Artsbox Artist in Residence Program

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Artsbox is a vibrant, intimate converted shipping container based outside Footscray library.

It is a versatile space for artists of all career stages and creative disciplines. The short-term (six-week) residencies are suited to the development of new work, testing and exploring ideas or the development of your arts practice.

Artsbox residencies are open to artists who live, work or study in Melbourne’s West or can demonstrate a connection to the City of Maribyrnong.

Artists are encouraged to work on creative projects that use the Footscray Library Collection and/or connect to the library’s programming and community to maximise the benefits of the program for artists and the local community.

ArtsBox Residency includes

  • Six-week residency in the converted built shipping container.
  •  Stipend of $1,000 toward artist fees and/or material costs.
  • Access to Footscray Library resources including a library card, printing and use of the library conference room and assistance with connecting to the community and library programs. 

Expressions of interest are welcomed from artists year-round. For more information on how to apply, call (03) 9688 0200 or email arts@maribyrnong.vic.gov.au

2022 ArtsBox Artists in Residence

February - Catalina Garzon

Catalina Garzon is an emerging local artist who draws portraits, paints and makes illustrations mixing traditional and digital techniques. She is also studying visual arts and design.

March – Fiona Barbetti

As a cross-disciplinary local artist Fiona explores concepts of identity, female fertility and everyday experience. A major thread throughout her work has been the exploration of female identity through concepts of home, nostalgia, and the personal journey through infertility into parenthood.

April – Lillian Hull 

Lillian is a participant in the Forte Mentorship Program. She is a Maiawali (that’s a nation in Western Queensland) but spent most of her childhood living in Canberra, on Ngunnawal country. Since 2015 she has worked in the theatre space as a costumier/maker, with companies such as The Australian Ballet and Creature Technology Company. During lockdown last year she rediscovered her love of painting by keeping a disciplined routine with daily practice. She is exploring developing a new business model centred around painting on second hand clothes. 

May - Sasha Cuha

Sasha Cuha is a multidisciplinary artist living in Ascot Vale with extensive experience in film production, visual arts, poetry (both performance and written) and music. Since 2019 he has been involved with Poetryspective held at Pride of Our Footscray where he has performed numerous times as a feature poet with his own live musical accompaniment. During the lockdown of 2020, he was asked to provide approx. 30 minutes of recorded poetry film for their new online presence, and from this the film 5 Fragments was born and is now under consideration for 2 international film festivals. He is a partial recipient of the Mooney Valley Council grant for Podcasting and has been working on a project The Candle which focuses on mental health issues within the arts. 

June - Deb Bain King

Artist Deb Bain-King grew up in forest country. Now living in Naarm (Melbourne). Her work is a consideration of place, drawing on the inter-connectedness of living organisms, environment and community. She has been making and showing works of art in Naarm, interstate, and overseas for almost twenty years as an artist, community activist and curator. Her practice emerges from a lot of walking, observing, and listening. Part of this creates connection to community through conversation with people she finds on her walks and research.

July - Poro Bibi

Poro Bibi is a West Papuan multidisciplinary artist, who uses storytelling through music, visual, spoken word, sound sculpture and community organising to highlight movements of resistance and the continuity of culture, particularly of First Nations people and people from migrant and refugee backgrounds like himself. His current works explore human social behaviour that include migration and reciprocity.

 

October - Olivia Floate

By way of introduction, Olivia says, “I am (mostly) a ceramicist and (sometimes) a puppeteer who makes works under the name ‘sausage woman’. My works usually have a face with lidded eyes and a mouth on them - sometimes described as ‘disquieting’. I am attracted to anthropomorphism and the spirit that may reside inside an object.”

 

 

 

 

2021 ArtsBox Artists in Residence

February - Opal Onyx

Artist OpalOnyx's practice revolves around engaging the overlooked and "childish". They have an obsession with puppetry and relish in using forms of expression typically reserved for children. Using the naive and simple, they express more profound concepts in a palatable and understandable way. Sometimes starting the conversation is difficult, and they hope that their work will give people a jumping-off point to start asking questions. During their residency, Opal will research and create a series of hand-stitched banners out of the world's oldest textile; FELT. Each flag will attempt to explore and highlight issues at the forefront of social justice. Inspired by protestors' signs, they will revolve around the themes of climate justice, indigenous land rights, queer liberation and the imprisonment of refugees.

March - Fiona Waters

Local artist, Fiona Waters, works in watercolour, ink, pencil and ceramics to reflect her own intuitive, playful, cathartic and emotional desires. Her drawings and objects are unique, fluid with organic shapes, often focused on bodies, or lumpy amorphous shapes, colours and textures. For her ArtsBox residency Fiona will make a series of ceramics and drawings that respond to the ceramics books from the Maribyrnong Library Catalogue. 

April - Maxime Banks

Maxime Banks is an award-winning, interdisciplinary artist, a time-traveller of the Black-American Diaspora with Chicago and Mississippi roots. Her work intersects science, visual art and creative technology with a sense of otherness across Afrofuture anamnesis, collage, multimedia, poetry, textiles and painting. Her self-portraits, both literal and psychological, are constellations of her journey as a Black woman emigrant.

Maxime is creating an Afro-galactic archive of Black portraiture, writing and identity. Maxime’s art practice explores Black portraiture, quantum poetics and more.

May - Andy Robertson

In drawings, paintings, videos and installations Andy Robertson collects, examines and reorganises the mundane minutia of everyday life to suggest unexpected or overlooked narratives, while at the same time toying with the viewer’s expectations by introducing elements that are farcical or surreal.

He recently completed a public art commission as part of Maribyrnong City Council’s StopMOTION program, which can be seen on the traffic signal box on the corner of Droop and Donald Streets, Footscray.

June/July - Frances Loriente

Frances Loriente seeks to combine her visual arts practice with her writing and work in the music industry. For her residency at Artsbox Frances wishes to experiment further with this medium to create a animated tale beginning with an Indigenous story of how the whale walked on the land and became the dingo, and a contemporary tale of a wandering dog that ends up in Footscray.

August - Gurmeet Kaur

Gurmeet Kaur (she/her) is a writer and educator from London, currently living on the Kulin Nation (Melbourne). Her work has appeared in Rewrite Reads, Dynamis Journal and Sweet and Sour Zine. Gurmeet is an alumni of Left to Write: Poetry development program with Express Media.

During her ArtsBox residency, she will be exploring family, language and displacement in her poetry project, as well as researching local migration history at the Footscray Library. 

September - Fiona Barbetti

As a cross-disciplinary artist Fiona explores concepts of identity, female fertility and everyday experience. A major thread throughout her work has been the exploration of female identity through concepts of home, nostalgia, and the personal journey through infertility into parenthood.

During her residency Fiona will continue to navigate her identity as female and mother through drawing, photography and collage. These works will form part of a greater body of work, The Female of the Species, where she is creating hybrid feminine creatures. The outcome of the residency will be a new body of work that will be used for an exhibition.

October/November - Matto Lucas

Matto Lucas is a local WeFo-based artist, photographer, designer, lecturer, curator, arts facilitator, producer and podcaster. During this residency, Lucas will attempt to combine his arts practice, photography and love of Footscray to create a series of portraits that celebrate the various faces of the municipality. By turning the Artsbox into an impromptu photo studio, residents are invited to drop in to sit for a portrait and contribute to this multi-media portrait series

 

 Artist Residencies are also offered at the Bluestone Church Arts Space.