Artist Talk - Helen Grace - Sustaining the art of practice

Saturday 25 June, 2pm-3pm

Join Helen Grace as she discusses her work, including the photographs exhibited in Sustaining the art of practice.

Helen Grace is an award-winning new media artist, filmmaker, writer and academic whose work has played an active role in the development of art, cinema, photography, cultural studies and education in Australia and regionally for over 30 years.

She was the Founding Director of the MA Programme in Visual Culture Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong and is now Associate, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney; in 2012-13 she was Visiting Professor in the Department of English, National Central University, Taiwan on a National Science Council Fellowship.

Her work is in the collections of Artbank, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of NSW and Art Gallery of South Australia as well as private collections nationally and internationally.

Elements of art and politics intertwine in her work as she draws on the past to reflect on the present. Her work has featured issues relating to women in public and private lives and has been instrumental in interrogating the manner of structuring living spaces; the ways of organising working and living within them, and how to exercise freedom in the everyday.

Working with both ‘movement’ (as in film) and ‘stillness’ (as in photography), she has documented her own experiences of domestic living and her ‘antiheroic’ photographs of ‘indecisive moments’ in the current exhibition include those in Christmas dinner (1979) Chromobromide prints and Letraset 53 x 43 cm, 7 parts.

Her work has been featured in Queering the Frame: Community, Time, Photography, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, Vic. (2022), as part of Photo2022 and Friendship as a Way of Life, University of NSW Art & Design Galleries, 2020. Her recent projects have included The Housing Question (with Narelle Jubelin), Penrith Regional Galleries, Home of the Lewers Bequest, 2019, Thought Log, SCA Galleries, Sydney (2016) and Map of Spirits, Gallery 4A, Sydney (2015). Recent books include Culture, Aesthetics and Affect in Ubiquitous Media: The Prosaic Image (Routledge, 2014) and Technovisuality: Cultural Re-enchantment and the Experience of Technology. (Co-editors, Amy Chan, Kit Sze and Wong Kin Yuen) IB Tauris, 2016).

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Image: Helen Grace Christmas dinner (detail), 1979, sepia-toned silver gelatin prints and lettering, 7 parts, Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, The University of Western Australia. Copyright and courtesy of the artist

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Please note: in keeping with the University's guidelines, space is limited for this event and registration is required.