RE/EMERGE

RE/EMERGE is a collaborative exploration of the generation, growth, and development of artistic practice by the PhD researchers Rachael Allain, Sian Gouldstone and HU Yue. Each artist uses their artistic practices to explore in and around known, and unknown, geographic, topographic, cultural and social worlds. A broad set of interests is found to connect the artists: returns, repetitions, removals, horizons, reclamations, remediations, the emergent (submergent and re-emergent), movement, embodiment, materiality, the multiplicity of representation and the ephemeral nature of affects and experience.

Rachael Allain’s practice-led research is made through a rigorous investigation and embodied phenomenological exploration of watery sites, often using artist residency as methodology. Moving both above and below the horizon, Rachael explores liminal spaces and places, in between the land and the water/sea/ocean, working with art and scientific data to reveal invisible realms of our visible world. 

Sian Gouldstone’s practice explores the emergence, (re)making and (re)constituting of whiteness as part of a contextual reading of British immigration in Australia. This implicates her own family histories as well as those pertaining to the broader British imperial project. In practice, she takes a critical approach to exploring whiteness as an affective and emotional form of belonging and links this with her own reflective nostalgia; a cryptic sense of desire for and (be)longing to, the Australian continent – whiteness is figured as a force of imperial duress that shifts and moves as it is embodied in practice.

HU Yue’s research and practice focus on the dynamic balance and the boundary between human practice and the natural environment; it also explores the horizon of knowledge shaped by the walking experience. Her work regards new and functional landscapes, that are built and that intervene in a particularly designated space, in order to make it inhabitable, as a “Humanscape”. Through walking, Yue communicates with these “Humanscapes” to diagnose their situation in compatibility with nature with using methods that incorporate with Traditional Chinese Medicine.

The concept of re-emergence then, links these artists’ and their works in the ways in which they are embodied in places and spaces, to which they continually return and remove themselves from. These are iterative forms of practice, learning and writing in research. These ever changing and diversifying landscapes, in which Rachael, Sian and Yue place themselves, are key to the emergence and re-mergence of their continual investigatory, artistic practices.