Meet the Artists
Lee Grant
Lee is a photographic artist based on the South Coast of NSW. She has a BA (Anthropology) and a Master of Philosophy (Visual Arts) from the Australian National University. She works on commissions and longform independent and collaborative projects dealing with themes of community, identity and belonging and how landscape (both natural and inhabited) relates to these concepts.
Working across mediums, Lee’s practice combines photography, video, sound and text in projects that are often underpinned with institutional and found archives. Her practice has a strong focus on bookmaking as an outcome, as both published and limited-edition artist books.
Lee produced her first book Belco Pride in 2012, followed by The Five Happinesses in 2015. She was the recipient of the Bowness Photography Prize in 2010 and won the prestigious National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2018.
Her photographs are included in the collections of the Australian War Memorial, Parliament House Canberra, the National Library of Australia, Monash Gallery of Art, Canberra Museum and Art Gallery as well as numerous private collections.
Lee continues to work on commissioned and personal projects in Australia and Asia, with a special interest in North and South Korea and Japan. More recently, she has continued her love of storytelling with contributions to several short documentary film projects including the local Far South Film production, The Oudmaker of Narooma. www.leegrant.net
Daniela Naomi
Daniela Naomi Molnar is an artist / wilderness guide / educator / activist / eternal student working with the mediums of language, image, and place to explore issues of social, political, and ecological justice. Her work aims to shape and nurture generative new ideas, ethics, and cultural change.
She founded the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and is an all-around integral part of Signal Fire, providing opportunities for artists to learn about environmental justice by engaging with public wildlands. Her work has been shown nationally and has been recognized by grants, fellowships, and numerous residencies. She was recently the topic of a front-page feature in the Los Angeles Times and she was nominated as a finalist for the Creative Climate Awards in 2018.
She is founding Co-Editor of Leaf Litter, Signal Fire’s art and literary journal and was Art Editor at The Bear Deluxe Magazine for many years. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Fugue, Moss, Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics, Bomb Cyclone, petrichor, LEON, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Discursive Impulse, GAZE, Archivaria, and Submit.
A member of the third generation of the Holocaust and the daughter of immigrants, she grew up in and around New York City and lives in Portland, Oregon, in the Cascadian bioregion, atop a buried headwaters confluence, on the unceded land of the Clackamas, Cowlitz, Chinook, Multnomah, and other Indigenous peoples.
Katherine Boland
Australian visual artist and author, Katherine Boland lives on the Far South Coast of New South Wales on the eastern seaboard of Australia.Her art practice is inspired and informed by the natural environment in which she lives and by her experience of and response to her surroundings while undertaking studio residencies in natural environments around the world.
Incorporating non-traditional media and processes in her work, Katherine seeks to distil classical interpretations of the beauty of the natural world in an organic, abstract space. She often begins the act of mark making by subjecting the surfaces of her large timber panels to the transformative power of flame; using fire itself as a drawing medium. Processes of inscribing and staining serve to capture the textures and colours of natural forms. Layers of wood stain, Japan black and liming solution are stripped back and more layers applied until a lustrous depth is achieved.
Rather than present a factual reality or reference recognisable forms, Katherine investigates the dynamics of landscape and fabricates an illusion in which meaning is shifted and interpretation becomes multifaceted. Her works are emotional landscapes, aimed to sweep you in, to entice you to forgo worldly material concerns; to be quiet and contemplate a state of being.
Much of Katherine's work explores her lifelong relationship with fire—a relationship which came into sharp focus when a fatal fire sparked the end of her 27 year marriage in 2002 (On Fire I series) and which continues to this day as firestorms rage across the country. (On Fire II series).
Alice Ansara
Alice Ansara has been an actor across film, TV, theatre and radio for most of her life with work ranging from AFI best actress nominated film roles to being part of the Actor’s Ensemble at the Sydney Theatre Company. It was at the STC that Alice began working in dramaturgy and script development.
Alice has also written poetry, co-founded Bass Coast Poetry Slams and was Victorian finalist in the Australian National Poetry Slam. Since moving to the Far South Coast of NSW, Alice has begun writing and producing radio documentaries and podcast series including the award winning ‘The CWA and the F-Word’ and ‘From the Embers’ about the Great Fires of 2019/2020.
Karen Sedaitis
I grew up in Canberra, fell in love with flowers and became a horticulturist and landscape designer in the 1990s while taking drawing classes at the School Of Art. My two young children and I moved to a bush block with a mud brick house in Bemboka in 1996, where I wrote short stories and raised my children while creating a garden and supplying salad leaves to restaurants.
Zaresky Press published a collection of my short stories, Soul Dark Soil, in 2000, the same year my partner and I purchased 1200 acres of forest, creek and mountain in Rocky Hall NSW with the aim of conserving and maintaining it as a wildlife corridor to nearby forest and National Parks.
With the children’s education in mind, we moved to a community farm in Tantawangalo soon after our son was born in 2003, dividing our time between our land at Rocky Hall and our newly established cut flower farm in Tantawangalo. Years of joy growing flowers ended with the diagnosis of an auto-immune system disorder which flared up in sunshine.
