Applications for the 2021 Gunyah artists-in-residence program are now open!


Gunyah artists-in-residence program provides low cost self-contained accommodation for solo, collaboration, group and family short term creative residencies for visual artists, writers, composers, designers, curators, new media and performance artists.

The 2021 residency program will run from May to November, with seven residencies each lasting ten days, Monday to the following Friday week.

2021 residencies at Gunyah will be partially subsidised by the Gunyah owners, so the cost to artists is $360 for ten days or part thereof (for the whole property, not per person). A refundable $60 key deposit is required. Artists are welcome to bring their families and friends, up to six people.

Before applying please read about Gunyah. In your application you'll need to include your contact details, preferred dates, bio and artist statement, three images and a short description of what you plan to do during your residency.

To apply please fill out the online form or email gunyahresidency@yahoo.com 

Applications close Monday 30 November 2020. 

Residency report: Kathryn Cowen

Kathryn Cowen and Natalya Shinn at Gunyah

It is with thanks and gratitude that I reflect on my time at Gunyah. What an unexpected gift it was to step away from the craziness of 2020 life to spend a couple of weeks immersed in my practice at such a special place.

Exploring North Arm Cove near Gunyah

After a few long walks to soak in the surrounding bush and beaches, breathing deeply and fossicking for treasures, I settled into the studio to start drawing and constructing small sculptures. It was a time of play and experimentation interspersed with long chats with my dear friend and fellow artist Natalya Shinn who came along to keep me company.

Fossicking for treasures at a beach nearby

Combining natural materials that I found in the local area such as rocks, driftwood, seed pods, shells and twigs, with synthetic materials that I had brought along with me such as string, feathers, fabric, paint, plastic, beads and polymer clay; I pondered the future of biological forms. A collection of specimens emerged.

Kathryn Cowen, Work in progress - Biofuture Specimens, 2020

The world and how we live in it has changed this year. I am curious as to how our relationship with each other and our environment will adapt as a result. I can only hope it is for the better.

Kathryn Cowen, Work in progress - Biofuture Specimens, under UV light, 2020

Thank you to Kath Fries and the Gunyah Collective for the opportunity to take part in this residency. My cup is full and I am excited to be back in my studio exploring the possibilities generated by the Biofuture Specimens made at Gunyah for an exhibition in 2021.

Kathryn Cowen
October 2020

Kathryn Cowen, Work in progress - Biofuture Specimens, under UV light (detail), 2020

Upcoming artist-in-residence: Riona Tindal

Riona Tindal

Riona Tindal is an artist and passionate conservationist based in Newcastle. She completed her PhD in Natural History Illustration at the University of Newcastle in 2016. Riona recently expanded her creative arts career as the Deaf Arts Coordinator with Accessible Arts and Co-facilitator of the Artist Run Initiative Inside Out in Maitland 2016-2018. Sharing her time between Sydney and the Hunter region, she is a strong advocate for inclusive, cultural accessible arts. Riona was born Deaf, she grew up surrounded by nature and takes inspiration from the environment in her creative practice. Being Deaf brings its own unique isolation, discrimination, different communication methods and attitudes, so Riona sees things visually and differently. However, deafness is not a main identifying part of her, nor is it a defining disability for Riona, but rather an aspect of a multifaceted part of her being. Art is her language. Riona uses arts as a visual communicative language working with mixed media, illustration, photography, typographic design, painting, poetry and writing.

Riona Tindal, Leaf Utopia study - detail from Moss Garden, watercolour and pencil on timber board

In both her art practice and conservation advocacy, Riona seeks out the impact of climate change in different landscapes, and these firsthand experiences have a profound effect on her arts practice. In 2018 Riona travelled solo through central Australia for two months, experiencing the diverse uniqueness of the landscape, reflecting on the symbolic shapes and structures that show the beauty of the earth that is slowly being destroyed or transmuted to serve humanity’s needs. Riona is expanding and exploring traditional and contemporary arts practice, with science, seeking to combine the three as a trinity in the arts. Conservation through science and arts where she hopes to educate the audience around our rapidly vanishing earth, climate change, species driven to extinction, communicating through creative media where it can immediately capture the audience and engage. 


Riona Tindal, Scientific illustration of a frog, 2016, stippling ink, 27 x 21.9 cm


During my residency I plan to develop poetry, narrative storytelling and imbedding poetry working on watercolour sheets and recycled timber boards to explore pathways that make connections and move between the rigidity of science into storytelling and communicative visual language.

You can see more of Riona's work on Instagram @riorioartist


Kathryn Cowen: upcoming artist-in-residence


Kathryn Cowen with her work A Field Guide To Reality, 2015-19, acrylic, aerosol and oil on canvas

Kathryn Cowen is a Sydney based multidisciplinary artist working across the fields of painting, sculpture and installation. Drawing on a diverse range of influences from cosmology and literature, to neuroscience and psychology; Kathryn reflects on our experience, understanding and perceptions of reality from a physical and psychological perspective. A ‘hyper real’ colour palette is a central feature of her work, used to prompt a shift in perception and creates portals to a place that is ‘Other'. 

