Helen Grace & Julie Ewington Residency #2 - Serious Undertakings

Helen Grace and Julie Ewington, will take part in an artist and curator in residence, exploring Helen Grace’s photographic and filmic output over the past 50 years. The residency involves an open process of archival enquiry, and iterative exhibition hang, which invites audiences to explore the curatorial process and exhibition in chaptered form. This program will be accompanied by public forums and open-door events.

About Helen:

Helen Grace (b Gunditjmara Country) is an artist, writer and teacher, based in Sydney (Wangal Country, Eora Nation) and (formerly) Hong Kong and Taiwan. Helen is an award winning filmmaker, photographer and new media producer and her work is currently on show in Know My Name, National Gallery of Australia. Her suite of works, And awe was all we could feel, will be shown in May at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, Melbourne as part of PHOTO2022. Her photomedia work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of NSW and Art Gallery of South Australia as well as private collections, nationally and internationally.

She has been exhibiting work since the late 1970s and her work was selected for Friendship as a Way of Life, University of New South Wales Art and Design Galleries, 2020. She was a finalist in the 2020 Bowness Photography Prize. Recent projects also include: 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).

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 at the National Central University, Taiwan. Her recent books include The Prosaic Image: Culture, Aesthetics and Affect in Ubiquitous Media (Routledge, 2014) and the edited volume, Technovisuality: Cultural Re-enchantment and the Experience of Technology (with Chan, Kit Sze and Wong Kin Yuen), IB Tauris, 2016

About Julie:

Julie Ewington is a curator, writer and broadcaster based in Sydney. Her chief pleasure as a curator is working closely with artists, assisting them to bring their particular version of the world, and their fresh ideas about it, to new audiences and new conversations.

From the mid-1980s Julie worked as a curator in Australian galleries and museums. Between 2001-2014 she led the Australian Art department at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, and was a contributing curator for Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art between 1996-2012, working with both Southeast Asian and Australian artists. Recent curatorial projects include The Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria (2016); Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, at ACCA, Melbourne (2017); and The Housing Question: Helen Grace, Narelle Jubelin and Sherre DeLys, for Penrith Regional Gallery. (2019).

Since the early 1970s Julie has written widely on the visual arts and crafts. She has published books on Fiona Hall (2005) and Del Kathryn Barton (2014); contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues and anthologies; edited publications on both Australian and Asian art; and published in journals including Art and Australia, Artforum, Art Monthly, Australian Book Review, eyeline, and The Monthly.

Julie is currently Chair of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney and a member of the Board of Samstag Museum, Adelaide. In 2014 she was awarded the Emeritus Medal from the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board for work as a writer, curator and advocate.