PAST MENTORS

Jacqui Stockdale

JULY/AUGUST 2019

Jacqui Stockdale is a 1990 graduate from Victorian College of the Arts and a leading contemporary artist renowned for her magical and symbolic images that include theatrical photography, painting, drawing, collage and performance. Her practice engages cultural identity, folklore and the transformative nature of ritual in society.

TRoy emery

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2019

Troy Emery is an artist based in Melbourne and has an art practice encompassing sculpture, painting, drawing, and embroidery. He graduated from a Bachelor of Fine Art (hons) at the Hobart School of Art, University of Tasmania in 2005. Troy then completed a Masters of Fine Art at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney in 2010.

HANNAH MATTHEWS

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019

Hannah Mathews is a Senior Curator at MUMA where she has been working since 2016 and is currently on the board of NAVA. Hannah is an experienced curator who has worked with contemporary art organisations such as the  Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (ACCA), Perth  Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) and the Sydney Biennale, as well as working prolifically as an independent project initiator and director. She has an impressive track record of ambitious projects  including Framed Movements, ACCA (2014), Action/Response, Dance Massive Festival (2013), Power to the People: Contemporary Conceptualism and the Object in Art, ACCA (2011), as well as NEW 11, ACCA and Primavera 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

ILONA NELSON

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019

Ilona is an artist and curator, interested in making work that encapsulates honesty and truth, searching for these qualities within our paradoxes. She works predominately with performance documented by photography and film, and incorporate installations when exhibiting. Alongside her practice she has created and curated a long term project called This Wild Song (TWS) which is a series of conceptual photographic portraits of Australian female visual artists who have a unique voice. She is also Co-Director of The Art Room, an independent art school in Melbourne, empowering artists.

Kate Rohde

JAN/FEB 2020

Kate Rohde completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2001. Since then she has become known for her intensely colourful jewellery and sculptural object based practice, nowadays working predominately with resin and hand casting techniques. Recent exhibitions include Luminous Realms, a solo survey of her work since 2006 at Craft, Magic Object; the 2016 Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, 21st Century Heide at Heide Museum of Modern Art, and Obsessed: Compelled to make, at the Australian Design Centre. In 2015 she was a finalist in the Rigg Design Prize at the National Gallery of Victoria. Other projects include collaborating with Sydney fashion house Romance was Born on their 2010/11 S/S collections Renaissance Dinosaur and 2011 A/W Fruits and Flowers. Her work is held in the collections of several institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia and Bendigo Art Gallery. 

NATALIE THOMAS

FEB/MAR 2020

Natalie Thomas is a Melbourne-based artist and writer. Thomas maintains a diverse and independent practice that considers storytelling as the basis of culture. Her work engages with the mass media and its role in the how we see each other and the world. Read her thought provoking writing on her blog Natty Solo. 

HOTHAM STREET LADIES - MOLLY & CASSANDRA

MAR/APR 2020

The Hotham Street Ladies are a group of five women who make
street art, installations, public art, recipe books and cakes.
The story of the TheHotham Street Ladies begins in a share household in Collingwood and we still draw much of our inspiration from this share household. The enthusiasm for cakes and the sense of community we have gained from our share household have also lead us to be inspired by groups such as mother’s auxiliaries and the Country Women’s Association.  They also come together out of necessity to make things for the enjoyment of their community and for the enrichment of girly chat.

The Hotham Street Ladies are Cassandra Chilton, Molly O’Shaughnessy, Sarah Parkes, Caroline Price and Lyndal Walker.

THE HUXLEYS

MAY 2020

The Huxleys are Will and Garrett Huxley whose shared background in costume design, photography, film and performance has informed their practice: a living, ever-evolving collage of still images, moving image, costume and performance. Their work reflects their iridescent hyper-real world, full of arresting shapes, lurid colour, extreme theatrics and an ethos of glamorous androgynous abandon. Each aspect of their work combines to create a cohesive and distinct visual language inspired by glamour, art and escapism. garretthuxley.com willhuxley.com

Catherine Bell

JUN 2020 - Wyndham WG Group

Catherine Bell is a multi-disciplinary artist and Associate Professor (Visual Arts), Australian Catholic University. Bell’s practice-led research focuses on the generative potential of grief, loss and memory in a creative context. In recent times, she has located her practice within an archive and healthcare setting. Bell’s socially engaged artworks expose personal narratives by up-cycling excess or waste materials to create unique, yet familiar, objects of reverence and contemplation.

