Paper Cut: Students in Residence Talk III

With Sky Edwards + Annique Cockerill

Wednesday 17 March, 1pm-2pm

Join recent UWA students and artists Sky Edwards and Annique Cockerill for a talk exploring their work and participation in the Paper Cut: Students in Residence space.

Sky Edwards' graduating work, U-193-x, examines contemporary ecologies of colonised natural spaces. Their work is place- and process-driven, beginning with site exploration, macro photography of lifeforms, and found object collection. These are modified, mutated, and recombined sequentially with neural networks, weathering, drawing, painting, sculpture, and other techniques, resulting in 2D and 3D art objects. Sky also practices science art combining experience and techniques as both a scientist and an artist. They are driven by process and material, with a particular love of paint, experimental photography, and neural network collaboration. They explore the Weird to create fundamentally new and unfamiliar imagery. Their work is created from experience of place and the natural world, especially near Derbarl Yerrigan, while remaining conscious of their position as a descendent of white colonists who cannot speak for or over Noongar people. Sky explores mental health through art and as a nonbinary transgender person their work touches on queer experience.

Annique Cockerill stumbled across the medium of paper-cutting entirely by accident as a teenager, messing with her mother's craft blades. From that point she became obsessed with pushing the limits of paper structure. Each piece is hand cut, with a focus on producing the entire work as a connected single sheet. She enjoys playing with illusions of disconnect rendered in flat paper and shadow. Her work is oriented around projections of the self in space: mental and physical. These two concepts of the self overlap, but don’t always align and are fragile. Much of her work deals with the involuntary transformations of the mind-body relationship, including the sense of agency or ownership over the physical self in life and beyond. In a gendered context, this deals with how queer or female bodies become disjointed through layers of social constructs, but also extends into mental health and death positivity. Annique’s works act as a contemporary Memento Mori: reminders of mortality running against modern death-phobic social constructs. She draws inspiration from Renaissance woodblock printing, particularly Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death series, as well as contemporary ink and paper artists.

Paper Cut

Paper Cut is an exhibition of works on paper from UWA's Cruthers Collection of Women's Art. The 'cut' in the exhibition's title refers to both the technique and to the incisive cut of much of the subject-matter. It is a mass showing that reveals the particular strengths of the collection and the remarkable breadth of content, featuring many works on public display for the first time. 

A Paper Cut residency program complements the collection display, showcasing print media and paper forms currently being produced by four local groups in dialogue with the themes, materials, strategies and processes of the exhibition.

Content advisory:
Paper Cut contains images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Some works in the exhibition refer to adult themes.

Please note: due to Covid-19 safety precautions, registration is essential for this event and space is limited.

Image: design by Julie Ziegenhardt.