Forecast

Eva Fernández was born in Toronto, Canada and lives and works in Perth, Western Australia. Fernandez completed a PhD (Creative Arts) in 2023 and been a practicing artist for over three decades, working across digital-based media, installation, and other mediums. Fernández’s practice is informed by dislocation from her original culture, negotiating the spaces which she inhabits in context to their complex histories and cultural legacies. Coming from a diasporic post-Spanish Civil war immigrant family, Fernández explores how culture shapes individuals, specifically in relation to womanhood. Drawing on fragments from her disrupted family narratives, Fernandez’s work embodies traces and voices from the past unearthing narratives which evoke repressed, shattered, emotional and forgotten histories. These visual elements interrogate history, creating a platform for suppressed voices and serving as catalysts for social transformation. The artist’s practice aims to break with ‘historical amnesia’ and give voice to those who were historically denied or disenfranchised.

Dianne Jones is a Ballardong artist from Noongar Country in Western Australia. Jones utilises photo-media to reposition the representation of Aboriginal Peoples and enact creative resistance to historical and contemporary colonial ideologies. Storytelling, family histories and decolonising archives are an integral part of her visual practice. Jones’s art reveals what is missing from pervasive Australian narratives and art history, highlighting the multifaceted nature of contemporary Indigenous identities and the importance of truth telling. Jones has completed her Masters at Victorian College of the Arts and is currently completing her PhD. Her work is part of a growing movement by Indigenous artists to explore generational traumas and expose the ongoing impacts of colonisation. Jones’s work is held in many important public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Parliament House Perth WA, Edith Cowan University and the Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Jo Pollitt is a transdisciplinary artist scholar and Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University (ECU) with the Centre for People, Place, & Planet and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Her research is grounded in a twenty-year practice of working with improvisation as methodology across multiple performed, choreographic, curatorial and publishing platforms. She was an inaugural Forrest Creative and Performance Fellow (2022-2023), is convenor of Dance Research Australasia, co-lead of #FEAS: Feminist Educators Against Sexism, co-founder of The Ediths, and author of The dancer in your hands < >. Her current research is ‘Staging Weather’ which brings together artist-led, meteorological, and First Nations weather knowledges, to develop nuanced human relations with place-based weather amidst the instability of climate change.