GEOFF NEWTON

JUN 2020 - Collingwood WG Group

Geoff Newton is an artist and gallerist, Director of Neon Parc. Established in 2006 Neon Parc represents emerging and established contemporary Australasian artists. Staging a varied line-up of solo and group exhibitions, the exhibition program includes opportunities to contextualise local artists with their interstate, national and international peers. In October 2015 Neon Parc opened a second exhibition space in Brunswick, affording artists the opportunity to present ideas at an ambitious scale, in concert with the Neon Parc city gallery. Additional to establishing two branches of his Neon Parc gallery in Melbourne, he co-found the SPRING 1883 art fair, lectured at two universities and has curated exhibitions at many other venues. 

Yvette Coppersmith

JUL/AUG 2020 - Collingwood WG Group

Yvette Coppersmith is an Australian painter specialising in portraiture and still life. In 2018 she won the Archibald Prize with a self-portrait, in the style of George Lambert. Coppersmith studied at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia.

Polly Borland

AUG/SEPT 2020 - Collingwood WG Group

Borland is an Australian photographer who formerly resided in England from 1989 to 2011, and now lives in Los Angeles, United States. She is known both for her editorial portraits including Nick Cave and the Queen, and for her work as a photographic artist including the series The Babies and Smudge.

Tai Snaith

AUG/SEPT 2020 - Wyndham WG Group

Tai Snaith is an Australian artist and writer with a broad and generous practice ranging from painting and ceramics to curating, conducting conversations and broadcasting.

Elvis Richardson

SEPT/OCT 2020 - Collingwood WG Group

Richardson is the founding editor of CoUNTess,(www.countesses.blogspot.com) a blog publishing data on gender representation in the Australian visual arts sector. The Countess Report 2016 (www.thecountessreport.com.au) was released in 2016 a sector wide bench marking data collection project, and which re-launched as The Countess Report (www.countess.report) in 2017 in collaboration with Amy Prcevich and Miranda Samuels and producing the updated 2019 Countess Report.

Elvis Richardson is represented by Hugo Michell in Adelaide and galerie pompom in Sydney http://www.elvisrichardson.com

John Forrester The Riverkeeper & Dr Teresa Mackintosh

SEPT/OCT 2020 - Wyndham WG Group

John Forrester has been in education for many years, and have transferred many of the skills learnt in that field to my lifelong interest in natural resources and environment. A great believer in the health giving services of the natural environment, and in recent years he has become an advocate for the right of people to have access to the natural environment, as that right has been gradually eroded by non-visionary decision makers, and vested interests.

Dr Teresa Mackintosh, is a biological scientist and currently the Melbourne Water Waterwatch Coordinator.

Daine Singer

OCT/NOV 2020 - Wyndham WG Group

Daine Singer is a contemporary art gallery. The gallery was established in 2011 in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, and relocated to Fitzroy in 2018. The gallery exclusively represents a group of fifteen artists from Australia and New Zealand and also presents occasional curated exhibitions and solo exhibitions by unrepresented artists.

Dr Paul Lasky

OCT/NOV 2020 - Collingwood WG Group

An ARC Future Fellow, Paul is a lecturer in the Monash Centre for Astrophysics (MoCA) School of Physics and Astronomy he is interested in a number of topics under the broad heading of gravitational astrophysics, with a particular penchant for gravitational-wave astrophysics. He is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array, which are two complementary experiments at the forefront of gravitational wave research.

Gravitational-wave astronomy is an emerging branch of observational astronomy which aims to use gravitational waves (minute distortions of spacetime predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity) to collect observational data about objects such as neutron stars and black holes, events such as supernovae, and processes including those of the early universe shortly after the Big Bang.

