.
Dolman is ultimately interested in interrogating the Western canon of art (and his place within it), whilst probing universal anxieties implicit with living in the world today.
Chris holds an MFA (research) from Sydney College of Arts, Sydney University, 2018, and a BFA with honours (first class) from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2010. In 2019, he won the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Traveling Scolarship. He received the Dyason Bequest from the Art Gallery of NSW in 2017. ArtStart and New Work grants from the Australia Council for the Arts in 2013 and 2011. He was the recipient of the Wallara Travelling Scholarship, George Hicks award, and the NGV Women’s Association Award, VCA 2009.
Dolman has undertaken international residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Villa Belleville Paris, and Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium. National residencies include: Bundanon Trust, Hill End, BigCi NSW, Ceramic Design Studio, Parramatta Artist Studios, and Artspace Sydney. He has presented work in solo and group exhibitions in Australia and overseas.
Carmel Byrne
Carmel Byrne has been a practising artist for over twenty years and currently works out of Scratch Art Space, a creative business she established in 2016.
A process-driven artist, Carmel explores existential concepts through drawing from life with both figurative and landscape works. This approach is conducive to chaos & accidents where unplanned marks can, with the flick of a pencil, capture a unique gesture or expression, a surprise that is always outside of the realm of full creative control. It’s an expressive, collaborative act with nature.
Selected drawings are then translated to mostly large-scale paintings where her personal visceral experiences are projected to ignite an internal life in the subjects through the painting process.
Carmel’s work is in collections in Australia and abroad including the Mallesons Stephen Jaques (EASS) Collection, and the Sydney Institute of Technology National Collection. Her work has been selected for a number of exhibitions including The Dobell Drawing Prize, The Blake Prize, The Bermuda Biennial, The Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize, and in 2020 won a minor section of the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, was awarded The Vincent Art Prize.
National Art School, Diploma of fine Art (Painting)
Australian National University, Bachelor of Arts (Visual) Honours (1st Class)
University of NSW Art & Design, Master of Fine Arts (Research), APA Scholarship
Atelier Spaces
On Saturday Artist Carmel Byrne will be continuing with classes for the Painting for Beginner Course. This class is for students only so there’s no opportunity to grab a paint brush for this session.
On Sunday you can join in with an Almost Life Drawing session with model Benedicta in a leotard. We’ll have drawing materials available along with easels so you can have a go at life drawing. It’s fun!
Art Studios
We will have at least one resident artist in our studio area. Walk through and behold these beautiful studios and all the thinking and creative work that is constantly developing and evolving.