Inhabited Ipswich

Alicia Lopez works as a creative catalyst for local artists, developing artistic projects that empower community, build identity and promote social inclusion. Working for 15 years in the Arts, Education, Business and Festival industries has influenced her passion about the role Public Art plays in strengthening our communities. As an Ipswich local, Alicia is inspired by its urban and historical landscape and the abundance of artistic and cultural opportunities that exist within.

Meagan Babore has worked within the Queensland arts scene for over 15 years, cementing herself as a leading Producer across film, television, visual and performing arts.

Kellie O’Dempsey creates site-generated installations and performances that integrate projection, video, collage, architectural space, gestural line, performance and digital drawing. Creating in both solo and collaborative formats with sound artists and contemporary dance practitioners, O’Dempsey’s diverse practice explores, deconstructs and heightens the concept of public space as shared experience.

Cynthia Copley is an award-winning landscape artist who captures her responses and interactions with the natural world through colour and texture, drawing on observation, memory and emotion. Cynthia deeply observes her surroundings, noticing the intricate patterns, the entangled beauty and the shifting light which make up the essence of time and place.

Artist Statement
Plunkett Mallee Disco is an installation that uses stop motion to create a dynamic animation of Cynthia’s oil painting process. The animation is an abstract display of moving colour as well as a regenerating kaleidoscope of images which reimagine the ephemeral beauty of light filtering through the leaves of the Plunkett Mallee tree, Ipswich City’s floral emblem, into a dazzling and spectacular light show.

Donna Davis is a multi-disciplinary artist who examines human and non-human relationships with respect to ecological health. Exploring the intersections between art and science she is often embedded within ecological research projects. Her work tells stories that examine science through a creative lens; exploring imagined futures and constructing new ways of ‘seeing’ complex natural systems and our role within them. Donna has exhibited widely in galleries and public spaces and had her work featured in state and national touring exhibitions.

Artist Statement
Inspired by a collaboration with Ecologist Abbey Yatsko from the University of Miami, The Great Carbon Exchange [working title] creatively explores the hidden world of carbon in some of its many varied forms. Playing between science-fiction and science-fact, Donna seeks to communicate the dichotomy of carbon in nature, and carbon that humans refine; removing carbon from its reciprocal setting and exploring the idea of carbon as a retail commodity, and in this case in a shop in Ipswich. Nature provides so much for us, however, we rarely stop to ask; what is the cost of consuming her resources or how we can repay her in return….

Rebecca Lewis is a self-taught print maker, seamstress and collage enthusiast based in Ipswich. Rebecca held her first solo exhibition at Cactus Espresso Bar in 2014 and has been playing with art making ever since. 

Artist statement
This new work ‘portrait of a woman as…’ is an exploration of the expectation of domestic labour and the mental load placed on women. Using humour, play and colour with collage, print making and installation, Rebecca delves into the traditional patriarchal role of women in the home to find ways to represent the repetitive nature of domestic tasks and examine what has changed from the 1950s to today. Through a feminist lens, Rebecca questions how we can continue to interrogate the role women play in the home and how this is managed around a creative practice.

In 2003 Sean Williams graduated from Queensland College of Art with Honours and went on to work in the public art sector developing local and international projects. Sean received the Emerging Artist award at the 2017 SWELL Sculpture Festival. In 2018 he was awarded Arts Queensland RADF grant to fund a mentorship with Emeritus Professor Patricia Hoffie, and in 2020 an Arts Queensland grant for an Assistant Curator role at SWELL. In 2022 he graduated from the Master of Visual Arts program at Queensland College of Arts with distinction. 2023 saw his first solo exhibition entitled Embodied Memories.

Artist Statement
Accidental Archive is an installation work consisting of sculptural and projection elements, that explores concepts around cultural memory and the history of Ipswich. Through the use of the embodied memory of objects, the form of the assembled sculpture, and archival media as projection, Sean examines the interaction of different ways of approaching memory.