Janaleen Wolfe, Katie West, Carmen Papalia, Benjamin Hancock, Jennifer Justice, Sophie Takách, Hillary Goidell, Holly Craig, Lizzie Boon, Georgina Kleege, Vincent Chan, Irina Povolotskaya, Andy Slater, Harriet Jones , J, Janice Florence, Kate Disher-Quill, Trent Walter, Riana Head-Toussaint, Adam Leslie, Tommy Carroll , Khang Chiem and Benjamin Baker
“A Gathering Dustcloud”
A growing assembly of biographies. Collaborators and contributors to 'We get in touch with things at the point they break down // Even in the absence of spectators and audiences, dust circulates...'
Janaleen Wolfe is an actress based in Sydney who creates character and sound performances drawing on voice and imagination.
Katie West is a Perth-based artist and Yindjibarndi woman who has lived her life in Noongar Yued and Noongar Whadjuk countries. West describes herself as a multidisciplinary artist situated in the social sciences. Her practice is shaped by her family history, studies in sociology and work experience in the area of Indigenous health.
Carmen Papalia is a nonvisual social practice artist with severe chronic and episodic pain. Since 2009 he has used organizing strategies and improvisation to address his access to public space, the art institution and visual culture. His work, which takes forms ranging from collaborative performance to public intervention, is a response to the harms of the Medical Model of Disability, a framework that erases disability experience by reinforcing ableist concepts of normalcy.
Benjamin Hancock is a solo and collaborative performance artist, who situates their work within and across the dance, drag, and contemporary art communities. He is interested in how a subjective body receives, interprets, processes, and translates information. His work explores and redefines how we understand the ability, strength, care, sexuality, masculinity and femininity of a body.
Jennifer Justice is an artist and writer living in Northern California. Her recent work includes computer-generated and tactile sculptural installations, as well as ekphrastic poetry to promote accessible design in exhibition and public spaces. She is also interested in disability culture and the ecological landscape.
Sophie Takách is an artist and teacher working from the lower Yarra Ranges area. Sophie generates sculptural objects primarily though casting processes, recording temporary voids and gestures that are captured and made tangible. These passing moments and movements are turned into tactile encounters that become nodal points for collective conversations and experiences; offering a perspective into the physical interactions and intangible forces that shape our understand of self and other.
Hillary Goidell is an artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She collaborates with choreographers to photograph their creative process, both emotional and physical, and expands on this work through multisensorial research and audiodescription. She also documents larger processes like end of life; these images act as imprints for accessing embodiment and lived experience.
Holly Craig is a dance artist and performance maker based in Sydney. From their lived history of Blindness, Holly creates movement works which activate critical discourse on social issues through personal narratives.
Lizzie Boon is an archivist, arts registrar, writer, and occasional designer, currently living and working on Wurundjeri country. She is interested in the expanded potentials of publishing, particularly its embodied possibilities. Lizzie is also studying psychology, which is increasingly guiding her perspective on making.
Georgina Kleege is a blind writer interested in representations of blindness across all facets of visual culture, and the ways these representations impact access to the arts.
Vincent Chan is a type designer based in Naarm. He is interested in commoning, pedagogy, language and letters and where they overlap, co-mingle and meld.
Irina Povolotskaya (Purple Fairy Phoenix) is a deafblind performer from Moscow. She is active in theater, music, and painting, writes articles on these topics, and composes prose, poetry, and scripts. She worked as a psychologist for many years, and is the founder of Cosmoopera Performing Arts.
Andy Slater is a blind media artist from Chicago, working in the mediums of sound, extended reality, web art, science fiction,installation and performance. Much of his art is focused on accessibility, blind wayfinding, and sonic drifting.
Harriet Jones follows a curiosity in ways of understanding and the interference from language-frames we habitually use to locate and identify, in search of untidy & empathetic alternatives. She is a curator and collaborator who lives and works on Wurundjeri country.
J (ju ca, picnic, etc) is a writer, musician and founder of the record label and publishing platform Daisart.
Janice Florence tangles with a range of approaches to improvisation and devising performance works in pedestrian movement, dance and text. She has recently been delving into Japanese Butoh. She has been dancing in a wheelchair for 30 years, mostly with other diverse bodies and minds.
Kate Disher-Quill is a Melbourne based artist working across photography, moving image, publication, multimedia and author of Earshot – a publication exploring the myriad of experiences of deafness. As a visual communicator she is drawn to stories that matter and translating these experiences into art.
Trent Walter is an artist, printer and publisher interested in the overlap of printed matter, contemporary art and community-based practice based in Naarm, Melbourne.
Riana Head-Toussaint is an interdisciplinary disabled artist, who uses a manual wheelchair for mobility. Her work crosses traditional artform boundaries, and exists in online and offline spaces. Enduring concerns are agency, representation, the limits of empathy, and how these impact people across different marginalised intersections. Her work is deeply informed by her experiences as a disabled woman of Afro-Caribbean descent, and her training as a legal practitioner.
Adam Leslie is a snake catcher and cabinetmaker, whose work usually derives from a Shaker ethos and function over form. When not relocating snakes or joining pieces of wood together, his mind swirls with science fiction, mythology, occult philosophy, geopolitics, and myriad flora and fauna of the Stringybark country where he lives and works.
Tommy Carroll is a drummer, composer, and beatmaker from Chicago who happens to be totally blind. He leads Tommy Carroll’s Calculated Discomfort, an 8 piece Jazz dance collective that has played in a wide variety of venues throughout Chicago. He recently released a celebratory album called, Dances for Different Bodies, Vol. I, providing a sonic display of his own take on disability culture.
Khang Chiem is an Australian Sign Language (Auslan) interpreter based in Melbourne, living on the Country of Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation. He is passionate about facilitating access to the intersection of ideas, expression and stories for the Deaf community.
Benjamin Baker is a multi-disciplinary artist working in Narrm/Melbourne. Their work encompasses painting and performance. Benjamin began volunteering at West Space in 2016, and took up a paid position as Gallery Assistant in 2020. Benjamin is an active member of the arts community, and is on the management committee at Trocadero Art Space in Footscray.