Image credit: Stephanie Hicks Oddkin, 2023 Photo: Astrid Mulder
Oddkin by Stephanie Hicks
Exhibition dates: 26 March to 25 September 2024
Oddkin is a creative reimagining of our relationship with the world around us, enlarging ideas of kinship and connection with other-than-human beings in ways that are positive, generative, and ongoing. Questions of care and responsibility arise through a recognition of interdependence and entanglement. Methodologies of collage and assemblage speak to a relationship between parts.
Creeks and parklands, suburban streets and bicycle trails provide the material stuff of making, which Hicks gathers and bring home to her studio. As disparate objects are brought into relation with each other they become interconnected and contingent on each other both structurally and formally. They exist largely as a gathering of moveable parts: individuals and kin groupings have the potential to grow, to change and to merge, to become with each other in myriad unfinished configurations.
"I am unfailingly drawn towards small things: to mosses, fungi and lichen, and their complex interactions within diverse ecosystems. They are different to the impressive trees that tower above a forest, but no less important. To be small is to welcome a sense of discovery and delight that comes with close looking, with attentiveness and being present to your surroundings. Through their symbiotic relationships with neighbouring plants, they embody my interest in kinship and interdependence and inform my process of bringing materials into relation with one another."
It is in these (sometimes improbable) networks, in the coming together of lively and bumptious ideas, materials and beings, that a space of possibility opens, allowing new ways of thinking about and engaging with the world to emerge.
About the artist
Stephanie Hicks holds a Master of Contemporary Art from the VCA, and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the ANU School of Art. Recent projects include: VCA Graduate Exhibition 2022; The Indeterminacy of Encounter, George Paton Gallery; Craft Victoria Artist in Residence; and CUT, The Dirty Dozen, Melbourne. Her work is held in private collections including The Peter Fay Collection and the Henry Ergas Private Collection.
Image credit: Stephanie Hicks Oddkin, 2023 Photo: Astrid Mulder
Oddkin by Stephanie Hicks
Exhibition dates: 26 March to 25 September 2024
Oddkin is a creative reimagining of our relationship with the world around us, enlarging ideas of kinship and connection with other-than-human beings in ways that are positive, generative, and ongoing. Questions of care and responsibility arise through a recognition of interdependence and entanglement. Methodologies of collage and assemblage speak to a relationship between parts.
Creeks and parklands, suburban streets and bicycle trails provide the material stuff of making, which Hicks gathers and bring home to her studio. As disparate objects are brought into relation with each other they become interconnected and contingent on each other both structurally and formally. They exist largely as a gathering of moveable parts: individuals and kin groupings have the potential to grow, to change and to merge, to become with each other in myriad unfinished configurations.
"I am unfailingly drawn towards small things: to mosses, fungi and lichen, and their complex interactions within diverse ecosystems. They are different to the impressive trees that tower above a forest, but no less important. To be small is to welcome a sense of discovery and delight that comes with close looking, with attentiveness and being present to your surroundings. Through their symbiotic relationships with neighbouring plants, they embody my interest in kinship and interdependence and inform my process of bringing materials into relation with one another."
It is in these (sometimes improbable) networks, in the coming together of lively and bumptious ideas, materials and beings, that a space of possibility opens, allowing new ways of thinking about and engaging with the world to emerge.
About the artist
Stephanie Hicks holds a Master of Contemporary Art from the VCA, and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the ANU School of Art. Recent projects include: VCA Graduate Exhibition 2022; The Indeterminacy of Encounter, George Paton Gallery; Craft Victoria Artist in Residence; and CUT, The Dirty Dozen, Melbourne. Her work is held in private collections including The Peter Fay Collection and the Henry Ergas Private Collection.