DR BARRY YORK

SOUND ARCHIVING: PRESERVING THE DISTINCTIVE HUMANITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL THROUGH THEIR VOICE.
(COVID VIRTUAL EXHIBITION)

MAR/APR 2021 - Wyndham WG Group

Migrated to Melbourne from London with his parents in 1954, aged three. His mother, Olive, was a Londoner and his dad, Loreto, was Maltese.  After two years in boarding-houses, they settled in their own home in West Brunswick, where Barry lived for 30 years. His parents were great story-tellers and he was fascinated by tales from their younger days, especially about their parents (as he had never known his grandparents). He attended La Trobe University in the late 1960s and early 1970s and ‘stormed many a barricade’.  He moved to Sydney and obtained a PhD in History in 1988, and then settled in Canberra with his wife, where they raised two children. The story of Australian immigration is dear to his heart and in 2005 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his work in recording in that field. His earliest interviews, recorded in 1984, were with two women who had migrated to Sydney in the 1910s. Their voices now represent a migration vintage of 110 years.  He has worked as a teacher and public servant, with stints in factories in his youth. He is now semi-retired and still recording oral histories. He has recorded about 500 substantial interviews, mostly with migrants but also with musicians, bus drivers and pro-wrestlers!

SUE MASLIN AO

THE SHOW MUST GO ON (COVID VIRTUAL EXHIBITION)

MAY/JUN 2021 - Wyndham WG Group

SueMaslin is one of Australia's most successful screen producers with a track record of producing award winning feature and documentary films including the smash hit The Dressmaker,one of Australia’s all time highest grossing films. 

Sue is committed to engaging and empowering audiences with ideas that matter. Her innovative company, Film Art Media established in 2008 with Daryl Dellora,produces and distributes screen content across many platforms with a focus on blue chip documentaries includingThe Edge of The Possible: Jorn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House, Jill Bilcock - The Art of Editing winner of the Greater Union Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2016 Adelaide Film Festival and The Show Must Go Onwhich premiered on ABC TV and was augmented by an impact strategy addressing mental wellbeing in the arts and entertainment sector. Her  latest release Brazen Hussiesscreened on 53 screens nationally in 2020 despite COVID.

Sue is a respected teacher and mentor and holds the position of Adjunct Professor at  the RMIT School of Media and Communications as well as Adjunct Fellow at Swinburne School of Film and Television. Sue’s outstanding 35-year contribution to the Australian screen industry has been recognised in numerous ways. In 2012 she received the inaugural Jill Robb Awardfor Outstanding Leadership, Achievement and Service to the Victorian Screen Industry. Reflecting her commitment to advocacy for women, Sue was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2018 as well as made Patron of Women In Film and Television (Victoria). In 2019 Sue was appointed as an Officer (AO) of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to the Australian film industry as a producer, and through roles with professional bodies. 

DR LUCRECCIA QUINTANILLA (JUN/JUL)

SOUND AND COLLAGE (COVID VIRTUAL EXHIBITION)
JUN/JUL 2021 - Wyndham WG Group

Lucreccia Quintanilla's work is concerned with sound and collectivity. At the core of her ongoing project is sound as a mode of knowledge transference, as a sensorial conduit for multiple senses of time and place and as a carrier of past and future and as an amplifier of irresolute collective mythologies and cultural complexities. In recent years is interested in the potential of amplification of stories and voice via sound and she has constructed a soundsystem speaker stack in the Jamaican sound system style as a point of departure for thinking through cultural difference, collaboration, music/sound experimentation.

Lucreccia Quintanilla is an artist, writer, DJ and researcher Gratefully living and working on the lands of the Boon Wurrung and Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) peoples of the Kulin Nation. Her practice is a collaborative one which manifests into outcomes within galleries and also as events and performances outside of that context. Her writing and artworks have been published and exhibited both nationally and internationally. Quintanilla regularly gets asked to speak at panels and symposiums in regards to themes within her research on sound and collectivity. She has received grants for her projects and residencies. 

KATE JAMES

AUG/NOV 2021 - Wyndham WG Group

MAKE SOME NOISE - LANEWAY (COVID OPEN AIR) PASTE UP EXHIBITION

Kait James is a proud Wadawurrung woman and her work explores her identity as an Australian with both Anglo and Indigenous heritage. Her work asks questions relating to identity, perception and our knowledge of Australia’s Indigenous communities. Utilising Punch Needling techniques, she embroiders kitsch found materials, such as souvenir tea towels, that reference colonial settlements and histories, and subverts them with Indigenous imagery and familiar references. Through the use of humour and vivid colours, Kait addresses the way white western culture has dominated Australia’s history, and her personal reflections on her Indigenous heritage. Kait is an emerging artist, with a current exhibition featured at Art Gallery of Ballarat in her exhibition titled,’Hang Us Out To Dry’.  

