Hands have a capacity to make and to touch, to be intimate, to love, to give and to take, to inflict great harm, or to heal. Hands are the restless, wiggling movers, changers and feelers, they dangle fingers through a perpetually running creek. the hands should have no peace takes its name from an excerpt from Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, which describes the way the mind, body and community express loss and grief. Uniting the practices of Pony (SA), Leila Baptist (VIC/WA), Claudia Nicholson (NSW), Jade O’Sullivan (WA), Andrew J Williams (WA), and Chiluba Young (WA) this exhibition uses visual storytelling to express an ‘embodied’ experience deeply connected with community and place.

Pony
Pony is an interdisciplinary artist that experiments, creates and collaborates through and between composition, performance, making and installation, and poetry and creative writing. Their practice has been developed through formal and informal studies, through professional development as an artist in the community through residencies, workshops, performances and exhibitions, contributing locally and interstate in a variety of settings. Their disabled, trans and queer identities inform how they centre their practice on accessibilty, mutual aid and collective care, and subverting the dominant gaze. Intersecting space with readily available and mundane physical material, but with community support is part of their method to gain access to meaningful expression and facilitate meaningful expression. They compose/construct/write/perform to facilitate collaboration and improvisation, analyzing likely variables, materials and space. Pony resides and creates on unceded Kaurna Land.

Leila Doneo Baptist
Leila Doneo Baptist is a mixed-race student and young artist. They live between the unceded lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people, and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. They have a keen interest in creative practice as an opportunity for interpersonal exchange, productive disruption, decolonial healing and humour. Recently, Leila has explored how existing cultural structures of perception can be manipulated to tell new stories.

Claudia Nicholson
Claudia Nicholson is an interdisciplinary artist based on Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia). Her practice examines psychic and physical connections to place through multidisciplinary forms of art making including painting, installation, performance and video. She is interested in creating acts of collective remembrance, exploring the ways in which we navigate the complexities of identity in a post-colonial context. The conceptual enquiries in Claudia’s practice are driven by her position as a Colombian-born artist living in Australia. Her practice addresses the diasporic position, specifically in the Asia Pacific region, and in addition, connects with the varied experiences of the Australian Latinx community. Her work blends artistic practices local to Central and South America with her own in an ongoing attempt to situate herself in a history and culture from which she is separate, specifically, silletas and alfombras de aserrín. Claudia adopts these practices – with their complex imbrication of both colonial and indigenous lineages – as a platform from which to articulate the complexity of identity. These artforms are transient, adaptable, and resilient becoming sites for celebration and resistance.

Jade O’Sullivan
Jade is a Noongar artist based in Boorloo (Perth WA), she is also a mother who loves playing wheelchair basketball. She explores all art-forms in her practice, with a particular focus on painting and drawing. She has exhibited her work in Revealed 2019 (Fremantle Arts Centre), and Djookian NAIDOC week 2018 (Gallery Central) and NAIDOC week 2019.

 

Andrew J Williams
Andrew J Williams grew up on Ngarluma country in the Pilbara region of Western Australia to migrant parents. His early life was moulded in an archipelagic state, and he sought to connect to the mainland after high school finished. After a decade of working in different music projects around Perth, a change of trajectory was pursued in North America. What started as a romantic inquest, turned into an unofficial mentorship in heritage restoration by master craftsmen in Vancouver, British Columbia. Working on several notable projects across the continent, including a restaurant by award-winning designer Joyce Wang, an appetite for design in construction had aggregated, and now Andrew has returned to Perth to gain qualifications venturing deeper in this field. This will be his first foray into expressing his passion for material in a less technical, more artistic application.

 

Chiluba Young
Chiluba is a Zambian photographer based in Boorloo (Perth Western Australia) currently studying biomedical science at The University of Western Australia. She has exhibited her work at Perth Centre of Photography in 2020, Paper Mountain in 2020 for her first solo exhibition, and Blue Room Theatre in 2019. Young enjoys photographing black women, drawing inspiration from the subjects she photographs.