CAT Studio Artist Talk
Jo Chew, Maggie Jefferies, Jon Smeathers and Loren Kronemyer
5.30pm Friday 16 August 2024
Come and hear from current CAT studio resident artists – Jo Chew, Maggie Jefferies, Jon Smeathers and Loren Kronermeyer – about their practices in general, works in progress and current work. If you stick around, you may even get to have a look at a studio space and see a demonstration of a new experimental process in the works.
Jo Chew’s painting-based practice centres on themes of shelter and home. Her works are often informed by small, collaged studies; seeing this process as a way to explore ideas of displacement and dislocation, but also of rehoming and potential for repair through the continuity of the painted surface. More recently her practice has extended to sculptural installations of found objects, altered, sewn into, and assembled. Jo was a finalist in the Churchie Emerging Art Prize in 2022 and Hatched PICA 2019. She was the recipient of the Zonta Emerging Artist Prize at the Women’s Art Prize Tasmania in 2022 and winner of the 2023 Glover Prize with her painting Tender.
Alongside her studio practice, Jo works as a painting teacher at UTAS and a librarian at Mona.
Recently completing a PhD, Jo aims to use this residency to work on a new body of paintings and experimental sculptural works, continuing her practice into potential new terrain.
Maggie Jeffries is an emerging artist from Lutruwita/Tasmania, based in Nipaluna/Hobart. Her personal practice involves botanical oil paintings which investigate experiential, felt connection to place and how this can be explored through art. Her practice also involves working with artists living with disabilities (artists with all abilities) through mentoring, tutoring, collaboration, and community engagement. She is passionate about celebrating the work of these artists, promoting inclusion in the contemporary arts scene in lutruwita/Tasmania, and facilitating artwork directed by any individual who communicates their stories and truths through art.
In 2020, Jeffries received an artist fellowship to visit and work for Creative Growth, an organisation working with over 170 artists with disabilities in California, USA. After completing her Honours in Painting at the School of Creative Arts and Media in 2022, Jeffries was selected for the Rosamond McCulloch studio residency at the Cite Des Arts Internationale in Paris as well as the Country Glover residency at Patterdale, lutruwita/Tasmania.
Loren Kronemyer is an artist living and working in regional Lutruwita/Tasmania. Her works span objects, interactive and live performance, experimental media art, and large-scale worldbuilding projects aimed at exploring ecological futures and survival skills.
She works solo, and in collaboration as Pony Express. Her approach of deep and immersive research has led her to foster collaborations with a number of niche societies, labs, and specialists. These include Australia’s last broom factory, from whom she learned to make millet brooms for the project Millennial Reaper; and the World Archery federation, from whom she earned a coaching qualification for her project After Erika Eiffel, and the scientists at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, with whom she developed her show Receiver. She received the first Masters of Biological Arts Degree from SymbioticA Lab at the University of Western Australia, and has a PhD from the University of Tasmania. Loren curates Faux Mo at Mona Foma Festival and is the Creative Director of Art Farm Birchs Bay.
Loren is the recipient of the two year studio residency (2024/2025)
Jon Smeathers (b.1992) is a composer, sound and installation artist based in Nipaluna/Hobart, Australia. Jon has exhibited and performed both internationally and across Australia, including at Soft Centre, Serralves em Fiesta (Portugal), Melbourne Festival, the NOW Now Festival (Sydney) and Dark Mofo. Jon’s work taps into the potential of algorithmic displacement, codecs and remix culture to enable a reimagination of one’s spectral and rhythmic currents.
For CAT’s curatorial program, Jon will develop an algorithmic decision-making curatorial practice that considers the socio-political impacts of distributed network algorithms in exhibition practices.
Jon Smeathers is the recipient of the CAT Curatorial Mentorship (2023/2024) which includes a studio