Anu Patel

SEPT/DEC 2021 - Hobson’s Bay WG Group

RECONSTRUCTING FRAGMENT - WOOD STREET ART SPACE, CREATIVE EXCHANGE LAB

Wood Street Art Space plays host to the Wunder Gym Arts Program as part of Hobsons Bay Creative Exchange Lab programming aiming to support western region artists, sharing ideas and engaging community creatives, producing artistic outcomes. Mentored by Hobsons Bay own established artist Anu Patel, participants were invited to respond to a theme titled Reconstructing Fragments, as part of Cultural Diversity Week (19-27 March 2022). 

As Patel prompted the participants, “You may see yourself as the main subject of the work. Explore different aspects of yourself. Think of these as fragments. These may be emotions, interests or concepts. Consider these as individual entities bringing them together to make a whole image. Each fragment may be of equal importance or have different levels of strength or identity. Consider how you can visually explore and represent these differences. Or you may see yourself as part of a landscape, a community, a culture, a member of your family or any other relevant context”.

FATIMA MEASHAM & DR CAMERON BISHOP

NOV 2021/MAR 2022 - Wyndham City WG Group

‘NO SHIT’ PROGRAM AND PUBLICATION 

The ‘No Shit!’ Wunder Gym program comprises of three main elements: a mentored creative response to a provocation; responses showcased in a publication; and launch of the publication. Program participants will be responding to writer Fatima Measham’s essay ‘No Shit’ and mentored by artist, writer and Deakin University’s Public Art Commission ‘Treatment’ co-curator Cameron Bishop.  The program commenced Monday 29th November 2021 and built to completion during NGV Design Week on Friday 18thMarch, and the Melbourne Art Book Fair, on Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th March 2022. 

The creatives were mentored via participant only events throughout the program, resulting in the No Shit publication.  The publication, ‘No Shit’, will be launched locally in Werribee at a public panel event, featuring Measham and Bishop, hosted by Wagner at Wyndham City Arts & Culture.

TILLY BOLEYN, HEAD OF CURATORIAL & ARIE GLORIE, CURATORIAL ASSISTANT, SCIENCE GALLERY, MELBOURNE + MELBOURNE FRINGE FESTIVAL

WG X WYNDHAM CITY COUNCIL X HOBSON’S BAY

(JUL - DEC 2022)

The Wunder Gym x Wyndham City Council X Hobson’s Bay program is delivered to 22 Western Region artists who applied to participate with their local council.

FORWARD MOTION EXHIBITION (INSPIRED BY THE SGM SWARM EXHIBITION)

Explore the human superorganism, collective movements, bio-communities as Science Gallery Melbourne delves into the science and art behind what it means to be part of a pack. SWARM reflects on the pros and cons of collective behaviour, looking at the human superorganism, collective social movements and behaviours, and biocommunities. Students will dive into an exhibition that investigates how, and why, we are replicating swarming behaviours, through a scientific, artistic and creative lens.

As part of this program, on Saturday 20th August, we conducted a field trip to Science Gallery, Melbourne to experience the SWARM exhibition. We followed the field trip with a private participant Q&A panel with our mentors, Tilly and Arie. Then each attending participant had a 1on1 speed coaching session with our mentors.

The process of practising articulately pitching a creative responses in 1on1 formats builds ongoing skills consistently required by artists when they need to submit EOI’s to various grant and exhibiting opportunities. Articulating ideas clearly is a practice that is often overlooked as a critical skill. Having an idea is really only 5% of actualising that idea. Communicating and implementing that ideas often consume the other 95% of developing and delivering successful ideas.

The participating artists all generated artworks that were curated and exhibited at the Wyndham Cultural Centre Ground Floor Gallery.

Listen to this program’s Science Gallery, Melbourne’s Mentors: TILLY BOLEYN, HEAD OF CURATORIAL & ARIE GLORIE, CURATORIAL ASSISTANT, Q&A Panel Event hosted by Wunder Gym Founder, Annette Wagner.