FAC is proud to support artists in their craft, with our extensive studio and residency programs offering artists from all disciplines the opportunity to explore and develop ideas.

Alexandra Kirwood + Stanton Cornish-Ward

This month we farewell Alexandra Kirwood & Stanton Cornish-Ward who work together under the alias Hiball, directing works specialising in moving image for the digital world. While undertaking their FAC residency the duo have developed their new project Composition for Mnemosyne, an installation consisting of a two-channel video work accompanied by six wall works which will be displayed for an A.I focused show at The Lock-up in November.

Their work explores the ‘machine gaze’ and ‘mediated body’, where the use of the human body and voice in the form of a youth choir act as conduits, symbolising Generation Alpha’s immersion in an increasingly synthetic online environment.

The video work features The Hunter Singers, a regional youth choir, translating and performing a synthetic A.I assisted score composed by long-time collaborator Mitchell Mackintosh, using their voices and hands to emulate digital sounds into a choral piece. Their vocal fluctuations score the second video channel, featuring cinematic tableaux of youth captured through a combination of live action and synthetically altered data. The wall works blend staged photographic scenes with synthetic imagery, coexisting within the same frame. Creating a feedback loop reflective of the evolving nature of our interactions with synthetic media.

Development imagery, courtesy of the artist.

Jen Datu

Jen Datu is a queer Filipinx emerging artist who remains at FAC until late April. Their multidisciplinary practice draws heavily on everyday experiences and personal histories to uncover hierarchies of power and hidden traumas. During their residency Datu continues to investigate the physicality of their Muay Thai training, playfully antagonising the boundaries of violence and spirituality through a bricolage of weavings, bodily imprints, B-grade American martial arts films and Catholic iconography.

Jen Datu, Blood and Bone. 2023. Photo by Guy Louden.

Sherry Quiambao

Sherry Quiambao is our current Artist in Residence, in the process of developing a body of work for an upcoming exhibition in July 2024. She intends to explore the intricate interplay of memory, cultural heritage, and materialism and investigate the ways in which we navigate our aspirations, through the mediums of still life photography, video, and sculptural installation.

Sherry is a multi-disciplinary artist of Filipino heritage, born and raised in regional Western Australia. Her work explores the relationship between found objects, memory, cultural heritage, and consumption. Using various mediums such as photography, sculpture, and installation, Quiambao challenges viewers to reconsider their relationship with possessions and their impact on self-image and status. Her work often explores themes of identity, belonging, and the intersection between culture and consumerism.

She completed a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Sculpture, at Curtin University in 2003, followed by postgraduate studies in art curation and secondary education. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia, the Philippines, and the United States of America.

Cim Sears

Cim Sears is a body of work being created for an exhibition at Gallery Central in June 2024. Cim is a multidisciplinary artist who works with printmaking processes, photography, ceramics and script. She travels long distances to the Western Desert where she draws on connections to explore and discover narratives that are lost from memory and the historical landscape. She will be moving into new territory during her time at FAC, bridging cinematic moving images with print making processes, artists books and archives. It will invoke the form of her mother, a First Nations woman of the Western Desert who was stolen from her homeland as a very small child.

Walking on Country, Wongawol Station. 2019. Video still by Cim Sears.

For more information about FAC residencies contact [email protected]