series image courtesy of Sara Thorn |
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Tutor Biographies
See below for more information on the tutors involved in this creative series of workshops.
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Anne Baker
Collage your life memories and dreams |
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| Anne was born in Canada, has travelled extensively, and has spent many years living in Papua New Guinea, England and Australia. She has journeyed through life with many Indigenous people, artists and shamans. She has life experience as a healer, teacher, massage therapist, cook, gardener, artist, stylist, and parent. She will inspire you to celebrate the telling of your life story through the art of collage. Your life experience is all that is required. |
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Michael Sibel
Create a Sculptural Relief |
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Michael Sibel has been making and exhibiting sculpture for the past 15 years. In early 2007 Michael became a resident artist of Gasworks Arts Park. He is currently producing sculpture at Gasworks and is also involved in community projects and education.
His exhibitions include Contempora 2008 Docklands, the University of Western Sydney Award (2008 Winner), Sculpture by the sea, Bondi, FoldOut, fortyfivedownstairs, New Sculpture, Australian Art Resources, Lost Body, Yarra Sculpture Space, New Work, Dickerson Gallery, Nothingness to Whole, Span Galleries, A Bell is a Cup, Lyall Burton Gallery, Floating Form, Lyall Burton Gallery. He has also exhibited widely in group exhibitions and is represented in various public and private collections.
Click here for Michael's resident artist page. |
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Candy Spender
Recycle your pre-loved jewels
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| Born in Venezuela in 1951, Candy’s early childhood years were powerfully influenced by the mixture of cultures she grew up in. From Iran to Europe, and the Dutch West Indies, Candy’s family were ‘Bohemian’, as they lived unconventionally and creatively, a myriad of cultures before migrating to Australia in the mid-60s.
Candy is renowned for her original and creative jewellery design. Her business Candy Spender Jewels has been around since the early 1980’s. At the pinnacle of her wholesale business she stocked Brown’s of London for three seasons.
However, her background is in painting, printmaking, and graphic design. (As a jeweller she is self-taught.) She attended the South Australian School of Art, where she graduated with a Diploma in Graphic Design. Then went on to do a postgraduate year of painting and printmaking at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.
In 2003, tired of ‘running a business only’, she made the decision to streamline production and now no longer produces for the conventional boutique and department store retail marketplace.
Today her studio is a place where the ‘alchemy’ between art and fashion breathes with a fresh new presence. Commissions, bespoke jewellery pieces and small seasonal ranges which interpret current moods in fashion and the zeitgeist, are now exploratory and independent. Her passion is for the beauty of the jewellery to reflect the intrinsic and eternal beauty which exists in all sentient beings.
Her work falls into a category all of its own, as it is not ‘fashion jewellery’, or ‘art jewellery’, or ‘craft jewellery’. Somewhere between artisan and couture is where these jewellery pieces exist. |
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Sara Thorn
Colour Chakra Design & Series Curator |
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| Sara Thorn is an artist and designer. Her work spans textile design, patterning, furniture, fashion and interiors. She is well known for establishing the iconic fashion labels Abyss, Galaxy and Funk Essentials, in Melbourne. These labels explored the intersections of popular culture and history. More recently she has been exploring the intersection between design and spirituality.
Sara has a particular interest in the research of historical and traditional textiles and sacred patterning. She traveled to Borneo in 2003 through an Asialink residency to research the customs, motifs and spiritual significance of the Pua Kumbu ikat cloths woven by the Iban people. She commissioned three cloths whilst in Borneo, hand woven by master weavers. Sara was awarded a Winston Churchill fellowship in 2001 to study the ancient art of silk weaving at the Lisio foundation in Tuscany, Italy.
She has conducted regular textile design workshops locally at CAE and internationally including a series of workshops in South India where she focused on bringing back design skills to traditional Indian Master Weavers who had lost the skills to design their own fabrics due to generations of commission weaving. Sara has also worked with local African artisans to extend traditional craft skills into contemporary design. She was invited to conduct design workshops in Soweto, South Africa, as part of the Johannesburg Gathering for the South Project in 2007.
Recently Sara has been developing workshops, which connect design skills and sensibilities with spiritual practices and knowledge of our inner worlds. Sara Thorn’s work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria and Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
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