about the artists

Aaron Matheson
Aaron Matheson lives and works in Brombin, on the mid-north coast of NSW. His approach is one of an open-ended and 'unknowing' sensory engagement with the living landscape. The subject of his practice is a desire to find haptic, unmediated experiences in what is an increasingly cushioned and  disembodied world.  His practice of Buddhist meditation and reflection helps him to return again and again to a sense of  'touching the earth', or bare witnessing of experience.
Drawn language is highly personal and not within the bounds of words to describe. It is his lifeblood to engage with this mysterious imagery that emerges from himself and others. As such he loves leading workshops and collaborating with other artists. These activities have included teaching “Drawing in the City at Night” in Sydney together with Enrique del Val, a residency at Bedford Modern School, and working with the Melbourne- based dance group, Opal Vapour.
He has been a finalist in the Mosman and Waterhouse prizes, and awarded the Richard Ford travel award. He completed a year's postgraduate diploma in drawing at the Prince's Drawing School in London in 2007. He is undertaking studies in art therapy and counselling, as well as a Masters of Art at the National Art School, Sydney.
aaronmatheson.com


Anna Jaaniste
Anna is a Sydney-based artist who is driven by her interest in the sensual processes of living - the languages of the body as nature. 
She sees art as a way of life.
Anna has a strong interest in working with people to facilitate creative processes, and over the years has worked in a large range of settings with people from diverse backgrounds - including school students, elderly people, people from non-English speaking backgrounds, and people with mental illnesses, physical and intellectual disabilities. Her business meri-maa creativity facilitates workshops and courses on creativity.
Anna is currently producing a series of sculptural objects that call for an act of ritualised engagement with the world - facilitated by the artist - to bring them to life. This body of work will be installed for viewing in a shipping container, as part of a guerrilla waterfront inner-city art event Anna is co-ordinating, to take place one October night 2011.
Anna is the devisor and co-ordinator of this Cross-Art Process Project.

Enrique del Val
Enrique del Val lives and works between Robertson in the Southern Highlands of NSW, and Sydney.
In 2003 Enrique completed a BA in Fine Arts at Basque Country University, Spain. He expanded his studies in Fine Arts in Athens, Greece, through the Erasmus Scholarship, and in Valencia, Spain, through the Seneca Scholarship. He worked as a resident artist at Bilbaoarte Foundation, Bilbao, Spain.
Enrique's first solo exhibition in Australia,"On The Complicity Among Rogues", was held at Space 3, Sydney, in 2004. In 2005 he worked as a volunteer at Muipi Art Centre in the Pirlingimpi community in the Tiwi Islands.
During 2008 to 2010 Enrique, alongside artist Aaron Matheson, ran the “Drawing In The City At Night” courses in cafes and bars around central Sydney. In 2010 he was artist in residence at Queen Street Fraser Studios in Sydney. Enrique's most recent solo exhibition of paintings “Stories of Friendship, Irreverence and Magik” was held at at Maunsell and Wickes at Barry Stern Galleries, opened by John Olsen AO OBE in June 2011.
www.enriquedelval.com


Felicity Wheeler
Felicity’s areas of practice include architecture, dance, energetic healing, meditation, spatial intelligence, academic education, performance, visual art, construction, sound healing, sensual studies, music, communication, design, writing, travel, administration, project management and day dreaming.
Felicity has developed an awareness of the innate intelligence embedded in our body-mind system. She believes that many disciplines and endeavours can be enhanced and augmented by working consciously with our bodies to explore concepts and actions. Over years, Felicity has developed a specific educational approach that encompass this understanding: Embodied Experiental Exploration - Accessing our Own Body of Knowledge.
For over fifteen years, she trained and practiced simultaneously in architecture, authentic dance and energetic work. This concurrent practice of seemingly distinct disciplines allowed an embodied synthesis of information, offering a unique framework for working with spatial, temporal, structural and relational experience. Felicity's particular interest is exploration of principles of spirituality, energy, and physicality through our own bodies.  Her personal experience has led Felicity to understand that energy is the basis of life.
www.peoplelovespace.blogspot.com

Gianni Wise

Gianni is a visual artist of over 20 years practice. He holds a Masters from College of Fine Arts, and is currently undertaking a PhD at Sydney College of the Arts. 
Gianni is interested in developing an art practice that would contribute to a discussion of criticality in art. How can art become effectively transformative? One of the overriding themes he has engaged with in his art practice over the last few years has been social paranoia and its representation in the visual domain - including the media in all its forms. 
Gianni's work has used large format photos, digital manipulation, objects (bought, found and made), drawing, film, sound, performance and installation.
Current projects include a joint drawing experiment with 3 other artists in which they share and respond to each others’ work over an extending period - to be published or exhibited. He is also developing a performative work which will involve cooking for Tamil Indian workers in Singapore, and another work on the boil is to build a working photo booth that randomly documents those who enter. 
Gianni loves drawing. 
gianniwise.com