Being ill and not being able to be in the sun led to radical changes and we moved to a house with a wild garden in Bega, near a park where large, spreading trees offered plenty of shade. I began painting full-time, initially as a way of immersing myself in nature without the health issues. My art practice enhanced my sense of connection with the bright, beautiful world outside and the still life form became a favourite, providing scope for exploring the meeting point between (my) humanity and the natural world.
In 2019 I began exhibiting paintings at Spiral Gallery in Bega and a few months later, I became a Spiral Gallery member.
Emily Schlickman
Emily Schlickman is a designer, artist, and educator who lives in Northern California. Her work focuses on the intersection of technology, digital representation, urban futures, and climate change adaptation by exploring the role of mapping, modeling, and monitoring techniques in democratizing data and bolstering community resilience.
She is currently a faculty member at the University of California, Davis. She holds a Master in Landscape Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies and Environmental Studies from Washington University in St. Louis.
Kelly Ramsey
Kelly Ramsey is a writer and wildland firefighter. She lives in Happy Camp, California. Find her on Instagram at @kellylynnramsey.
Cara Despain
Through writing, research and field work, Cara Despain creates film and video, sculpture, photography and installation addressing issues of land use and ownership, climate change, visualizing the Anthropocene and frontierism. She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and currently lives in Miami, Florida and works between the two.
Through writing, research and field work, Cara Despain creates film and video, sculpture, photography and installation addressing issues of land use and ownership, climate change, visualizing the Anthropocene and frontierism. She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and currently lives in Miami, Florida and works between the two.
Cara Despain is an artist working in film and video, sculpture, photography and installation addressing issues of land use, the desert, climate change, visualizing the Anthropocene, land ownership and the problematics of frontierism. She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah (1983) and currently lives in Miami, Florida and works between the two. She holds a BFA from the University of Utah (2006). In 2012, she was selected for the Salt Lake City Mayor's Award in the visual arts, and in 2016 she was selected for the South Florida Consortium Fellowship. In 2018, she received an Ellie award from Oolite Arts for her forthcoming film project Earthbound Objects. Her work is included in Rubell Family Collection and the Scholl Collection, as well as the State of Utah and Salt Lake County art collections. Recent exhibitions include FROM DUST at the Southern Utah Museum of Art, it doesn’t look like paradise anymore at Southern Oregon University; FREE!. at Brickell City Center, Miami; Cryin’ Out Loud at the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, Fringe Projects, Miami, Slow Burn at Spinello Projects, Miami; and No Man's Land at Rubell Family Collection, Miami. She was the Art Director for the feature length film The Strongest Man that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (2015), as well as A Name Without a Place which premiered at the Miami International Film Festival (2019). A short documentary about her and her work aired on Art Loft, WPBT and PBS and screened at the Miami International Film Festival (2016). Writing and research play a major role in all of her creative work, and she often works very site-specifically— researching, casting objects, or writing in the field. Recent residencies include Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Colorado, Feminist Summer Camp at Birch Creek Ranch in central Utah (which she co-facilitates), and Signal Fire Wide Open Studios field research program in the four corners area. In addition to visiting artist lectures at museums and universities, she has recently presented on her work at IKT International Curator Association Congress (2019) and at Common Field 2020.
Rhonda Ayliffe
I was born, raised and remain in the small community of Cobargo, Yuin Country, far south coast of NSW. I’m an artist with a mixed discipline creative practice. With a background in the traditional crafts of calligraphy and book arts, I have an enduring interest in language, text and book forms, but my process-oriented arts practice has evolved to include photography, sculpture and installation. I primarily work with salvaged books and the book form exploring ideas about knowledge and place, self, site and sustainability.
On NYE 2019 my community was devastated by the Badja Forest Rd firestorm. Our whole world changed.
I am currently preparing to commence a PhD where I will use practice-based research to examine the capacity of creative practices to build resilience and assist community recovery in the aftermath of trauma.
Karyn Thompson
I live on a small farm in the area of Verona, near Cobargo and Quaama, on the far south coast of NSW, Australia. With a father in the Defence force, I was born in Townsville, QLD and lived in many places during my childhood and teenage years, including the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, South Australia, Singapore and the United Kingdom.
I am trained as both a visual artist and an architect. I completed a degree in Architecture at the University of Canberra in 1997. I later undertook a degree in Visual arts at the Australian National University, graduating in 2001 with first class honours.
For a number of years I worked in architecture for firms in Brisbane(QLD) and Canberra(A.C.T) on commercial, community and Education projects. I settled in the regional area of the Bega Valley with my family in December 2015.
Since living in the Bega Valley I have developed my art practice. I have exhibited regionally at Altenburg & Co. (Braidwood, NSW) in 2018 and at Ivy Hill Gallery (Wapengo, NSW) in both 2018/19 and in 2020. I was a finalist in the Wyndham Art Prize (Victoria, 2019) and The Basil Seller’s Art Prize, (Moruya, NSW 2020).
I am driven to explore and challenge/ merge boundaries between things, predominantly between the conscious and subconscious; the seen and unseen. Psychology, symbolism, and philosophical thought play an important part in my approach. Dream is my symbolic connector or bridge.
Australian native Trees have become significant within my recent work. They provide me with a way to connect to my subconscious dreaming self within the natural environment. My intent is to connect others to their own dreaming. I believe connecting to imagination through reverie generates wonder, which in turn increases value and awareness of our environment on a personal level.