NGV Creative Studio
Time to get hands-on and creatively inspired by leading contemporary artists and designers in NGV Creative Studio. The NGV has teamed up with artists and designers from around Australia — including Kaylene Whiskey, Jessica Murtagh and Joshua Yeldham — to develop a series of creative workshops exclusively for students. Through an interactive educator-led gallery tour and studio workshops, students will explore the creative process of the featured artist and develop skills and techniques derived from the artist’s practice and sources of inspiration.
Kaylene Whiskey is an award-winning Yankunytjatjara artist from Indulkana, a remote Indigenous community in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, South Australia. Whiskey’s works are irreverent and witty, layered with commentary around Indigenous life and its ever-evolving and complicated relationship with tradition and contemporary popular influences. Her lifelong dream is for Dolly Parton to visit her on Country. She is currently exhibiting as part of the 2023 MECCA Holiday Collaboration.
Jessica Murtagh is an Adelaide-based early career artist working with blown glass. Murtagh’s art practice leans heavily on illustration, using sandcarving and engraving techniques to create imagery and narratives on glass. Her work is predominantly in the form of vessels and draws inspiration from both the natural world and classical artefacts contrasted with contemporary themes. Murtagh’s Modern Relic series, 2021, references ancient Athenian ceramic amphoras, often depicting scenes of everyday life. Adapting an ancient glass technique called cameo glass, Murtagh sand carves and engraves complex illustrations to the exterior of the vessels, depicting in 360 degrees scenes relating to the social and economic fallout of COVID-19 in Australia, online dating, and domestic and everyday contemporary life. Murtagh’s work is held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney; and the Parliament House Collection in Canberra. She is an exhibiting artist in NGV Triennial 2023.
Working across painting, carved photography, ceramics and sculpture, Joshua Yeldham’s work conflates these various media. His work ranges from characteristic hand-carved paintings with sculptural assemblages on board, to pierced and carved photographs. Yeldham was awarded the Nancy Fairfax Artist Residency in 2017, through which the artist created new works exhibited in association with his retrospective exhibition at Tweed Regional Gallery. He has been an award finalist for the Wynne Prize, Archibald Prize, Sulman Prize and Mosman Art Prize, and in 2015 he participated in the London Art Fair, ART15. He is an exhibiting artist in NGV Triennial 2023.