Katya Petetskaya
Katya had a few years of formal art school training as a teenager in the Russian education system - which effectively put her interest off visual arts for a number of years. She gradually came back to painting, her favourite artistic medium, while trying to forget the ‘outside’ things she learned at art school and remembering the exciting, wonderful feeling about the process ‘within’ (that disappeared in ‘studying’). She now believes that there has been progress. Katya is fascinated with the idea of translating her meditation experiences into visual forms and she explores this in her work. She also finds inspiration in ‘unconscious memories’ that come up in meditation and while painting. This method helped Katya to discover a very deep inner Russian cultural psyche, which unconsciously appears in the form of strong archetypal imagery in many of her works.


Martin van der Wal
BIO : MARTIN VAN DER WAL (1953 - X)
EVERYTHING BUT AN ARTIST.











Nick Edin
Nick Edin is a multi-instrumentalist, song writer and award winning producer. He likes music and people among other things.
Sometimes he doesn’t like people all that much, but sometimes he doesn’t like music that much either. Usually this is a fleeting feeling and sooner or later he finds something to like in music and people.
He generally always likes nature and often wonders if he could arrange his life to be more like that of a wild animal’s, content with only sleeping, eating and procreating.
Nick has played with various ensembles in his twenty year endeavour, from indie folk/rock queen Diana Anaid to rollicking Country Rock’n’Roll warriors The Re-Mains, from award winning country artist Lou Bradley to a bunch of people you would never have heard of and probably never will.
He currently plays drums for the brooding and moody Ghost Mountain (one of Rolling Stone’s “Bands to Watch”) as well as formidable producer, Christian Pyle’s, solo project.
He is also chipping away at his debut solo album and running a recording studio in Newtown, Sydney where he is currently producing an album for David Moss and just finished one for London-based troubadour Jont.
www.dianaanaid.com
re-mains.com
www.loubradley.com
ghostmountain.digitaltao.com
www.christianpyle.com
www.davemoss.com.au
www.jontnet.com


Nick Strike
Nick Strike works primarily in the material and conceptual realm of contemporary sculpture.  Language and matter are equally subject to the critical pressures of form and process. The material that comes to hand and the words that tongue lets fall are put into play to cleave a subjective breathing space from the rote sense of self (for maker and partaker).
A recent work took coffee as its foundational fuel. (As a commodity, coffee is second only to oil. As an accelerator of chains of association, this lube of late capitalism is the only legal psychoactive substance). A coffee table printing press, (with some table tennis attributes), expressed an edition of original prints on squares of cotton nappy cloth: printing money (like Ella sang scat).
Strike studied at Sydney College of the Arts: MVA 2007, BVA 1997, and also at National Art School: Dip FA  1991. He has been exhibiting since 1989, and is currently at Stonevilla Studios. 
www.stonevilla.com.au

Tom Hespe
Tom Hespe started playing music at 11 and has been infatuated with it ever since.
Saxophone was the first instrument he picked up and the only one he had any formal training on. He started gigging and songwriting at 13. These days you're more likely to hear him singing and playing guitar or bass but the trusty old horn gets a workout every once in a while.
Improvising, performing and songwriting are his passions. He has played with numerous bands over the years and will do it till he drops. Music has been pretty good to him all things considered. It keeps him alive, spiritually if not always financially. It's taken him around Australia, introduced him to some of his best friends and heroes, put him on some amazing stages and continues to reaffirm his belief in the universal power of sound.
"It gets better the more you do it... can't say that 'bout everything."
He currently writes, sings and plays bass and guitar with The Slowdowns and The Anon Anons and continues to tour and record with them both. He recently facilitated a song writing mentorship as part of the Sydney Children's Festival and will assist in the recording and performing of a suite of 9 songs written for the Sydney Children's Festival Choir. Tom is also co-founder of Music For Trees, a not-for-profit initiative that uses music as a means of raising funds to help impoverished communities around the world plant trees as a way of improving their livelihood.
www.sydneychildrensfestival.com
www.myspace.com/tomhespe
www.myspace.com/theslowdowns
www.musicfortrees.com
www.abc.net.au/rage/archive