Leigh Shersby
Image source Facebook
Leigh Shersby is a Western Australian metal artist handcrafting unique sculptures made from scrap metal & various recycled parts. Taking influence and inspiration from wildlife and conservation which is close to his heart.
”Ultimately, my goal as a metal artist is to transport the viewer to a place of wonder and awe, to inspire a sense of connection and reference for the natural world.”
Leigh Shersby
Visit: Facebook, Instagram
Greg Banfield
Image source LinkedIn
As a child Greg was fortunate to be able to wander in a rural setting to get to know nature, the changing of seasons, the affect of the right amount of rain too much and too little, the beauty of the land, water and air, the sound of birds, sheep, cattle, silence and to see what we do to exist and in an attempt to prosper.
Since as early as he can remember drawing and creation has been part of him. So many in rural remote can claim this we make our own fun, draw in the dirt, create imaginary people, sing songs that are our own. However, like so many who have a bent toward creativeness, the concentration over a period to create a meaningful block of work has been missing. His upbringing said “that won’t earn you a living”. He was not in a culture that had considered, or had knowledge, that art creativity was a meaningful contribution to life, or that one could exist by following this path.
He views public art as a positive and expressive medium to explain what the artist has seen or perceives, as he has seen (or perceived) in his childhood and other periods that fabricate his mind, to make a statement publicly for the community to make comment or to take on board as an opinion.
“Public art is found in a broader context than widely defined, as in fashion, clothing, vehicles, cathedrals, houses etc etc. Contemporary art continues to make bolder statements about community. I like that!”
Greg Banfield
Visit: GregBanfield, Instagram, Facebook
Greg Gelmi
Image source Facebook
Greg Gelmi is an artist living and working in the South West of Western Australia. Being surrounded by the constant wastage of living, gives him the motivation to find beauty in the discarded. A strong recycling message runs through all his sculptures using waste metal, wood and wire rescued from the surrounding countryside.⠀
A design theme of simple organic shapes flow through most sculptures and mirror the return to basic living and appreciating family, garden and nature.⠀
Jordan Rush
Image source Facebook
Jordan Rush is an Australian artist specializing in large-scale murals and urban art, known for her distinctive style and versatility across various mediums. She often draws inspiration from city laneways, textures, and the layering of urban art. Her work includes portraits, animals, landscapes, and contemporary pop art.
In the middle of her university studies she made the decision to pursue a career in visual arts. She continued to study and work while she sharpened her skills and took feedback. Eventually she started making sales and experiencing success. As she began to push out of her comfort zone and work harder new opportunities began to present themselves. All this experience has enabled her to hone in on her style and break into new markets such as prints and murals. Since graduating she started working for herself full time.
Visit: JordanRush, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn
Harsha Vardhan Durugadda
Image source Harsha Vardhan Durugadda
Harsha Durugadda is a multidisciplinary artist based in India. He received The Arts Family Emerging Artist Award in 2023 for South Asia and won the Rio Tinto Sculpture Award 2017 at Sculpture by the Sea, Australia.
In 2021 Durugadda was part of a Sotheby’s New York contemporary auction in partnership with Burning Man at Boundless Space.
In 2014, the Courtauld Institute of Art invited him to present on Ancient Buddhist Sculpture at the British Museum, London. He received the Andrew Stretton Memorial invitation in 2016 Sydney.
Durugadda’s sculptures have been exhibited internationally at Nord Art in Germany, Emergent Art Space in the United States, London, and Sculpture by the Sea in Australia. Durugadda’s artworks are part of major public and private collections including Busselton Australia (Sculpture by the Sea), Bangalore Airport (Terminal 2), RMZ Hyderabad and HMDA, Hyderabad.
He went to JNU New Delhi, and he currently resides in Hyderabad.
