21 Sep 2022 — 10 Dec 2022

 

FREE EVENT

RMIT Gallery

344 Swanston Street
Melbourne 3000

TIMES

Tuesday to Friday: 11am – 5pm
Saturday: 12.30pm – 5pm
Sunday: Closed
Monday: Closed

T-collective comprises a group of four mature-age artists whose work is based on the lived experience of personal trauma. 

About

T-collective comprises a group of four mature-age artists whose work is based on the lived experience of personal trauma. Each member is currently undertaking PhD studies in the School of Art at RMIT; our art practices are separate, but we work in close proximity. Besides creating a dialogue around common themes, part of the impetus for forming this collective was to activate a more rigorous discourse around trauma, one that departs from perceptions that trauma art is about catharsis and that isolate the artist as victim. 

Our interests focus on more specific areas like the complexity and mutability of memory, the inherent problems interpreting childhood experience, the transmission of affect and the identification of trajectories in the visual language of trauma in the realms of the vernacular and the artistic. A common element that applies to each of our individual practices is that we work across a variety of media. As a collective we bring four distinct perspectives of agency and resilience through our artwork and its visual discourse. 

In the contemporary gallery environment emotion is a rare commodity – it often requires an interpretative process between artist and spectator; a transaction that often acknowledges raw feeling without fully comprehending what lies underneath. Our work is about extending a sensitive and experimental dialogue to a wider audience. 

This project will be included in the Archives of Feeling exhibition at RMIT Gallery.

Image: Simon Crosbie, Trauma/ pre-Trauma.
Image courtesy of the artist.
 

Artist Biography

Jude Worters

Born in New Zealand Jude Worters settled in Melbourne in 1988. After completing a Bachelor Degree at Victorian College of the Arts and a Graduate Diploma of Education at Melbourne University she began teaching Art At The VCE College/Centre for Adult Education. In 2016 Worters graduated from the Masters Programme at RMIT University. Worters practice is multi-disciplinary encompassing soft sculpture, self-portraiture, costume, and installation. Recent projects explore the legacy of trauma and the transformative nature of the creative process. She is currently engaged in PhD research at RMIT University in Melbourne. 

Mig Dann

Mig Dann is an artist, writer and researcher, whose practice is multidisciplinary and autobiographical. In 2022 she completed her practice-led PhD in the School of Art at RMIT University. Her work is informed by memory and forgetting, absence and presence, feminism, queer culture and decades of lived experience. She is exploring how the concepts of memory, time and identity can be realised through the present encounter with materials and the sculptural object in order to explore the poetics as well as the politics of memory and personal cultural history. Her work has been exhibited both internationally and nationally in solo and group shows.  

Simon Crosbie

In 2022 Simon Crosbie completed his PhD studies in the School of Art at RMIT. His project: Trauma, dissociation and the boarding school experience draws upon personal experiences of child abuse at a Catholic boarding school. The primary challenge in this project involved a process of having to articulate aspects of memory and affect that are complex, fragmented and sometimes unintelligible. He has exhibited extensively and in the past four years he has presented at academic conferences at institutions in Palermo, Vienna, Dubrovnik and Edinburgh. 

Yiwon Park

Yiwon Park is a Korean-Australian artist based in Melbourne. She grew up in Korea and immigrated to Australia 2003. Yiwon obtained her BFA in Korea and she completed Masters by research at UNSW Art and Design in 2014. She has had solo exhibitions and has participated in a number of group exhibitions in Seoul, Sydney, Hong Kong and Melbourne. Yiwon participated in the Artist in the Residency program at Artspace Hue in Korea from 2015-2018 and  Camac-Centre d’Art Marnay in France in 2012. Yiwon is a current PhD candidate at RMIT University in Fineart. 

How to Engage

T-Collective exhibitions are about creating conversations between our individual works. We create discourse around the key areas of trauma, childhood memory, identity, child sex abuse, complex trauma, dissociation, affect, boarding school syndrome, materiality, embodiment, queer art and psychoanalysis.