Makeshift Publics Facilitator Group

Makeshift Publics is part of Arts House’s ongoing Makeshift program, which has been developed to directly respond to the situations we all face right now.

Meet the Makeshift Publics facilitators.

In 2021 a group of 10 artists and eight facilitators from a range of artistic fields collaborated in peer-to-peer learning environments to unearth new configurations of the spaces we share.

In 2022 – 2023, artists will come together online to continue the Makeshift Publics enquiry. EOIs are now open for artists in 2022-23. Read more and apply here.

Latai Taumoepeau (NSW)
2021 – 2023

Latai Taumoepeau makes live art. Her faivā (performance practice) is from her homelands, the Island Kingdom of Tonga and her birthplace Sydney, land of the Gadigal people. She mimicked, trained and un-learned dance, in multiple institutions of learning, starting with her village, a suburban church hall, a few nightclubs and a university.

Her body-centred performance practice of faivā centres Tongan philosophies of relational space and time; cross-pollinating ancient and everyday temporal practice to make visible the impact of climate crisis in the Pacific. She conducts urgent environmental movements and actions to create transformation in Oceania.

In the near future she will return to her ancestral home and continue the ultimate faivā (performing art) of sea voyaging and celestial navigation before she becomes an ancestor.

Hanna Cormick (ACT)
2021 – 2023

Hanna Cormick is a performance artist and curator with a background in physical theatre, dance, circus and interdisciplinary art. A graduate of Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq (Paris) and Charles Sturt University’s Acting degree (Australia), she has worked as a physical artist for twenty years, performing in Australia, Europe and Asia.

Cormick’s current practice is a reclamation of body through radical visibility. Her most recent works have been featured at the 2020 Sydney Festival (The Mermaid), The Street Theatre (Zebracorn), Art, Not Apart (Little Monsters; The Mermaid), and worldwide locations for Climate Change Theatre Action 2019 (Canary). Cormick is an Ainslie + Gorman Arts Centres’ Live Arts Lab Artist in Residence, collaborating with multidisciplinary choreographer Riana Head-Toussaint, and under the mentorship of Rawcus’ Kate Sulan and Axis Dance’s Marc Brew. Cormick also worked as co-curator for Platform LIVE, and writes and talks on themes of crip activism in art – see here.

Timmah Ball (VIC)
2022 –  2023

Timmah Ball is a nonfiction writer, researcher and creative practitioner of Ballardong Noongar heritage. Her work is often informed by studying urban planning and offers a critique of conventional city-making systems. In 2018 she co-curated Wild Tongue for the Next Wave festival, with Azja Kulpinska, which interrogated labour inequality in the arts industry.

In 2016 she won the Westerly Magazine Patricia Hackett Prize, and her writing has appeared in a range of anthologies and literary journals. More recently she has created audio work for ACCA and Liquid Architecture which contemplates the past, present and future of both physical and online spaces in the COVID era.

Joel Spring (NSW)
2021 – 2023

Joel Spring is a Wiradjuri man raised between Redfern and Alice Springs. A Sydney-based architecture graduate, he is an interdisciplinary artist working between solo works and Future Method studio. Working across research, activism, architecture, and broadcasting, he currently focuses on the contested narratives of Sydney’s and Australia’s urban culture and Indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation. Joel has experience creating, producing, recording radio/podcasts and other sonic work – see here.

Madeleine Flynn (VIC)
2021 – 2023

Madeleine Flynn is a leading Australian audio conceptual artist who creates unexpected situations for listening. She has a long term collaborative practice with Tim Humphrey. Their work is driven by curiosity and questioning about listening in human culture and seeks to evolve and engage with new processes and audiences, through public and participative interventions. Their highly awarded practice intertwines local, national and international relationships. They are in high demand as creative collaborators across artforms and industries.

In 2020, they presented their new work with Korean artist Jihyun Kim When it Rains at AsiaTopa, (back in gathering times), were part of the APAM curatorial panel, Maddie curated the ADAM Online Lab in Taiwan with River Lin and the Transient Collective, facilitated the Proximity/DADAA artists lab, and together they created an online work how much time do we have? for ACCA Open and presented the PGH National Address on music as a chatbot, while being active in mutual aid and support projects across communities. They continue to stay connected to their art kin. See their work here.

James Ngyuen (VIC)
2021 – 2023

James Nguyen is an Australian artist and filmmaker based in Melbourne. He has been commissioned by institutions such as the Australian War Memorial, the Museum of Contemporary Art for the National 2019, and others. A past recipient of the Maddocks Art prize and the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, James has had the opportunity to develop projects and work collaboratively on experimental documentary, research and curatorial exchanges in NYC, Europe and the Asia Pacific. Find out more at the archive or the artist’s website.

Paola Balla (VIC)
2021

Paola Balla is a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara artist, curator, arts worker, writer and academic.  A Lisa Bellear Indigenous Research Scholar PhD Candidate at Moondani Balluk, VU, Paola focuses on Aboriginal women’s resistance and disruption of patriarchy and colonialism. Paola’s visual practice is about narrative realms and Aboriginal women’s stories. She is a regular speaker in museum, gallery, education and community spaces and is also published internationally. In 2016 Paola co-curated Sovereignty and in 2017 Unfinished Business, perspectives on art and feminism, both at ACCA. Paola’s a member of Blak Brow Collective who edited Blak Brow, women’s edition of The Lifted Brow, 2018. More info here.

Fayen d’Evie (VIC)
2021

Fayen d’Evie is an artist and writer, born in Malaysia, raised in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and now living in the bushlands of unceded Dja Dja Wurrung country, Australia. Her projects are often collaborative, and resist spectatorship by inviting audiences into sensorial readings of artworks. Fayen advocates blindness as a critical position that radically agitates ocularnormative biases, offering methods for navigating intersensory conversations, the tangible and intangible, hallucination, uncertainty, the precarious, the invisible, and the concealed. Fayen is the founder of 3-ply, which approaches artist-led publishing as an experimental, critical, and poetic site for the creation, mutation, dispersal, and archiving of texts. With artist Katie West, Fayen co-founded the Museum Incognita, which activates collective readings of neglected and obscured histories. Find out more here.

Sarah Scott (NZ)
2021

Sezzo is a proud Ngāpuhi woman, DJ, writer and curator. She is interested in what it is to be modern Māori and the magic of the club. In 2018 she created the experimental art club night Precog, and in 2019 founded the Māori-Australian art collective Ngāti Kangaru. Sezzo has played at Palais de Tokyo Galerie (Paris, Fr), Dark Mofo, MONA FOMA, Next Wave Festival, GoMA, Mardi Gras, MCA, IMA, Firstdraft, Falls Festival, and has supported the likes of Justin Shoulder, Moor Mother & Black Quantum Futurism, Klein, Le1f, Cher, Coolio and Charli XCX.

Latai Taumoepeau headshot by Stelios Papadakis; Hanna Cormick headshot by Michelle Higgs; Timmah Ball headshot image courtesy of the artist; Joel Spring’s image supplied by the artist; Madeleine Flynn photo by Pekka Mäkinen; James Nguyen headshot by Kim Nhung Nguyen; Paola Balla’s image supplied by the artist; Jaara country image by the artist Fayen d’Evie; Sarah Scott’s image supplied by the artist.