Umbrella Event: SOCIAL curated events

Wona Bae (South Korea) and Charlie Lawler (Australia) are collaborative artists based in Australia, known internationally for their installations and sculpture that navigate visceral and symbiotic human relationships with nature. 

Their multifarious practice includes sculpture, relief, sound, photography, and video. Drawing on patterns and systems from the world around them, their unique immersive installations experiment with materiality and technology, tapping into the primitive need to find connection with the natural world. 

Grounded in observation and documentation of the world around them, their practice explores human experience in both natural landscapes and the built environment. Characterised through abstraction, distortion and repetition their work plays spatially with ideas relating to perspective and escapism.

Bae and Lawler have held solo exhibitions at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2019/20); Backwoods Gallery, Melbourne (2022 and 2019); See You Soon Gallery, Tokyo (2017); and Koskela Gallery, Sydney (2016). They were commissioned to create a major new installation for The National at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021), and have undertaken other major installations throughout Australia, South Korea, Japan, Spain and the UK. Bae and Lawler have won the 2019 Yering Galley Award and the 2018 Yarra Valley Arts/ RACV Award. They have undertaken residencies at Artspace, Sydney (2021), Gregans Retreat, Lisdillon, Tasmania (2020), and Onyang Folk Museum, South Korea (2022).

Hayley Millar Baker

 b. 1990, Melbourne, AU 

Hayley Millar Baker is First Nations (Gunditjmara/Djabwurrung) woman born in Melbourne, Australia (1990). She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2010) and Master of Fine Arts (2017) at RMIT University in Melbourne. 

Through examining the role our identities play in translating and conveying our experiences, Hayley works across photography, collage, and film to interrogate and abstract autobiographical narratives and themes relating to her own identity. Her oblique storytelling methods and methodologies encourage us to embrace that the passage of identity, culture, and memory are not linear nor fixed. 

Hayley’s works are held in significant public institutional collections across Australia and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Hayley has been a finalist in several prestigious national art prizes including the Ramsay Art Prize (2019 and 2021), Bowness Photography Prize (2021), John Fries Award (2019), and international prizes including Hong Kong’s Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2021), and United Arab Emirates Vantage Point Sharjah 9 (2021), and has won the John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship for the National Photography Prize (2020), the Darebin Art Prize (2019), and the Special Commendation Award for The Churchie National Emerging Art Prize (2017). She was selected as one of eight artists to exhibit in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Primavera: Young Australian Artists (2018) and has been awarded several residencies including the Artist-in-residence at Monash University Prato, Italy (2022), the First Nations Residency at Collingwood Yards (2021), the Photography Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria (2019). Hayley was a feature artist in PHOTO2021: International Festival of Photography (2021) and has exhibited in other art festivals including the International Ballarat Foto Biennale (2017), and Tarnanthi (2017). Hayley will present a new commission for the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia (2022). 

In 2021 Hayley presented her first early career-survey ‘There we were all in one place’ at UTS Gallery, curated by Stella McDonald. The exhibition brought together five pivotal bodies of work from Hayley’s early career for the first time and will tour Australia in 2022. 

Millar Baker’s work is held in significant collections across Australia: Australian War Memorial, Canberra; Melbourne Museum, Melbourne; Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Melbourne; Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne; Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), Albury; State Library of Victoria, Melbourne; University of Technology Sydney, Sydney; University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney; Warrnambool Art Gallery, Warrnambool; Shepparton Art Museum (SAM), Shepparton; Deakin University Art Gallery, Melbourne; Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Horsham; City of Melbourne, Melbourne. 

Hayley Millar Baker is represented by Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne, Australia. 

Jessie French

Based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, the work of Jessie French explores speculative futures through algae-based bioplastic and water-based ecologies. Housed within an ethos of consumption, sustainability and regeneration, her practice invites others to engage with the possibilities of a post-petrochemical world. Through experimenting with other materials, she explores the potential of closed-loop systems of (re)use and conscious consumption and interaction with objects. In 2020, French founded OTHER MATTER, an experimental design studio working with algae-based bioplastics which engages others in the possibilities of new materials though objects, experiences and futures.

