"the symposium brought to life ideas and issues raised by artists from across 32 countries and contested territories in the region. From its starting point, 52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS sought to create a new platform for commissioning works that had respect for the context that each artist worked within to scaffold a bigger picture. " - 52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS Symposium Brings Ideas Offline, Ocula

"Ultimately, The National 2019 proves itself by bringing a diversity of artist's voices, many of whom are from marginalised contexts, to think beyond Terry Smith's 'provincialism problem' and towards a new way of renegotiating how we see ourselves. " - Review: The National 2019, Ocula

"Exhibitions are temporary, they exist in moments of time. What remains is documentation: photographs, hashtags, a catalogue, a website. With the significant shift to online platforms the experience of the event and the experience of seeing the event through documentation have become increasingly entangled." - Images in Flow: Dematerialising the Archive, Terra Firma Magazine

"Her use of utilitarian fabrics like hessian sit in an ambiguous state between function and art, challenging the aesthetic value of commodity objects."

- Artist Profile, Elizabeth Pulie, Ocula

The female body continues to be fetishised as both subject and object, living inside our data where it becomes sorted into neat categories and re-filtered across platforms only to be uploaded and downloaded again. Xanthe Dobbie has created a living, digital archive of images that act as signifiers of queer and feminist aesthetics. - Undergarments Catalogue Essay 

While the word care is commonly used, sometimes overused, in the art world, it's important that we reclaim it as a verb through action and practice. 

As curators, we work to reflect the world around us, and given that the world currently feels exposed and unstable, it provided a clear intention with which to approach this year's Fellowship—with a deep sense of empathy and openness. We launched into the project by cultivating the conditions for trust with the artists, firstly between themselves as peers, and secondly with us as curators. 

- Rethinking Care for the 2020 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship, Ocula

"The world has seen dramatic change over the past decade; from the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the growing threat of climate change, to the rapid rise of gentrification, severe economic inequality and the decay of democratic transparency. Brexit, Trump and the rise of the alt-right in many countries indicate that a ubiquitous leaning towards conservatism, nationalism and populism is growing. At the same time, communities worldwide have bonded together to protest for social and political change, challenging old structures of power in a new media world." - Introduction: 52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS, Published by Thames and Hudson

"Strategies of Intent presents two decades of the artist's work alongside a series of ambitious new embroideries including Mild Red Steel (2019) that catalogue the history of colonial collections as a means of ownership, reflecting on her ongoing investigation into the tropes and symbolism of power embedded in art history."  - 2019: The Sydney Lowdown, Ocula

"The film mediates an intimate encounter between the bodies of the dancers and the audience. The rhythm of articulating bodies is constantly unfolding and stretched out as the camera glides fluidly over their forms."  Text: Nakh Removed, Angelica Mesiti: A Communion of Stanger Gestures, 2017

"The reproduction and re-appropriation of the Buddha has continued to play out through Gyatso's practice, transforming the figure of the Buddha into three-dimensional sculptures clad in his signature sticker collage." - Artist Profile, Gonkar Gyatso, Ocula

"Rheology_forms that flow adopts the chemical deformation of matter from solid to liquid to explore the way we experience images in the post-digital age. Concerned with images that are fractured, ephemeral and infinitely reproducible, this exhibition considers the journey from objects to data and back again." - Rheology, Exhibition Catalogue, Designed by Maddy Rowley

"As the protagonist fights against anonymous forces he performs a choreography of refusal, evoking imagery of mass protest, riots and uprisings where water cannons are deployed to control or scatter a crowd. Here O’Callaghan renders conflict as symbolic, dangerous and affecting. So too, the performer’s body becomes an all-body, worn down and brutally impressed upon but continuing to fight through. The work stands as an allegory for self-determination and freedom of the individual within the collective political body." - Text, Ensemble, Mel O'Callaghan

 "The almost-tactile eroticism is disrupted by strange flashes of a dead fish, feet squishing raspberries and the occasional sound of a drum beat that with each hit seems to travel deeper into the psychological belly of the film, dragging it into an increasingly ambiguous and disquieting space. " Review, Sense, Cement Fondu

"The mediated view of the landscape through the lens of the Anthropocene operates within the material language of Greville’s painting, rendered two and three dimensional. Searching for a new visual language beyond its colonial heritage this exhibition, Fabricated Country, lifts and breaks open a small fragment of the Australian landscape to reimagine its past, present and future."  - Piers Greville, Fabricated Country, Kings ARI

 "The work is a gesture of resistance against blindly accepting the status quo as it ultimately questions how art can be used as a form of defiance. Each assault against the wall feels like an accumulation of pent up emotion, like much needed art world therapy that aims to alter individual subjectivity towards a collective catharsis." -Review: Marco Fusinato, Constellations, Art & Australia

"The title of this exhibition is, in itself, an invitation to think laterally about one's relationship to a place, a community, and the art world more broadly. Part of Campbelltown Arts Centre's 30-year anniversary, We are all connected to Campbelltown (one way or another) brings together 13 artists and artist collectives to speak about the history of Campbelltown, a suburb of Greater Western Sydney." - 2018 Lowdown, Ocula

a cosmological landscape 

accumulates above us

it bloats and expands. ceaselessly, it explodes apart

standing beneath these infinitely unfolding voids

watching over complexities unknown

the present moves in timeless swells

shrouded mysteries awake

from the surface of the earth

we speak of larger things

and we retreat within

our bodies emit light 

too low for the eye to perceive 

photons glistening over flesh 

reach out beyond our boundaries

and escape our human shores

the universe has collapsed 

into our blood, teeth, hair 

embedded and entangled 

it clusters into eternal breath

our material presence

enclosed within these fragile containers 

unfurl against a darkness

to somewhere never travelled 

on the edge of the abyss we look within us and we see stars 

​

- ​Helen Shelley, 'New Life Old Life New Life', Interlude Gallery Writers Program , 2017