Upcoming artists-in-residence: Virginia Hilyard and Fiona Kemp

Virginia Hilyard and Fiona Kemp

Virginia Hilyard and Fiona Kemp are multidisciplinary artists who met whilst doing Masters of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts in 2002. Incorporating principles of meditation and mindfulness, the experience of being in a place is the primary concern for them. Their collaborative work often uses fragments of sound and image collected while in the field … being present in time and place. These gathered fragments become the basis of the tangible artwork - a result of the experience.

Fiona Kemp and Virginia Hilyard, The Circle is

Everywhere, 2020, still from 360 video diptych.



" ... During our residency at Gunyah we plan to develop raw data (video, audio, VR) we gathered on Kotlin Island in Russia. Immersion at Gunyah – through stillness, observation and listening – provides perfect conditions to mature the work - important processing before embarking on a companion piece in Finland ..."


Fiona Kemp and Virginia Hilyard, The Circle is

Everywhere, 2020, 360 video diptych and samovars,

installation at Articulate Project Space.


Fiona Kemp lives on Gadigal and Bidjigal Country, she is a multidisciplinary artist whose body of work explores the way certain objects, images and repetitive practices resonate memory. The media varies according to the nature of each project and additional study in clinical psychology informs the theoretical underpinnings of some of the work. Memory Time and Memory Space was the research focus of a PhD awarded from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, 2010. 


Fiona Kemp and Virginia Hilyard, Work-in-progress,

2020, still from 360 video triptych.


Virginia Hilyard lives on Wangal and Gadigal Land, she works across media including handprocessed film, the digital image and field recordings. Undertaking artist residencies in Thailand and The Philippines, exhibitions included Womanifesto II and Cities on the Move, Bangkok; Experimenta, Melbourne; Artspace, Sydney and Art in General, New York. Other artist residencies include the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and National Centre for Contemporary Arts on Kotlin Island, Russia. Recent works include Remembering Yellow – made with her mother who lives with dementia – exhibited as part of the Womanifesto, Trans-southeast Asia Triennial, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts Museum, 2021. 
@avventura2046


Fiona Kemp and Virginia Hilyard, Work-in-progress,

2020, project based project at Articulate Project Space,

Sydney, various screen based works


Gunyah Artists-in-Residence Program 2023 Announcement

There was a record number of applications this year, thank you to all the artists who applied! 

And thanks also to our selection panel: Sylvia Griffin (previous Gunyah artist-in-residence) and Kath Fries (Gunyah AIR coordinator). 
Congratulations to the artists selected! 

Gunyah Artists-in-Residence 2023:

Jo Langdon
Cara Johnson
Virginia Hilyard & Fiona Kemp
Jodie Herden
Catriona Pollard
Aryadharma Aaron Matheson






Residency report: Annelise Roberts & Jack Palmer


We had a peaceful twelve days at Gunyah in November. I started doing another round of edits on my novel Totem, a bit of a painful process - made much easier by all the distractions/inspirations nearby. The moon eclipsed and turned blood red on our second night there - we went and watched it down on the jetty. Another night we saw bioluminescence in the foam lapping at the shore of the boat ramp down the road. As promised by my friend Vanessa Berry (and as other artists in residence have mentioned in their reports), there were two very friendly sheep dogs just up the road who were available for pats on afternoon strolls; we also saw the silky backs of a pod of dolphins one sunset at the cove (after many fruitless evenings scanning the waves), were visited by kookaburras, and I returned several times to the Yacaaba headland to do the challenging walk to the summit. The window seat was my work station and I spent many hours there reading, thinking, half or fully asleep, and idly taking notes. Plans and schemes were formed and ideas took shape. I'd love to return one day. Thank you Gunyah!

Annelise Roberts
Gunyah Residency Report
November 2022





My time at Gunyah was very productive. I set up downstairs, with my computer, monitors, midi controllers and guitar, with a full window view of the bushy back yard and North Arm Cove waters. It was a dynamic setting, there was always weather, bird wars and boats to watch from the still and contemplative room. I managed to write a substantial chunk of an audio/visual piece of music I had been envisaging. This is the first piece of music I have written with actual music notation for possibly 10 years, so it was nice to connect with that style of working again. I found the residency productive in the standard sense, the sense I was expecting, but I also found it to be productive on a deeper level. The landscape, the atmosphere, and the inward facing process of writing music that is yet to be played unearthed some emotional holdings that I didn’t know were there. In this way the residency became a space to explore and process these feelings and really confront unexamined beliefs I have about myself as an artist and composer. Hard feelings at times, but so refreshing to unearth, process and return back to Melbourne feeling quite different. I look forward to developing further what I started at Gunyah next year.

