Artists ALENA KENNEDY and DR FRIEDERIKE KRISHNABHAKDI VASILAKIS will discuss their differing art practices.
Saturday 18th November 2pm- 3pm at Wollongong Art Gallery
Free, all welcome.
ALENA KENNEDY has been a practicing, independent visual artist since 1999. After completing her Creative Arts degree at Wollongong University in 2007, Alena decided to focus on the local Wollongong and Illawarra community. This resulted in her co-founding the Illawarra Association for the Visual Arts in 2009, which today has over 40 members and is a vibrant and thriving group of contemporary artists.
Alena paints with acrylics and the natural world is usually her inspiration. Focusing on common-place aspects of nature, she conveys a sense of their presence and of her own feeling of connectedness with all life. Her observations of the ‘small’ provide her with glimpses into larger patterns and processes of the cosmos. Her personal insights into nature have been translated into luminous, layered paintings which display a harmonious interrelationship of colours and of naturalistic and abstract forms.
DR FRIEDERIKE KRISHNABHAKDI VASILAKIS is a visual artist, curator, and writer. She is interested in interdisciplinary research exploring challenges to self and society boundaries in the Anthropocene. She previously worked as a journalist and taught Art History, Art Theory, and Indigenous Studies at the University of Wollongong. Friederike also directed the South Coast Writers Centre and launched a successful Indigenous Literary program and Kids program. Her eco-writing engages with Anthropocene discourse, and her fiction and non-fiction have been featured in several publications, including Griffith Review and TEXT.
Friederike has exhibited art since 1994, with her latest exhibition, DEEP SOUNDING, focusing on ecotones and the world as a shared living space, showcased at the Wollongong Art Gallery in 2022.
ALENA, FRIEDERIKE AND ARTWAYS
In 2022 Alena and Friederike founded ArtWays, an enterprise with two streams: ArtWays to Creative Skills, and ArtWays to Wholeness. They run retreats and also facilitate creative workshops for SEED, an initiative that brings holistic wellbeing practices to the struggling healthcare sector. They are currently producing books on pattern and free line drawing to aid in stress relief and to stimulate creativity.
Image left: Rain in Casuarina. 2016.Acrylic on Canvas. 91 x 101cm by Alena Kennedy.
Image right: Seagull in Water, 2021, mixed media film still / watercolour /photomontage by Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis