FLYING ARTistry – Showcasing Regional Artists in the Digital Nightscape
Flying Arts is excited to announce that we will be managing the Judith Wright Art Centre Projection Program for the building’s facade nightscape showcasing Queensland’s regional artists until April 2025!
The FLYING ARTistry project will be projected onto the Judith Wrights Arts Centre facade every night from 6 – 11pm.
This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
Naomi McKenzie
2023 QRAA Emerging Artist Award Winner, Naomi McKenzie, showcases two images from her Where We Meet series on the Judith Wright Façade from the 15 April – 12 May 2024.
After 15 years in the photographic and newsprint industry, Naomi now dedicates her time to family and furthering her artistic analogue skills both with a still film camera and in the darkroom. Skilled 135, 120 and large format films, Naomi is actively exhibiting her work in regional and urban galleries.
Image credit: Judith Wright Arts Centre
Lincoln Austin
From the 13 May – 2 June, 2023 QRAA Art For Life Award Winner, Lincoln Austin, exhibits a video projection artwork that displays a spectacle of modular forms, tessellating patterns and interlocking structures onto the Judith Façade. This projection coincides with Lincoln’s solo exhibition at the Judith Wright Art Centre foyer titled, I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing.
Lincoln Austin’s artworks reveal systems of making and codes of construction. Artworks are open invitations to experience relational sensorial fields of abstract colour and form and perceptively co-construct them – playfully following the logic of design, meeting material limits, and imagining infinite recurrent possibilities. From intricate miniature assemblages to expansive installations to integrated architectural expressions, Austin’s works play across scales and materials, energising space, light, and time.
In a creative contract with the viewer, Austin offers building blocks for perceptual experience, providing a common platform to meet, share and exchange, as well as allowing for myriad points of departure, where we can feel individual difference and singular perspective. There is a lot of joy and sensorial pleasure in these skillfully crafted immersive and speculative architectures.
Artworks escape their own frames while working to frame, contain and then release the viewing experience. Performance and poetry are intrinsic dimensions at play. In this immediacy, the works can softly connect to inner emotional states, enfolding the viewer, echoing the structural complexities of our own making, growing, adapting and senescing throughout our lives’ journeys. Experiences of struggle and resolution, vulnerability and strength, openness and protection, become apparent. Though working within a systemic logic and a disciplined truth to material, Austin’s works release rather than define the possibilities of form, expressing an intense optimism.
Based in south-east Queensland, Lincoln Austin has exhibited nationally and internationally, receiving numerous grants and prizes, and participating in forums, workshops, residencies, artist talks, cultural exchanges, university teaching, and mentorships. In 2021, a 20-year survey exhibition, Lincoln Austin: The Space Between Us, was curated for Ipswich Art Gallery by Samantha Littley, Curator, Australian Art, QAGOMA. Austin has produced 18 large-scale public projects and has been awarded two prizes for Art and Architecture by the Australian Institute of Architects. Austin’s works are held in many public and private collections, including Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
Artist biography written by Beth Jackson (2022).
Image credit: Chantel Bates
Clare Jaque Vasquez
2023 QRAA First Nations Art Award Winner, Clare Jaque Vasquez, showcases a striking textural projection work that conceptually weaves her heritage and personal narratives together. The facade artwork accompanies Clare’s solo exhibition Fibres and Vessels at the Judith Wright Art Centre.
Clare Jaque Vasquez is an emerging Aboriginal artist from Gomeroi/Kamilaroi nation. Clare grew up in both an urban environment in her younger years and then on her Grandmother’s Country in north west New South Wales in a small country town near the mission and station where her family lived. Clare’s art gently showcases unique memories and moments from being raised with three generations of Gomeroi/ Kamilaroi women under the one roof navigating the aftereffects of change.
Clare’s works capture stories and weaving practices in a raised textural form leveraging natural and contemporary art tools to apply texture. These tools include different natural brushes, fingertips, branches and sticks through to natural self-made art tools. Clare gently works in layers through a unique practice to apply acrylic paint and impasto textural mediums to create three dimensional fibres of paint. These appear to be etched, embedded and scarred onto the canvas.
Image credit: Masimba Sasa
Fiona Harding
2023 QRAA Digital Art Award Winner, Fiona Harding, exhibits an iteration of Night Body onto the Judith Façade from the 24 June – 21 July 2024.
Fiona’s work, titled Night Body Blooms, is a large scale projection collage comprised of watercolour paintings, photographs, neon line work, and a repeated self-portrait from the artist’s previous work, Night Body. Taking swatches from the natural world, the vivid, futuristic colourscape incorporates, the magenta of the hibiscus, the glow of the moon, and the neon green of the Mycena chlorophos mushroom, only visible at night. Night Body Blooms continues Fiona’s ongoing celebration of nature and her fascination for the expansive frontiers of the universe.
Image credit: Pixel Punk
Donna Davis
2023 QRAA Digital Art Award Finalist, Donna Davis, exhibited onto the Judith Façade from the 24 June – 21 July 2024.
Donna Davis is a multi-disciplinary artist who examines human and non-human relationships with respect to ecological health. Exploring the intersections between art and science, Donna’s work is often embedded within ecological research projects. Donna’s practice explores stories that examine science through a creative lens; examining imagined futures and constructing new ways of ‘seeing’ complex natural systems and our role within them.
Image credit: Pixel Punk
Michelle Le Plastrier
2023 QRAA Environmental Art Award Winner, Michelle Le Plastrier, exhibits onto the Judith Façade from 22 July 2024.
Michelle Le Plastrier is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on hand built ceramics exploring identity, socio-political and environmental issues all in her signature candy coloured style.
Michelle teaches introductory ceramics across South-East Queensland. She has completed residencies, produced workshops and exhibited across Australia for businesses, galleries and councils such as Gold Coast Arts and Culture, Level Up Studio + Gallery, Pacific Fair, HOTA, Side Gallery and Honey Bones Gallery.
She recently won the Environmental Art Award at the Queensland Regional Art Awards and was a finalist in the 2022 North QLD Ceramic Awards at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery. Her recent body of work Dopamine Days is on exhibit at Home of the Arts on the Gold Coast until April 2024. Michelle graduated from a Bachelor of Visual Media from the Queensland College of Art. Michelle was an artist-in-residence through HOTA’s inaugural ArtKeeper program in 2021-22.
Image credit: Michelle Le Plastrier