Julie Robyn Ziegenhardt

English and Fine Arts Major

Julie Robyn explores her evolving understanding of the world around her through the reimagining of objects and spaces from her everyday life. Conventionalised cultural signifiers are manipulated and reimagined to unpack the ways in which one’s understanding of the past is constantly shifting as this relationship is carried into the present. This is done through the interrogation of the ‘everyday ’and the ‘mundane ’using digital illustration, sculpture, and writing. Robyn uses aspects of her own experiences to visualise ambiguous narratives. These narratives open up spaces for the reflection and ever-changing possibilities of the small and unspectacular aspects of human life.

Isabella Rossaro

Zoology and Fine Arts Major

Isabella Rossaro is an emerging Perth artist fresh out of an Undergraduate degree in Zoology and Fine Arts. Specialising in monoprinting and illustration, she manipulates ink with graphite drawing, natural found objects and medication packaging. Isabella pairs these traditional mediums with biological polymer clay forms. She is very passionate about invisible illness and gender inequality, especially communicating the struggle caused by endometriosis and major depressive disorder. Her practice is heavily influenced by scientific findings, especially genetic research, looking to amplify its importance in reproductive health.

Sky Edwards

Fine Arts Major

Sky’s graduating work, U-193-x, examines contemporary ecologies of colonised natural spaces. Their work is place- and process-driven, beginning with site exploration, macro photography of lifeforms, and found object collection. These are modified, mutated, and recombined sequentially with neural networks, weathering, drawing, painting, sculpture, and other techniques, resulting in 2D and 3D art objects. Sky also practices science art combining experience and techniques as both a scientist and an artist. They are driven by process and material, with a particular love of paint, experimental photography, and neural network collaboration. They explore the Weird to create fundamentally new and unfamiliar imagery. Their work is created from experience of place and the natural world, especially near Derbarl Yerrigan, while remaining conscious of their position as a descendent of white colonists who cannot speak for or over Noongar people. Sky explores mental health through art and as a nonbinary transgender person their work touches on queer experience.

Debbie Gilchrist

Fine Arts Major

Perth based artist Debbie Gilchrist specialises in portraiture and socially engaged art intended to promote reflection and discussion. A multidisciplinary artist exploring many art forms, her work ranges from drawn images to prints, pen and ink and other media. During COVID lockdown, availability of lino in her cupboard and discussions and contemplations with her teenage daughters inspired an exploration of reduction lino printing with a focus on women’s equity. Alarmed to find that the word “feminism” had become a dirty word for a younger generation of women, and keen to reclaim the word as an expression of a wish for equity, her current print works explore the barriers that still remain for women in our current society.

Recognising that her personal experience is cultural, gendered, and socio political, she was interested in using her artistic practice to ask questions more broadly about where we are now in relation to experiences of women in society, what is hidden, and where we are going. The aim is to generate discussion about equality, to bring light to the hidden and not discussed and to raise awareness of contemporary concerns facing women, this being especially relevant in a COVID-19 world, a time when considerable political discussion has been focused on the role of women in society and, in particular, their role in the economy.

Annique Cockerill

Management and English Literature Major

Annique stumbled across the medium of paper-cutting entirely by accident as a teenager, messing with her mother's craft blades. From that point she became obsessed with pushing the limits of paper structure. Each piece is hand cut, with a focus on producing the entire work as a connected single sheet. She enjoys playing with illusions of disconnect rendered in flat paper and shadow.

Her work is oriented around projections of the self in space: mental and physical. These two concepts of the self overlap, but don’t always align and are fragile. Much of her work deals with the involuntary transformations of the mind-body relationship, including the sense of agency or ownership over the physical self in life and beyond. In a gendered context, this deals with how queer or female bodies become disjointed through layers of social constructs, but also extends into mental health and death positivity.

Annique’s works act as a contemporary Memento Mori: reminders of mortality running against modern death-phobic social constructs. She draws inspiration from Renaissance woodblock printing, particularly Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death series, as well as contemporary ink and paper artists.