Jack Palmer
Gunyah Residency Report
November 2022



Residency Report: The Bowerbird Collective


The Bowerbird Collective spent ten blissful days at Gunyah. In addition to finalising the visual design and audio of our second 'Songs of Disappearance' album, this year in partnership with the Australian Museum, we worked on the sound design for 'Our Country', an immersive experience by Australian Geographic, Tourism Australia and Northern Pictures. Find out more about our album at songsofdisappearance.com and 'Our Country' at ausgeo-ourcountry.com. Anthony was also able to celebrate his 36th birthday with family on a beautiful sunny weekend.


Gunyah Residency Report, October 2022
Anthony Albrecht and Simone Slattery
The Bowerbird Collective

Applications for the 2023 Gunyah artists-in-residence program are now open!


The 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 2023 residency program will run from May to October, with six residencies each lasting ten days, Monday to the following Friday week.

As the program is moderately subsidised by the Gunyah owners, so residencies will cost artists $400 for ten days or part thereof (for the whole property, not per person). A refundable $70 key and cleaning deposit is also required. 

Before applying please read ABOUT GUNYAH

In your application you'll need to include your contact details, preferred months, bio and artist statement, two images and a short description of what you plan to do during your residency.

To apply please fill out the ONLINE APPLICATION FORM

Applications close 11pm Wednesday 30th November.



Upcoming artists-in-residence: Annelise Roberts and Jack Palmer


Annelise Roberts and Jack Palmer are partners who live on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong country in Melbourne.

Annelise is a writer and academic. Her fiction, poetry and criticism have appeared in Cordite, Plumwood Mountain, Going Down Swinging, Rabbit Journal and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2021 A. D. Hope Prize by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and the manuscript for her unpublished novel Totem was shortlisted for the 2022 Penguin Literary Prize. Her creative interests include experimental diarising, working with unfamiliar technical/scientific languages and archival material, and the personal essay.

I plan to use the Gunyah residency to finalise edits for my novel Totem, which explores the legacy of the British nuclear testing in South Australia in the 1950s through a family lineage. I also hope to continue work on a collection of creative essays on a range of topics, including Australian suburban garden aesthetics, the 2003 Canberra bushfires, and lyrebirds and mimesis. Although I’ve developed a particular approach to writing these essays, I don’t yet have a sense of the shape of the collection as a whole – the residency will be a great opportunity to spend some time thinking about this.

Annelise Roberts, 'Pine', 2019. 35mm film



Jack is an artist, music producer, guitarist and music educator. He works with computer music production, improvisation, video, and installation. Jack’s work is characterised by paradox and emotional contradiction - urgency held by meditative equipoise. In 2013 Jack graduated from the ANU School of Music with a major in jazz guitar. Since then he has featured as a performer/artist at ACCA, La Mama Theatre, Testing Grounds, George Patton Gallery, One Night in Footscray, and West Projections Festival, among others. He has collaborated with dancers, visual artists, musicians, and poets, and has composed and performed across electronic music, jazz, post-rock, and experimental genres. www.jackpalmer.net

For a number of years I have been interested in the potential of synaesthetic perception, such as mental imagery in hearing, or psycho-aural sensation in seeing. For me these experiences suggest the potential of a unified perception, a cognisance that apprehends phenomena before they are objectified as images, sounds, physical textures etc. As part of my exploration of this, I have been playing around with “charging” objects with non-conceptual or "felt-meaning" using sound. This just means developing a strong association between an object and a sound. Sound can produce non-conceptual meaning — music is the obvious example — and objects can be containers for non-conceptual meaning. So, how can we play with this artistically? Can we charge objects with non-conceptual felt-meaning using sound? How does the sound change our experience of the object and how does the object change our experience of the sound? What meaning could be produced in such a situation? For my Gunyah residency I plan to work on an audio-visual music composition that utilises and explores this very ordinary yet habitually unexamined phenomenon. The opportunity to share the residency with my partner Annelise and develop our ideas together is also very inspirational.

Jack Palmer, Soma, La Mama Theatre.



Upcoming artists-in-residence: The Bowerbird Collective


The Bowerbird Collective. Photo: Off Track, ABC Tiger Webb

The Bowerbird Collective are classical musicians and producers, Anthony Albrecht and Simone Slattery, who make art for nature.


The Bowerbird Collective. Where Song Began


“Our residency at Gunyah will give us the opportunity to develop our 2022 edition of Songs of Disappearance, an album raising awareness about threatened species.”


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