Opening 1 February, 6-8pm; Exhibition runs 2-17 February @ Spectrum Project Space •
Presented by Annette Nykiel •

An artist in residence project at Edith Cowan University (ECU) will explore a sense of regional and remote non-urban spaces, where the artist walks noticing the ground beneath her feet and collecting materials that she can make things with.

Annette Nykiel is the recipient of the 2018 Spectrum Project Space Artist Residency. This annual program allows an artist one month’s access to Spectrum Project Space at ECU’s Mount Lawley Campus as a working studio, with the aim of exhibiting new works in the gallery at the end of the residency. This program is now in its fifth year.

Annette Nykiel is a practice-led researcher and currently an ECU PhD candidate. During the three-week residency component of her stay at Spectrum Project Space, Annette Nykiel will slowly transform the gallery into a making place. From this transformation, an exhibition will emerge, created from piecing together gleaned fibre, fragments of found objects and handmade textiles. The resulting assemblages will evoke the non-urban spaces where the materials are gathered or made during sustained fieldwork. She invites people to gather to make and yarn with her during this time, but please let us know when you are coming.

Nykiel spends many hours, observing, and wandering in the bush and along the coast. Her experience becomes a slow tactile place-making that asks questions of the relationships between the maker, her materials and the place. Narratives and assemblages emerge from dyeing and plying plant fibres and cloth, which are pieced together with found objects. The emerging assemblages bring with them, a sense of the non-urban and transform the gallery space into a map of place.

At the conclusion of her residency Nykiel will open her exhibition, meeting place, at Spectrum Project Space as part of the FRINGE WORLD festival 2018. With over 700 events at more than 150 venues, the Fringe festival is the largest annual event in Western Australia and recognised as the third largest Fringe in the world.

meeting place will also be a part of the City of Stirling’s Summerset Arts Festival 2018. Now in its tenth year, the City of Stirling’s Summerset Arts Festival showcases the unique lifestyle and diversity of the City through a range of free and low cost events and activities that celebrate our heritage, art, music and culture. The 2018 Summerset Arts Festival will be jam packed with art exhibitions, live comedy, children’s events, theatrical shows and live music that the community can enjoy across multiple spaces and places throughout the City of Stirling.

Annette Nykiel is a socially engaged bricoleuse, a maker, and a practice-led researcher, exploring questions of the Country. She is interested in raising the awareness of the value and importance of relating to the materiality of non-urban spaces. These spaces include regional places where she takes images of the ground between her feet, and gleans material for fibre and textile works while practicing in her field studio. Annette wanders between urban, regional and remote areas in a variety of roles as a geoscientist, arts worker, maker and workshop facilitator. Her textile, fibre and photographic works are held in the John Curtin Gallery, Artspace Mackay and numerous private collections She has exhibited in a variety of spaces in Perth, regional Australia and online.

Annette Nykiel will undertake her artist residency at Spectrum Project Space at ECU’s Mount Lawley Campus from 8 January to 31 January. The meeting place exhibition opening celebration is on Thursday, 1st February, 6:00 – 8:00pm, the exhibition will then run from Friday, 2nd February until Saturday, 17th February at Spectrum Project Space, with an artist talk and demonstration on Saturday, 3rd February. On Friday January 19th, Friday February 2nd and Friday February 9th, the artist will be making and yarning at the gallery and invites you to come and join her from 10-3pm.

For more on Annette Nykiel visit: http://www.annette-nykiel-artist.com

More info: www.facebook.com/spectrum.ecu/
Email: spectrum@ecu.edu.au

Image courtesy of Annette Nykiel.