Visit: Harsha, Instagram
Nicole Mickle
Image source Yahoo News
Nicole Mickle and her husband, Alex Mickle, are the duo behind Safehaven Studios, known for their large-scale public sculptures. They are recognized for their innovative approach, combining traditional sculptural processes with industrial techniques like blasting and 3D laser scanning. Their work, often involving community consultation, is highly respected for its collaborative nature and ability to interpret and represent diverse cultural narratives.
One notable example is the "Wardandi Boodja" sculpture in Bunbury, a five and a half meter steel bust representing a Noongar face.
Alex Mickle
Image source Bunbury Mail
Alex Mickle of Safehaven Studios continue to stun the community with their innovative approach to the creation of large scale public sculpture and their highly respected collaboration and interpretation skills.
After months of community consultation, the pair’s exciting works of art are created through traditional sculptural process, as well as blasting, 3D-laser scanning and cutting, welding and other industrial techniques.
“I’m a big believer in using art for social change
and to make people’s lives better. People do
things in the name of art that they would never
do for any other reason, and there is something
very fulfilling about that.”
Alex Mickle
Visit: Facebook, LinkedIn, HarveyRegion
VJZoo
Image source VJZoo
Jasper Cook and Kat Black met at Art School in 2003, and have collaborated creatively since first meeting. We both love working with video and visual images, whether it's for Art projects or commercial VJing.
We live in Perth, Western Australia. Yeah, it's a long way from anywhere, so we travel a lot. So far, we've performed in Spain, France, the UK, Singapore, New Zealand, New York, San Francisco and around Australia
Gabe Heussenstamm
Image source Margaret River Art Trails
Gabe Heussenstamm lives in Margaret River and is credited with several works in that area.
Gabe Heussenstamm paints large scale murals and focuses on the flora and fauna of the region.
He is son to Mark Heussenstamm and brother to Karl Heussenstamm.
Rima Zabaneh
Image source Clyde Yee
Rima Zabaneh is an award winning artist.
Her work explores the methods and processes artists use to propel everyday materials into the realm of wonder, using found, recycled & repurposed materials in interesting ways.
Rima has exhibited in major group exhibitions, including Sculpture by the Sea Cottesloe & Bondi and Look, Look Again; a Survey of Women’s Art at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.
She has completed public art commissions and taken part in international art residencies, her work is represented in Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art as well as private collections.
Visit: wfac, sculpturebythesea
Mark Datodi
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Mark Datodi is a sculptor and metalworker who creates large scale public artworks.
His artworks during the early 2000's often juxtaposed abstract forms relating to the pattern of road plans with images of rooftops, native grass trees or power line towers. These exquisitely made works combined sculptural elements, such as the 3D balsa wood street patterns, with screen-printing directly onto the wooden surface of the artworks.
Over the last few years his works have become even more poetic and pared back. He has zeroed in on the patterns of nature, printing leaf skeletons over wooden panels that are then cut and re-spliced, 3D land contours worm their way across wooden panels, and elliptical forms emulate seeds and pods.
Visit: markdatodi, instagram
Ben Fasham
Image source Ben Fasham
Ben Fasham is a sculptor whose work features large metal geometric forms.
His work "Conversation" is a 6m high sculpture that was fabricated from plate aluminium in 2007 (from a marquette made in Year 12). This sculpture was exhibited in the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award in 2008 and can now be found at Warralily, Armstrong Creek, Geelong.
“I have been very fortunate to be surrounded by sculpture and art for many years. In Year 12 my passion for sculpture was inspired by my Art Teacher and I started making marquettes.”
“My sculptures develop from marquettes, which enable me to enhance the vital elements of balance and proportion.”
Peter Dailey
Image source Artsource
Peter Dailey has been balancing his vocation as an artist with his living as an art teacher for decades. As the selected artist for a remarkable sculptural opportunity Peter is finally free to dedicate himself completely to his art practice and life couldn’t be better.
Philanthropic group, The Syndicate, commissioned Peter to create ten life-size sculptures interpreting the figure for The Syndicate Project II – Apparition. For two years now he has had complete creative and financial freedom to do this, allowing him to cut back on his duties at Midland TAFE for the first time in 20 years.
