During her studio residency, Janet Carter has been using a speculative fiction framework to undertake some alternate world building in the studio. Exploring ideas of identity and queerness amongst the precarity of our troubled times, Janet has been asking:
What if we lived in a world where our kinship ties were untethered from gender and biology?
What if we could choose our family and our roles within them?
What would our social and cultural ties look like?
What would be our responsibilities and obligations of care for one another?
In this practical workshop, Janet will provide an introduction to the project before each guest creates their own avatar in this new world. Participants have 2 hours to respond to these questions and utilise materials on site to create an avatar through writing, drawing, sculpture or other chosen hand-made methods.
At the end of the workshop, guests will share their avatars with the group as we build ties with each other to make us stronger and more resourceful in the precarious IRL world we currently live in. Each avatar will be documented by the artist and become part of the project’s ongoing development.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Janet Carter was born in 1966. She currently lives and works in Perth, Western Australia.
After completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Edith Cowan University in 2008, Carter finished Honours in Contemporary Arts in 2010 and is currently a Fine Arts PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia. Her practice embraces sculpture, installation, performance and new media works. She is primarily concerned with investigating contemporary conceptions around gender, sexuality, desire and embodied identity.
Janet has contributed to a number of group exhibitions, including Hatched, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2008), and Queer City Lane Dwellers, Guildford Lane Gallery, Melbourne (Midsumma Festival, 2009). She had her first solo show (New Works) at Horus and Deloris Contemporary Art Space in 2010. She was nominated for the Qantas Encouragement of Emerging Australian Art Award, and was a finalist in the Churchie Emerging Art Award, last year, and is currently involved in RHINOCEROS, Fremantle Arts Centre’s inaugural ARI program. She was a Proximity Festival 2013 artist and was also one of the twelve artists/performers involved in the inaugural Proximity Festival in 2012.
