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about

What inspires me?
What am I working on?
How did I get here?
E_McGregor_headshot_B.jpg

Artist Statement

My interdisciplinary practice explores transformation and transformative processes, often inspired by materiality and chance, preferring natural materials or adaptive reuse through found objects. My mission is to revive our relationship with Life and a sense of aliveness. Initially, I researched transformation through movement, growth and the effects of the elements and time, particularly inspired to consider the different speeds and timescales on which other elements of the living world operate.

 

Later, I began to challenge myself to turn inward: I continued to investigate transformation and transitional states, however, the search was lensed within to understand what mechanisms of growth, healing or even harm occur via the beliefs we take on through our experiences.

 

Old occurrences, many times revised in our mental memories, are often stored in our bodies too, at a muscular and cellular level. By offering them expression in physical form through my work, I can perform a catharsis of those body-stored beliefs that have been outgrown: a shedding like crabs and cicadas in ‘ecdysis’. The works thus produced arrive via channels of sense memory, bodily intelligence and the intuitive field.

 

I feel a strong connection to the living planet as being, a vastly powerful creative presence sensed in the landscape and waterways, connected via the winds, currents and the air we breathe. My work moving forward is exploring two interweaving frameworks: supporting ourselves as healthy, thriving personal ecosystems and supporting healthy thriving in the ecosystems making up our living world. Where previous work explored transformation as the subject, what it is about, I hope that future work conveys or enables transformation, as what it does.

Bio

I am based on Australia’s east coast, on the country of the Arakwal people of the Bundjalung nation. I hold Bachelor of Fine Art and Master of Fine Art degrees from National Art School, Eora/Sydney.

 

I received a commission from Willoughby Council, Eora/Sydney in 2016 for Morphogenesis,  a solo exhibition at Incinerator Art Space, produced and shown while undertaking my MFA.

 

I had my second solo exhibition ECDYSIS in March 2020, having been selected for the exhibition program at BSA Project Space in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. Concurrently, I was asked to participate in RISE, an exhibition at Carriageworks, Eora/Sydney, on 11-12 March, 2020, of artworks created with bushfire remnant charcoal. The accompanying silent auction benefited charities and initiatives for recovery from the previous summer’s bushfires. My work XX was selected by Jerico Contemporary, Eora/Sydney in 2020 for the gallery’s group exhibition Intimacy, a poignant enquiry into the nature of intimacy during our first round of experience with pandemic lockdown.

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I was awarded the Mark Tedeschi QC Art History and Theory Award in 2013 and the Clitheroe Master of Fine Art Scholarship Award and Mansfield Ceramics Writing Prize in 2015.I was also a finalist in the Tom Bass Prize for Sculpture in 2018.

 

In research exploring transformation through movement in plants and humans, my work was facilitated by independent movement artists and by multiple artist-in-residence opportunities with Sydney Dance Company’s Pre-Professional Year dancers and visiting choreographers. Through this I was able to extend my capacity for attention, as well as expanding awareness of interpersonal dynamics.

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