Kathryn studied painting at the National Art School, Sydney, where she was a finalist in the John Olsen Prize for Drawing and winner of the Chroma Paints Award, graduating with a Bachelor Fine Arts (Hons) in 2007. Since this time she has exhibited regularly in solo and group exhibitions across a variety of commercial, artist run and institutional galleries. Kathryn has been a finalist in the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award (2019), the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2019, 2015), the Calleen Art Prize (2018), the Waverley Art Prize (2015), and the Portia Geach Memorial Award (2006). She has participated in the NAS Artist-in-Residence Program at Hill End, NSW and the Movers and Shapers Collective Residency at Turondale, NSW. Her work is held in collections throughout Australia, the Netherlands and the USA.

Kathryn Cowen, Field Guide Specimens (studio installation), 2019, seed pods, twigs, date palm inflorescence branches, shells, rocks, expanding foam, paint, laboratory glassware, plastic figurines


During my residency at Gunyah I plan to work on components of an installation using found natural objects and small sculptures, housed in scientific glassware. This new work will present specimens from a post apocalyptic world where the scale and relationship between fauna and fauna has been inverted, minuscule life forms rule and the light we live by has changed. The work is intended to question our ecological future and invite the viewer to imagine alternate realities and future biological forms. The COVID-19 pandemic has diminished our perceived human power. Desperately peering into microscopes looking for an answer, how will we adapt and grow in our relationship to nature in this new world order?

While at Gunyah I will continue fossicking and refine this work in progress for presentation as part of the Movers and Shapers ‘Women and the Land' sculpture exhibition to be held at Hazelhurst Arts Centre in 2021.


You can see more of Kathryn's work on her website kathryncowen.com and instagram instagram.com/kathryn.cowen

Residency Report: Vanessa Berry

On my first night at Gunyah there was a bright full moon. Beneath it, reflected in the bay, was the moon's silver path, which shimmered with the movement of the water. I looked out over this scene, wondering how being here would shape my thinking, and what kind of reflections I would go on to make during my residency. Places shape thoughts and actions, and residencies draws attention to this exchange: the relationship between the atmosphere of the place and the artist's own mental weather.

The next morning I set up a desk by the window where I'd been looking at the moonlight and unpacked my bags of materials. I'd come with two projects to work on, one a manuscript that's reaching completion, and another that's so new it is mostly a set of scribbled notes, and vague thoughts I need to do hard work to chase after. Both of these stages, end and beginning, require courage and confidence, although they require different levels of attention. The manuscript I examine carefully to consider how its pieces work together, as I engage in the careful work of editing it into a whole. For the new work I set meticulousness aside. The important thing was to open up my thoughts, take a notebook down to the water's edge, let my ideas shift and collide. In this way I divided up my days, between the 'desk work' of the manuscript, and the 'jetty work' of the new project.


On residency an artist is lifted out of their routine, their familiar places and habits and constraints, and has space to consider their practice. Most days I found myself sitting by the jetty, beside an empty black flowerpot over the mouth of which a small white spider had spun a web. Each day it was at the centre of a newly-spun web, the pattern slightly different from the day before. Writing, rewriting: the spider was my companion in contemplation.

As the water lapped at the rocks I thought about my intentions, of what I do and how I might continue or modify it. The practice of writing is an exchange between self and world, and made up of activities that bring them together. At its most broad this is everything the writer does, their continued experience and all the interactions that come with daily life, observing and feeling, balancing moment with momentum.

As well as writing and thinking, I went out walking, gathering a sense of place on this Worimi country of North Arm Cove and balancing out the quiet, concentrated energy of writing. On the suburban streets I was particularly drawn to the houses and their architecture. North Arm Cove is a secluded place, and the houses were built as retreats, and to be open to the natural environment they are surrounded by. As I walked, I collected my favourites.

One of the things that I find particularly rewarding about walking is that each walk forms a story, with particular moods and details, so I thought that I'd include a walk story to end this report, as a way of describing my time at Gunyah as it unfolded.


--


Walk Story, Gunyah, 11th August 2020 

At the desk by the window I look up, over the bay. In the days I've been here I've seen it smooth as a mirror, with the silver track of the full moon reflected in its night surface. I've seen it high and lapping the rocks at the shoreline, seen its ripples extending out as if it's a shivering skin. On the day the storm front came through it was turbulent with low, rapid waves, which raced in towards the inner cove as if in a great hurry to arrive. Today the bay is calm and grey, tinged a slight gold as the afternoon settles. While there's still light I decide to go out walking.

As I turn the corner, out into the road that follows the water's edge, a kookaburra looks down from a high branch, turning its attention from the ground, to me, then back to the grass, studiously hoping for insects. I like their solitary, concentrated attention to observing, and today feel something of an accord with this approach, for the way that I have been working: concentrating on reading my manuscript, looking out for the details that have a life and energy to them.

