Artist Biographies

Matthew Benjamin works across text, sculpture and video to consider technologies of emanation. Drawing on a background in winemaking, Benjamin’s practice is informed by an interest in alchemical processes where sensory information is abstracted by its own means of containment.

Recent works look at the process of bell-casting to consider the production of sound and voice as material systems, treating them not as speech, but bulimic overflow – ingesting, distorting, and emitting. Here, the voice functions not as a singular channel but as a mechanism comprised of many partials. Conflating the bell and the body as resonant chambers, Benjamin explores material emanation through the latency of silent form.

Martina Copley is an artist and writer whose work explores the poetics of compositional processes. Language underwrites the practice. Understood as an artistic text that operates in dialogue with its own mode of production, the work doesn’t have a set form. Approaching the logic of exhibition as indexical aside, accidental and extant movements serve as both content and method. Object and modality are collated to set up a structural space for something to exist, a space in which the work moves towards an opening and at the same time asks questions about itself.

Martina’s work has been presented at Bus Projects, RMIT Project Space, SEVENTH, West Space, City and Docklands Libraries, Melbourne Festival, and Liquid Architecture. She has co-produced two artist books and her writing (often with live readings) has been published by the Expanded Writers Collective, Runway Journal, no more poetry, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), and Bloomsbury Academic. Martina is Chair Artistic Director at Blindside and lectures in Contemporary Art and Writing at RMIT University, the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and La Trobe College of Art & Design.

Photography credit Guy Grabowsky.