Creative Studios

Jennis Ardern is a multidisciplinary artist who embraces creative play and storytelling to promote individual and community empowerment. Jennis draws upon her childhood love of stories such as fairy tales, mythology, and comics. By combining the narratives of popular superhero storytelling, with mindful practices and gestalt therapy, Jennis invites viewers and participants to envision themselves as the hero of their own stories.

Jennis’ collaborative and interactive installations harness co-creation strategies and often invite viewers to physically explore the concepts of wellbeing, resilience, and self-acceptance by participating with or adding to her artworks.

 During the studio residency, Jennis made soft puppets with The Puppetarium to represent emotions.

Jennis says: “I currently create textile artworks on canvas to represent big emotions, ones that feel out of control, as monsters. Then I consider ways that these monsters might be tamed − listened to and responded to in a way that reduces the overwhelm, so that the emotion can be helpful, like a sidekick. This monster artwork is effective but I want to use puppets to represent an emotion at multiple levels: ‘normal’, out of control, and shut-down to add nuance and be more playful.”

Annalisa Aum is a creative reveller, producing a diversity of written and screen works, installations and performance art over the past twenty years.

Following postgraduate studies in Screenwriting at the Australian Film, Television & Radio School, Annalisa worked as a children’s television writer for Network Ten, freelance script assessor and story developer. Her short films have been screened in Australian and international film festivals, group and solo gallery exhibitions, and public art installations.

Annalisa’s work is influenced and driven by compassionate environmentalism, Buddhism, Taoism, feminism, equity and Jungian thought.

During the residency, Annalisa unpacked several interconnected projects: researching and puzzling together a quirky futuristic self-help novel; a blog on parenting against the grain with musings around capitalism and the patriarchy perpetuating the world of trauma; ideas for a gallery exhibition proposal that explores swinging the world back from the extremes of patriarchy towards the Buddhist/Taoist middle way of peace and harmony.

The studio space held a detective’s unpuzzling of a complex case. Writings, rantings, ideas and poetry on the walls. A journey into the madness of the mind, and (hopefully) a safe return home.

Mel Brady is a painter and installation artist living on Gubbi Gubbi land, working with fabric and paint to create site-specific, immersive installation art and light-hearted craft. Mel’s love of vintage fashion has informed art and craft workshops in galleries and museums in the Moreton Bay Region since 2017. A recent highlight is Expedition, a travelling art experiment in conjunction with the Side Gallery, Brisbane and the New England Regional Art Gallery, Armidale NSW.

Following on from a three-part installation series made in 2020 with an RADF grant, Mel created a series of immersive environments that people can experience and respond to. The overall goal was to spark a sense of wonder and delight in the viewer and charge their everyday lives with the electricity of discovery. Using a variety of media, including cardboard, fabric, paint, lighting and music, she made environments such as:

•  a giant garden 
•  a nest or pillow fort/cloud land for relaxation and imagination
•  a secret club-house/tree-house with games and meetings.

Mel created environments in response to visitor feedback, to make a feedback loop with the local community. Mel facilitated a series of crafting, imagination or meditation workshops and will collaborate with Council to plan artist talks/open studio events.

Ruth Ellington’s creative practice as a multi-disciplinary artist and visual arts teacher demonstrates her passion for creative exploration and adventure; both in life and in her artwork. With a strong personal context, she continually explores new ways to create, incorporating sculptures and installations with fabric, fibres and textured materials, painting, drawing, photography and printmaking.

During the studio residency, Ruth Ellington combined the elements of visual imagery and the written word to weave together stories of her life to create a body of work titled The Tulip Project.

Ruth’s current focus is on extending her craft to writing her memoir and creating a body of work where the artwork intertwines with the written word. Not only will it be a written memoir but a visual one, where the viewer and reader are taken on a journey. Two- and three-dimensional visual artefacts will be created with mixed media, sculpture and photography.

Alongside housing Ruth’s creative project, this studio will allow access to visual art students, fellow artists and the general public to view her works in progress, engage in workshops and interact in a working artist’s studio.

Jennis Ardern is a multidisciplinary artist known for her colourful landscape paintings and participatory installations. Her artworks are welcoming, using heightened, saturated, bright colours. Her fanciful patchwork paintings evoke memories of child-like wonder by combining actual and remembered places.

Her artwork is spirited and peaceful. She invites viewers to explore their identification with natural landscapes. Her collaborative and interactive installations harness co-creation strategies. She invites viewers to touch or add to the artwork.

During the residency, Jennis extended her existing body of work through experimentation. She developed nature-inspired assemblage using a mix of new, found, and recycled materials. This exploration allowed Jennis to transform her 2D painted landscapes into 3D sculptural artworks.

Community members were part of the creative process by attending drop-in collaborative art sessions. Jennis had hand-cut plenty of coral and fish out of reclaimed Coreflute signage, and visitors to The Hub revitalised this bleached reef, using paint to add colour and texture to the scene.

Jana Daniels is a writer, fine artist and student graphic designer. She has worked in the arts sector as an assistant in secondary education and has ambitions to pursue art therapy for people from all walks of life and ages.

Jana believes that the power of creativity is in all of us. She desires to help people tap into that natural energy for guidance, direction and added enjoyment in their lives.

During this studio residency, Jana focused on building her freelance business, Crooked Flaw Creations, which offers illustration and graphic design services, as well as fun and therapeutic creative workshops for the community. Jana has also researched and experimented with drawing illustrations for children's books and graphic novels.

Larysa uses a combination of traditional methods and digital tools in her artwork, such as combining modelling and animation with photography and painted surfaces. Her influences come from nature and playing. She practises art to release the inner child, playing and satisfying her curiosity and interests daily.

Her methods are influenced by The Artist's Way, Carl Jung’s Red Book, and his Active Imagination process, a rigorously defined procedure for channelling creativity. Her story, Play Like a Rite, documents the process of using Active Imagination for health and holistic medicine.

 During this studio residency, Larysa used the Active Imagination process to channel the story of a child who grew up too fast, turning their back on all thoughts of playing. It is a story she wishes she had found in a library book when she was a child. The book will be full of soft, glowing, beautiful pictures, hinting at the unnerving horror of the life of an adult child in a dysfunctional family system.

 Larysa experimented with ways of producing this as a storybook. She shared her work-in-progress with the community and facilitated workshops for people to explore their inner voices through pictures to discover their own unique stories.

Anna Turnbull is an artist who works with ceramics, mixed media and textiles. Her work encapsulates elements of the natural environment, drawing from the colours, textures and forms around the region.

Her ceramic works emerge from a receptive walking methodology as a contextual and conceptual mechanism for the production of contemporary artworks. She describes herself as a walking artist concerned with coming to know a place through experience and sensory perceptions of Moreton Bay.

 During this studio residency, Anna continued working on her latest series of contemporary ceramics inspired by a wayfaring methodology of walking around the foreshores of Deception Bay, Nudgee Beach and Redcliffe. She had her ceramic wheel in the studio and interested visitors to The Hub were able to watch her work.

Anna's studio space provided a constantly changing display of her current developing body of work. During April and May 2022, Anna presented an exhibition of her ceramics, Desire Paths: Reflective Walking in Deception Bay, at The Hub Gallery.