Waverley Artist Studios
Waverley Artist Studios at the School of Arts are for emerging, mid-career and professional artists interested in working within Bondi and the greater Eastern Suburbs area. Studios are offered in year-long residencies.
Artists in the studios benefit from:
- A fully subsidised studio space for 12 months to develop new work.
- Paid professional development opportunities including workshops, artist's talks, public art projects and live art opportunities.
Successful applicants participate in a compulsory open studio event in the second last month of their occupancy. The open studio event is aimed to showcase works being produced during artists’ residencies to curators, artists, funding bodies and the community.
Studios are located at the School of Arts, 138 Bondi Road, Bondi.
Applications now open for the studio residency period of 1 March 2025 – 28 February 2026. Applications close Friday 25 October 2024.
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2024-2025 Resident Artists
Nick Breedon is artist and co-creator of the arts podcast Pro Prac. Nick’s sculptural practice weaves references from lived experience, pop culture and art history through meta narratives about desire and alienation, drawing on vulnerable personal stories and dark humour. Nick incorporates a vast array of material processes and making techniques from craft, the western canon of sculpture, painting, textiles and video to make ritual-like objects.
Nick recently exhibited Public Art, a solo exhibition at Firstdraft. Other projects include a holographic rainbow installation, Monotone Rainbow; solo exhibitions Bongs and Commodores, Alaska Projects (Sydney); A Lot of Luck Bus Projects (Melbourne); Feelings West Space (Melbourne) and Firstdraft (Sydney); Sierpinski Mountain, TCB (Melbourne); and a pyrotechnic text installation, Let’s Get Metaphysical, commissioned for the 2012 Splendour in the Grass festival.
Nick’s work has been shortlisted for several prizes and awards including the 64th Blake Prize, the 2015 Darebin Art Prize and the 2015 Wangaratta Contemporary Textiles Prize, and features in the collections of Artbank and City of Melbourne.
Dr Elizabeth Day is an artist, an educator, writer and curator. Her art has engaged the subject of the imposition of colonial rule on the landscape and its indigenous population, characterising Australia as a crime scene and positing care as a creative response.
Most recently she exhibited her unravelled textile work, The Flow of Form: There’s a Reason Beyond a Reason, Beyond That There’s a Reason (1797 Parramatta Gaol), CarriageWorks, Redfern in The National 4 (2023). She is currently co-curating Dreams Nursed in Darkness with Claire Taylor to be exhibited at the Wollongong City Gallery beginning early September 2024. For this they have been awarded an Australia Council Grant and a Create NSW. This exhibition includes Indigenous and refugee artists and asks questions about the prison as an archetype in post-colonial Australia. She recently published an article, ‘Animating Creative Projects in the Australian Anthropocene’ in Ethics, Care and Art edited by Jacqueline Millner and Gretchen Coombs (ROUTLEDGE).
Day completed a DCA at Western Sydney University, her thesis entitled Discontinued Narratives of Migration (2013). She has exhibited widely in state and regional galleries and is co-curator of the Boom Gate Gallery, Long Bay Gaol, Sydney.
Jacquie Meng (b.1998, Hangzhou) works with painting, sound and installation. Her work redefines diasporic cultural identity beyond national and geographical specificities, rather seeing it as unfixed. Through consideration of posthumanism, performativity and the migration of objects and imagery between cultures, Meng breaks down binaries of “East”/”West”, real/imagined, and human/non-human. This often involves a fusing of mythology and folklore with memories, fictions and contemporary aesthetics.
Meng was awarded the Brett Whitely travelling scholarship in 2021, was a finalist in the Churchie Emerging Art Prize at the IMA, and was a part of PICA’s Hatched 2022. In 2023, she completed two overseas artist residencies, at Kunstraum in New York (April-July) and Pilotenkueche International Art Program Leipzig (July-September). Meng is represented by Stanley Street Gallery.
Remy Faint is an emerging artist based on Gadigal-land, Sydney. His practice is motivated by the desire to expand languages of painterly abstraction by examining its global histories. While often referencing collection-based objects and materials specific to his Chinese heritage, his works mediate cross-cultural and material frameworks to explore themes surrounding exchange, visibility and hybridised artistic production. Utilising a variety of mediums involving painting, textiles and ceramics, Remy’s interest in transparency is evident in his consistent use of silk as an artistic surface and the form of the folding screen. While Remy often reinstates the screen’s historical function as a barrier, divider or structural device, this cultural referencing coincides with physical acts of assembling, repurposing and combining various materials in his studio.
Remy has exhibited nationally including at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), Cement Fondu, UNSW Galleries, Gosford Regional Gallery, Craft Victoria, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (Chongqing), ADSpace, Mothership Studios, Sheffer Gallery, Comber Street Studios and Kudos Gallery. In 2022, Remy was curated into the national graduate exhibition Hatched at PICA, where he received the inaugural Schenberg Art High Commendation Award and was selected to undertake a one-month residency. Remy was the winner of the 2023 Gosford Art Prize and has been a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize, the Jenny Birt Painting Prize, Kudos Emerging Artist Award and was a studio resident at the City of Sydney Creative Studios. In 2023, he presented his first solo exhibition at Cement Fondu in the Project Space with his exhibition The Library and the Cave. In addition to his art practice, Remy is a Casual Academic at UNSW Arts, Design and Architecture. He is a finalist in the 2024 Create NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging).
Re-Right is an artistic collective between Dennis Golding and Carmen Glynn-Braun that spans across artistic, curatorial, writing and research disciplines. The collective centres on stories of contemporary life with an approach to heal and strengthen the voices of First Nations history and experiences.
Southern Arrente, Kaytetye and Ammatyerre artist Carmen Glynn-Braun takes a trans-disciplinary approach across many mediums including painting, sculpture and installation. Her work predominantly explores lived experiences of Aboriginal women translated through gentle and experimental approaches to materials and form.
Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay artist Dennis Golding critiques the social, political and cultural representations of race and identity. Working in a range of mixed media including painting, video, photography and installation, Golding explores empowering notions of Indigenous cultural identity by challenging the categorical boundaries from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous experiences.
The artists co-founded Re-Right to provide a safe space for emerging First Nations practitioners to form ideas and build a support network within the cultural arts sector. Re-Right strives to expand their creative practice through collaboration with a key goal to highlight resilience and truthful narratives of history and cultural identity.
Rox de Luca is an artist based in Bondi working on unceded Gadigal land. Her art practice converts marine and industrial single-use plastics via jewellery-like processes in order to explore ideas of consumption and waste and our neglect of the environments around us.
"Most days Sydney-based artist Rox De Luca gleans along her local beach, Bondi, or a little further away at Rose Bay Beach. She is looking for flashes of colour and of whiteness against the sand, the signs that the beach – like every beach on the planet – is adjusting fragment by fragment to the deluge of plastic waste that our species generates daily. She collects the weather-worn fragments from the sand, and she takes them home to clean and to categorize by size, colour and shape. Then her defiant transformations occur." ~ Gleaning for plastics, defying wastefulness by Paul Allatson (2020)
For further information, please contact Waverley Council’s Visual Arts Team at visualarts@waverley.nsw.gov.au.
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