One of a new generation of contemporary sculptors emerging through The Claremont School of Art, Peter originally sat on a panel to write the three-year Environmental Art & Design course for TAFE and was then asked to teach. This has not been without its bureaucratic challenges, and to say that Peter was simply a teacher of art at Midland is an understatement according to colleagues, who believe that Peter was instrumental in preserving, overhauling and almost single-handedly holding together a unique art school.
Reviewing the impact of such a commitment, Peter explains, “To me teaching is about giving, about fulfilling my social obligation to community, but there was a time when my practice was almost swamped by education. As an artist though, I’d made a pact to my vocation so I kept pressing on with practice.
Visit: Artsource, TurnerGalleries
Daniel Göttin
Image source Symetria
Daniel Göttin is a Swiss artist whose work is divided between site-specific work and coloured or painted objects for walls. He lives and works in Basel.
Göttin is working with common industrial material which can be paint, tape, wood, metal, polystyrene, plastic, carpet. The concept for an installation work depends on the site and its conditions. For his objects and paintings, he uses similar material. His interest and concept are to examine the subjective nature of perception, and playfully responds to the characteristics of an architectural site or space and activate the viewer’s relationship to it. In the series of works made of aluminum and painted MDF, due to their simplicity, the attention is directed to the space within the object, corresponding with the reflection of light and shadow. Thus creating a new quality of perception between concrete and abstract reality.
His artistic background relates mainly to Minimal Art , Concrete Art, and Conceptual Art. Besides these art tendencies he works also with aspects of Dada/Merz, Constructivism and Arte Povera. For more than 25 years, Daniel Göttin has focused on making temporary and permanent site-specific installations and interventions, Art in Public Space, objects, paintings, drawings, collages and prints.
Visit: DanielGöttin, MinusSpace, Symetria
Penny Coss
Image source Penny Coss
Penny Coss employs 'stratigraphic thinking' in her art practice as a way to approach entanglements of time, location, and matter through situated fieldwork and material explorations which intersect painting , drawing, video, performance and sculptural textiles.
Coss is interested in stratigraphic geological deposits, watery environments, and the interconnectedness of the human and more-than-human .
Her interdisciplinary practice resists categorical distinctions, operating fluidly to make way for new understanding and knowledge. This knowledge is continuously archived, reassembled, and reassessed with ongoing encounters in field-based research as expressed through her work.
Visit: PennyCoss, ArtCollectiveWA, Instagram, Facebook
Clare McFarlane
Image source Art Collective WA
Clare McFarlane was born in the small country town of Kojonup, but has lived on Perth since 1990. She has completed a Masters and an Honours Degree in Fine Art from Curtin University, where she also completed a Graduate Diploma in Cultural Heritage. She has held many solo exhibitions in Perth and Melbourne and participated in multiple group shows. She has also completed laneway and street art commissions for Form, the city of Perth and the City of Subiaco. Her work can be found in numerous collections including the City of Perth, Cruthers Collection at UWA, Janet Holmes à Court Collection, Edith Cowan University Collection, Curtin University, Artbank, City of Wanneroo, Joondalup Hospital, Bureau of Statistics, and Alinta Gas.
Clare’s paintings have been investigating William Morris inspired patterns as metaphors for a romanticised past. Into these paintings she incorporates elements of fragility and femininity from the past and the present, using Australian flora and fauna to signify the creation of a new Australian identity that doesn’t sit comfortably with the viewer.
Most of these paintings were created in painstaking detail, every feather, petal and butterfly wing captured in an extraordinary likeness. However, her work over the past three years reflects some of the changes in her life and has become looser, a freer approach to painting. Whist the paintings still contain patterning, birds, insects and plants, they are not as restrained and detailed as before.
Visit: ArtCollectiveWA, TurnerGalleries, ArtSource
Tom de Munk-Kerkmeer
Image source Tom de Munk-Kerkmeer
Tom de Munk-Kerkmeer was born in Subiaco, Perth WA, but was raised in the Netherlands.
He started to make beach sculptures on the North-sea coast at the age of 4 and since then art and migration have had great impact on his life.
In 1997 he returned to WA and currently dreams up his own myth in West-Northam on the “Edge of the Man-Made desert…”
Visit: sculptureatbathers, instagram
Mary Knott
Image source Mary Knott
Mary Knott is an artist who works in both two and three dimensions, making sculptures and mixed media drawings that have a pensive introspective character. Boats have been prominent in her repertoire of subjects and she has found them a rich source of sculptural inspiration. A chance meeting with Jean-Jacques Kurandy, a French bronze caster, has resulted in the production of innovative sculptures originally made from paper and cane or twigs but finally cast in bronze and finely patinated.
More recently figures have become quite central to her sculptural practice and these tend to be contemplative and quite balanced in their posture whereas the figure is absent from her depictions of streetscapes and their absence lends an air of mystery to these compositions. Water is nearly always featured in her drawings where lonely vessels drift and these may be interpreted as a personal haven or metaphor for the travel which has been a source of inspiration to the artist.
Photography is important in the early stages of her work but it is just a starting point and the work is never atrue rendition of the place. Using a muted palette the images become more enigmatic and leave a haunting impression on the viewer. This palette is achieved with the use of a bituminous paint over gesso and the application of pastel and fixative something the artist discovered in her early days working in an artist run space in Northbridge.
Now working from a studio at home in Quindalup in the south west of Western Australia, she initially majored in Sculpture at the Claremont School of Art in 1985.
Visit: MaryKnott
Eveline Kotai
Image source Art Collective WA
Eveline Kotai was born in 1950 and lives in Fremantle, Western Australia. She is a member of the Art Collective WA.
Eveline has used a variety of media during the course of her 40 year art practice including drawing, painting, printmaking, thread and stitch. Over the past 2 decades she has concentrated on the theme of material dissolution and regeneration where works that may have previously been seen as representational are dismantled allowing a remodelled ‘palette’ to create the impetus for new directions.
Exhibitions like Infinite Threads (2012), Subdivision (2014), Writing on Air (2015) and Reconstructions (2017) all draw their titles from the artist’s symbolic and material interpretation of the nature of change. Complex combinations of tone, colour and surface merge instinctively to form harmonies that unfurl in a way that reiterates the patterns in life’s underlying cycles.
Eveline's work offers a space for contemplation that distills her ongoing inquiry into the correlations between art, life and nature.
Visit: EvelineKotai, ArtCollectiveWA
Sharyn Egan
Image source Daily Telegraph
Sharyn Egan is a painter, weaver and sculptor.
As a member of the Stolen Generation who grew up in the New Norcia Mission School much of her artwork is a commentary on her life as a Nyoongar woman and the associated trauma, emotions and deep sense of loss and displacement experienced by Aboriginal people.
Never afraid of experimentation and exploration, she works in numerous media, including painting, sculpture, woven forms and site specific installations, often choosing materials, such as ochres, resins and grasses that connect to land, especially her home near the lake system in the southern suburbs of Perth.
Her woven works include traditionally styled contemporary forms and baskets, as well as larger scale sculptural forms.
Sharyn began her art career at the age of 37 when she enrolled in a Diploma of Fine Arts at the Claremont School of Art in Perth. She completed this course in 1998 and continued her education at Curtin University, first completing the Associate Degree in Contemporary Aboriginal Art in 2000 and a Bachelor of Arts (Arts) in 2001. She has also been awarded a Certificate VI in Training and Education and has worked as an art lecturer, curator and art facilitator in schools, community groups and health organisations.
In recent years Sharyn has been awarded several prestigious and prominent public art commissions, at the new Perth Stadium, on Elizabeth Quay, Yagan Square and the Scarborough Beach Redevelopment. She is a frequent exhibitor and invited artist at Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi and Cottesloe.
Born in Subiaco, Perth, Western Australia
Lives and Works in Hamilton Hill, Perth, Western Australia
