Database

Tay Haggarty’s practice explores how reductive forms can be used as an open field to reflect upon personal and shared queer experience. Their works take the form of collaborations, performances, videos, sculpture and public art. Haggarty uses industrial and ready-made materials that, when arranged within a space, heighten precarious elements through tension and balance. Their work is often minimal and site specific. Haggarty is a co-director of DRIVER ARI and is one half of the collaborative duo Parallel Park. They completed a post graduate degree in Public Art at Monash University in 2022 and their Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) degree at the Queensland University of Technology in 2015. They have had solo shows at the Institute of Modern art, Kunstbunker ARI and Wreckers Artspace. Haggarty has also shown in group exhibitions with Metro Arts, Bus Projects, UNSW Galleries and more. They were the 2019 recipient of the Jeremy Hynes award.

TextaQueen (b. 1975) is a multi-genre artist of Goan descent living on unceded Wurundjeri land. Known for using the humble felt-tip marker to create majestic portraiture, their work complicates assumptions around identities at the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and ability. Their practice envisions an ever-expanding alternate universe of collective and transformative possibility, centring those not often witnessed in states of empowerment. Encompassing drawing, painting, printmaking, video, performance, curating, music, writing and murals—in collaboration with other displaced and diasporic people—they deliver irreverent satire in enticing colour and detail that disrupts all the “isms” entrenched in the status quo. Texta contemplates dis/connection to cultural and colonial legacies, interrogating the many ways in which they find themselves precariously balanced across ancestral and stolen lands. TextaQueen’s work has appeared at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London; and Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany; and is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Monash University of Modern Art, Melbourne; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; and the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Mural commissions include de Young Museum, San Francisco; Murray Art Museum Albury, Albury; City of Moreland, Melbourne; and City of Melbourne. They have had mentorships with Emory Douglas and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashina in Oakland, California; a 2017 State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship; and residencies at ACME, London; International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; and QAGOMA. A mid-career survey exhibition toured nationally via Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery in 2017.

The Kingpins were a collaboration between Angelica Mesiti, Técha Noble, Emma Price and Katie Price established in 2000. Emerging from the queer culture of Sydney’s drag king scene, the all female foursome used an aesthetic of remixing, with elements taken from mainstream media, pop culture and art history, to comment on issues of gender, sex, public space, consumerism and corporate branding. Performers in their own works, The Kingpins achieved significant national and international success in the decade after they were established.

Thembi Soddell (b. 1980) is a non-binary, Polish-Australian (2nd generation) and Anglo-Celtic descendant born on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Bendigo, Australia, now living in Clunes. A sound artist, composer and practice-based researcher, they are best known for their powerful acousmatic performances and installations in darkness. In 2019 they were awarded a PhD from RMIT University for their practice-based research titled ‘A Dense Mass of Indecipherable Fear: The Experiential (Non)Narration of Trauma and Madness through Acousmatic Sound’. This research developed a novel approach to understanding lived experiences of anxiety, depression, trauma and so-called mental illness using a medium (abstract sound) with a unique ability to reflect the intangibility of the inner world. Soddell’s 2018 album Love Songs, and its accompanying book of concrete poetry, won the 2019 Green Room Award for Contemporary Sound Performance. Its companion sound installation, Held Down, Expanding (2018), premiered at MONA-FOMA in 2018 and was a finalist in the 2019 APRA-AMCOS Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Music. Soddell’s work has also shown in national and international galleries, including Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2020), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2016), Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2016), National Gallery of Victoria (2013), and Wellington City Gallery (2013). Soddell has performed at many Australian experimental music festivals, including Totally Huge New Music, Liquid Architecture, What is Music?, and the NOW now. Soddell has released three solo albums and two in a duo with cellist, Anthea Caddy. In their duo with Caddy they have twice toured Europe, performing 33 shows across 12 countries, including venues and festivals such as Instants Chavirés (Paris), Cave 12 (Switzerland), and Hoerkunst Festival (Germany). Soddell has also performed solo in Poland (2009), Germany (2017) and Iceland (2017), and presented at two interdisciplinary conferences in Budapest, Hungary (2016) — one on Trauma, the other Storytelling, Illness and Medicine. They have worked as a sound designer and dramaturg for choreographer Tim Darbyshire, theatre director Rebecca H. Russell, and media and performance artist Vanessa Godden, guest curated for Melbourne Now: Now Hear This’s electroacoustic composition playlist at the National Gallery of Victoria (2013), and twice mentored for Signal’s Screen x Sound Commissions (2019, 2020). Their work has been discussed in two books, *Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia* (2008) and *Women of Note: The Rise of Australian Women Composers* (2012) and their research published in *Organised Sound *and *Disclaimer*.