Exhibition Artist Talk
A conversation with Armando Chant, Sadhbha Cockburn, Belinda Yee, and Justine Roche
Gallery 1
PRESENT / PLACE explores the idea of landscape not as something fixed or distant, but as something alive shaped by memory, time, and our presence within it. In this exhibition, landscape becomes place: not simply a location on a map, but a shifting space where personal and shared histories gather, where material meets memory, and where meaning is always in the process of becoming.
Join us for an artist talk by featured artists Armando Chant, Sadhbha Cockburn, Belinda Yee, and Justine Roche. This is an exciting opportunity to hear accomplished multi-disciplinary artists speak to their practice and this exciting exhibition on debut at Tamworth Regional Gallery.
Artist Biographies
Armando Chant
Chant's practice-based research is an investigation of material transformation as applied to mediated images of the ‘landscape.’ The work is concerned with the possibilities and limits of representation using processes of erasure, disruption and repetition in relation to found images, where ‘the image’ does not sit exclusively within one realm but in between multiple mediums and surfaces. This interdisciplinary approach builds on the conceptual and aesthetic tension between craft and concept, image and object, local and global, visual and tactile. His work explores these dynamic relationships by foregrounding the in-between as a new space that emerges from these binary tensions.
Within Australia, Armando has participated in exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne that have been part of arts festivals such as Sydney Art Month and Head-On Photography Festival. Armando has also participated in major Regional gallery exhibitions, such as the Tamworth Textile Triennial 2015, where the gallery acquired the work for its collection and its 2020 edition.
Recently selected for the biennial Dobell Drawing Award 2023, Australia's premier showcase of contemporary drawing in all its forms, and has been chosen to tour nationally for the next two years. Armando is a finalist in the inaugural GIRRA: Fraser Coast prize for Landscape 2023 and in 2024 is a finalist in the prestigious Art Gallery of New South Wales Wynne Prize, Gosford Art Prize, Jacaranda Drawing Biennale (Grafton Regional Gallery) and the Redlands Art Prize (Cleveland Regional Art Gallery).
Sadhbha Cockburn
Sadhbha Cockburn is an emerging artist and writer, living and working upon Gadigal country. She holds a BFA (Painting), an MFA (Drawing), and has a background in medicine. A recipient of an Australian Government Research Training Scholarship, she is currently completing a PhD in Visual Art at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Interested in affective poetics, Cockburn aims to foreground material and spatial listening in her research - letting the materiality of objects, and the stories they hold, guide her practice. She is currently fascinated by homonyms, spatial prepositions and making thread from her own hair.
Cockburn has participated in multiple group shows and prizes including recent exhibitions at Schmick Contemporary, DRAW Space, aMBUSH gallery and airSPACE projects in Sydney. In 2023, she was awarded the Onslow Storrier Residency Prize at La Cité Internationale in Paris and the Foundations Residency Prize in Portland, NSW.
Belinda Yee
An interdisciplinary Australian-Chinese artist living and working on Gadigal land. My practice is primarily in drawing, installation, and video. I approach drawing as a temporal art, one that is characteristically transient, open-ended and provisional. I use drawing to reframe the experience of time. I am currently exploring processes for decolonising time and the inherent bias associated with data-driven and generative technologies.
Yee has completed a Bachelor of Visual Art (Painting) at Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University, and a Bachelor of Industrial Design (Honours) from the University of Canberra. In 2022, I completed a Master of Fine Art (MFA) degree at the National Art School, where my research looked at conceptions of time in physics, philosophy and human biology.
Exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Australia, Hong Kong and France.
Finalist Fisher's Ghost Award, the National Works on Paper Prize, the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award, the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing and the Ravenswood Australian Women's Art Prize.
Held in the permanent collection of the National Art School, the Capella Hotel in Sydney and in private collections in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Netherlands and the United States.
Justine Roche
Justine Roche is an artist working on Gadigal and Gamia-Dharrawal land. Her practice explores multiplicities of perspectives underpinned by how memory, culture, personal experience and photography influence how we perceive the world. Presenting contemporary understandings of place, Justine engages with dark room and digital photographic processes to fuse material, elusive and unpredictable elements. She is particularly drawn to the 19th-century wet collodion process of exposing images directly on glass and metal plates for their haunting, timeless qualities and the imperfect traces left by the maker.
Justine completed her Masters of Fine Art in 2022 and her works Here / Now 2019 and Dark Eden 2022 were purchased by the National Art School for their permanent collection. In 2023 she was commissioned for the Capella Hotel in Sydney. She has been a finalist in the Grace Cossington Smith Biennial Art Award and the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize twice.
Artist Talk with Armando Chant, Sadhbha Cockburn, Belinda Yee, and Justine Roche
Sunday 13 July, 10.30am
FREE, RSVP appreciated:
https://tamworthregionalgallery.com.au/present-place-exhibition-artist-talk-
The Tamworth Regional Gallery offers free and accessible parking - located behind the building, accessed via Peel or Hill St.
If you have any questions about our visible mending workshop or any programming, please contact the friendly gallery staff.
You may also like the following events from Tamworth Regional Gallery:
- This Friday, 4th July, 08:00 am, Official Exhibition Opening Event-'Grace&Grace', 'Present/Place' and Dhurranmay-Gal Dhirrabu in Tamworth
- This Sunday, 6th July, 03:00 am, The Yarn Bombing Project in Tamworth
- Next Wednesday, 9th July, 12:30 am, Fundamentals of Illustration with Emma Stilts in Tamworth
Also check out other
Arts events in Tamworth,
Fine Arts events in Tamworth,
Exhibitions in Tamworth.