Loren Kronemyer | Artist Talk, Facilitator

Loren Kronemyer (b.1988) is an artist living and working in remote lutruwita (Tasmania), Australia. Her experimental artworks are aimed at exploring ecological futures and survival skills through hands-on immersion and deep learning. In 2021, she learned to hand-build millet brooms from Tumut, the last factory in Australia, setting up her own self-sufficient replica of their factory in the project Millennial Reaper (Fremantle Biennale, Melbourne Art Fair). In 2018, she learned to shoot arrows, then became a coach so she could train her audience to shoot at her artwork for the project After Erika Eiffel (ANTI Festival of Live Art, MONA FOMA). In 2016, her collaboration Pony Express created Ecosexual Bathhouse, a touring queer sex club for the entire ecosystem. In 2017, Kronemyer was the first artist in residence at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. She collaborates frequently with laboratories and received the first Masters of Biological Arts Degree from SymbioticA Lab at the University of Western Australia.

Ross Coulter

Ross Coulter is a visual artist with a BFA (Hons) and MFA (Research) from the Victoria College of the Arts. He has exhibited both locally and internationally at a number of gallery spaces. As the recipient of the 2010-2011 George Mora Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria he undertook a project that involved the release of 10,000 paper planes into the Domed Reading Room of the State Library of Victoria. His photographic series titled “Audience” (2013-2016) was exhibited at the NGV in 2017. In 2018 Ross developed and presented a photographic series titled “Corporate Portraits” that was presented at the Warburton Arts Centre. His recent artworks have been an exploration of photographic portraiture, performance and community participation. Ross has received numerous awards, artist residences and grants.

Dr Meredith Turnbull

Meredith’s practice focuses on the world of things as the form-creating basis of culture. She is interested in making and material, and the experiential and temporal register of forms. Her practice engages various disciplines and approaches to making, writing and curating. Her artworks engage diverse scales, art historical traditions and genres – and manifest in connections between the body and; sculpture, images, decorative objects and jewellery.

Recent projects include Closer, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne University, 2018 and SHE TURNS at c3 Contemporary Art Space, Hardbody Sculpture at Daine Singer and Softbody Sculpture at Pieces of Eight in 2017. Turnbull has held solo exhibitions at Station, MADA Gallery, Pieces of Eight, Bus Projects, The Other Side, West Space, the Centre for Contemporary Photography, TCB and The Narrows. She has exhibited in group exhibitions at galleries including the Heide Museum of Modern Art, the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne University, the National Gallery of Victoria, Craft Victoria, Jam Factory, Adelaide, Melbourne Art Fair, the VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery and the George Paton Gallery. Recent curated projects include Material Exchange at c3 Projects (2017), Form and Flex (2015) and Rock Solid (2011), Pieces of Eight, Melbourne, A Condition of Change, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne (2011), Risk Potential, Die Ecke, Santiago (2010) and Once More with Feeling, VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne (2009).

Meredith Turnbull completed a Bachelor of Art (Honours) in Art History at LaTrobe University in 2000, a Bachelor of Fine Art (Gold and Silversmithing) at RMIT University in 2005 and a PhD at Monash University in the field of Sculpture and Spatial Practice in 2016. In 2016 Turnbull was co-editor (with Shelley McSpedden) of un Magazine issue 10.1. From 2006 to 2010 Turnbull was Gallery Manager and Curator of the VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery. She was editor of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s online magazine ACCAMag from 2004 to 2005 where she also worked as a Project Manager and Assistant to the Artistic Director. Meredith has lecturered in Art History at RMIT University specialising in Contemporary Art and C20th Craft and Design. She currently Coordinator of Bachelor of Fine Art First Year in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University.

Meredith Turnbull is represented by Daine Singer, Melbourne

Roma Turnbull-Coulter

Born in 2014, Roma Turnbull-Coulter is an emerging artist living on Boon Wurrung country. Her art practice includes painting, drawing, photography, video, performance and sculpture. Roma is in Grade 1, (when not being home-schooled due to COVID restrictions). Roma’s first exhibition was in 2016 when she was invited to collaborate with her mother Dr. Meredith Turnbull in the group exhibition Mum at the Stockroom in Kyneton, curated by Claire Needham. Roma has exhibited with her parents in the annual c3 fundraiser, Faux Studio, in 2016. In 2018 and 2019 she exhibited with her contemporaries from Monash Caulfield Childcare Centre at Monash University Museum of Art for her Childcare End of Year exhibition. Mathew Ware, director of Muse du Strip, invited Roma and her father Ross Coulter in 2019 to create an exhibition for his gallery which was titled Roma + Ross.