I pass holiday houses with names like "Stray Leaves" and "Nightjar's Rest" and "Whispering Tides", with their wide windows and balconies, good positions for watching the water. I follow the road down to where it crumbles to an end beside a small beach. Like the other days I've walked this way, two dogs run up to greet me. The first time the younger one had rushed up barking, and I'd veered away, but then the older dog had come up and sat by my side, looking up with an imploring expression, and I knew they had accepted me. Today they bound around me, the young one carrying a fish in her mouth as if it's a great prize, until I reach the end of their territory and they stand as if at an invisible barrier, watching me walk away.

At the top of the hill is an A-Frame house, perched at the back of a wide front lawn on which a flock of corellas are grazing. More fly in, making nervous bleats, then turn down to tear at the grass. Behind the house is the edge of the bushland that extends across the headland. I walk until I reach a path that leads into the bush, a dirt road still muddy from the previous day's rain. At the corner is a wooden post with two blank wooden road signs pointing towards the forest.

A century ago, there were plans for this forest. Reading the history of the area on the Gunyah blog I'd found out that in the early 20th century this area was destined to be cleared for the building of a city. In 1918 the plans drawn up by Walter Burley Griffin for Port Stephens City were approved, and lots offered for sale. But the plan dwindled when the 1930s Depression hit, and all that was ever built of the city are the roads, which carve out trails through the bushland, marked by blank signs.

Walking on the paths I imagine Burley Griffin's plan overlaid upon the land, the ghosts of parks and civic buildings. It is hard to imagine the place other than how it is now, with the tall bloodwoods and stringybarks, and purple pea flowers and sprigs of native orchids in the undergrowth. Imagining the map of what it could have been I thought how the land was carved up, with the colonial mindset of land as space to be renamed and repurposed, as it has been across the continent. I walk here on Worimi country, holding onto the understanding that a city is only something temporary or provisional.

Thinking this, letting thoughts trail out with the rhythm of my steps, I follow the bushland paths until I'm back on the sealed stretch of road that follows the shoreline. The kookaburra has moved on from its perch and the sun is lower in the sky. I turn back to Gunyah, to the desk and my notebooks, with the walk's new thoughts to record and observe, hoping within them there is a quiver of something that I might take up and take further.

My time at Gunyah was precious and rewarding, a chance to write, think and dream, and connect with the abundant creative energies of the house, land and environment. Thank you to Kath and Gunyah for your support and generosity in having me on the residency. It is a privilege to have had Gunyah influence my work and thinking, and to now carry the work and insights from my time here with me.

Vanessa Berry

August 2020

mirrorsydney.wordpress.com

Vanessa Berry: upcoming artist-in-residence

Vanessa Berry is a writer and artist who works with memory, history and archives. She is the author of three books, most recently Mirror Sydney, a collection of essays and hand-drawn maps that investigate the city’s marginal places and undercurrents. Within the Mirror Sydney project Vanessa has used multiple formats - blog, book, hand-drawn maps, zines, guided walks - and she usually works in this way, drawing on variety of textual, visual and performative forms, around a central idea or theme.

Vanessa Berry with her book, Mirror Sydney (photo courtesy of Better Read Than Dead), published by Giramondo Publishing in 2017, 300 pages
 Vanessa's work has been widely recognised: Mirror Sydney won the Mascara Avant Garde Literary Award, her visual artwork has been exhibited at major galleries such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and National Gallery of Australia, the hand-drawn maps she produced for Mirror Sydney were purchased by the State Library of NSW for their collection, and Vanessa's work has been commissioned by institutions such as the Powerhouse Museum and Museum of Sydney. 


Vanessa Berry, St Peters map (detail), 2017, A3 risoprint


At the heart of her creative work is an interest in the storied nature of everyday life, and a desire to investigate expressions of memory within the physical environment and material culture.


Time and Memory, Powerhouse Museum (includes essay Time Machines by Vanessa Berry).

"During my residency at Gunyah I'm going to continue working on my two current collections of essays. The first is about physical and symbolic relationships with animals, and the second is about chance, coincidence and objects. In both projects - considering human-animal relationships, and also the relationships we have with mundane and everyday objects - I consider the connections we build, sustain, and inherit, between ourselves and the world, and how encounters with animals, and with objects, can shape our lives and identities."

You can find more of Vanessa's work at mirrorsydney.wordpress.com

2020 Gunyah artists-in-residence program

Thank you to everyone who applied for the 2020 Gunyah residencies!

Congratulations to the artists who have been selected for the 2020 Gunyah artists-in-residence program:


New for 2020: Gunyah artists-in-residence program has just launched an Instagram account @gunyahartists ... follow to see what our artists get up to on their residencies!  


Gunyah waterfront, photo Kath Fries

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