Selected Works is a self-curated collection of recent work from three artists working across shared and disparate subjects, materials and questions. 

A common sensibility here is an attention to the body as a political and aesthetic zone of enquiry: Cedar Rankin-Cheek explores the expectation of use and value functionally ascribed to femme bodies; Isabella Rossaro, in reference to biological science and aesthetics, materialises and draws out her own relationship to invisible illnesses; Zoë Sydney constructs objects posed at the scale of the body—mirror, gloves, shower cap, skipping rope—in order to communicate and explore her personal experience of lesbian womanhood.

Cedar Rankin-Cheek is a UWA Fine Arts graduate working on Whadjuk Noongar boodjar. She works with soft sculpture and installation works that are born from her own experiences and understandings of the femme body. She particularly focuses on creating works that examine the functionality of the body and the relationship between usefulness and value. Rankin-Cheek works with soft sculpture as it holds a lot of political and historical weight as a form, referencing the understanding of what art is and who is expected to make what kinds of art. 

Rankin-Cheek merges art, craft and furniture making to examine further our understanding of functionality and usefulness and how those ideas relate to the value we place on people and art objects. In the examination of functionality, Rankin-Cheek explores how we exploit bodies for their usefulness, both for their visual aesthetics and comfort aesthetics, similarly to the way we ‘use’ and value furniture pieces. Rankin-Cheek combines the femme body with sculpture and furniture design to give an example of our desire for things to fit into functional categories in order to be wanted and valued.

Isabella Rossaro is an emerging Perth artist fresh out of an undergraduate degree in Zoology and Fine Arts. Specialising in monoprinting, she manipulates ink with graphite illustration, natural found objects and medication packaging. Isabella pairs these traditional mediums with biological polymer clay forms. She is very passionate about invisible illness, especially communicating the struggle of being a young woman suffering with endometriosis and major depressive disorder. She is inspired by genetic research, looking to amplify its importance in women’s health.

Zoë Sydney is a local Perth artist working with multimedia including textiles, paint, and her own hair. Her work deals with aspects of queer womanhood from an Australian lens, exploring the interactions between an artist’s body of work and the public and private concept of the body. 

She is currently studying Physics and Fine Arts at the University of Western Australia, and endeavours to bring this interdisciplinary thought into her practice. She is a cofounder of Snart Club, a group of young people running art/science/sustainability workshops across Perth. Check out what’s happening at snartclub.com