Opening Celebration at First Site Gallery: Inpatient by Tess Hider; Locating in Disarray by Juliette Claire; Transformations of energy: drawing in motion by Emily Song

Please join us at First Site Gallery, for the Opening Celebration of our April suite of exhibitions, Inpatient by Tess Hider; Locating in Disarray by Juliette Claire; Transformations of energy: drawing in motion by Emily Song


Transformations of energy: drawing in motion by Emily Song

Emily Song uses automatic drawing techniques to reveal ephemeral expressions of the unconscious mind and the fleeting nature of our existence. This ‘moving drawing’ installation features individual ink drawings projected onto hanging drapes of tulle. Visitors are encouraged to sit down and observe the hypnotic qualities of this flickering animation, offering a moment of reprieve from the consistent routine of daily life. The artist proposes an alternative method of making sense of the world around us, using automatic drawing – a surrealist technique involving drawing intuitively from the unconscious mind – as a meditation on states of remembering and forgetting.

Emily Song is an Australian-born Chinese emerging artist who is based across Naarm (Melbourne) and Boorloo (Perth). Her multidisciplinary practice is rooted in expanded drawing, manifesting through forms of painting, sculpture, installation and the moving image. Her work experiments with conscious and unconscious ways of making as a method to understand the world around her, her own lived experiences and multifaceted identities. Currently engaged with ideas of the ‘moving drawing’, Emily’s process-driven practice uses a sense of labour and repetitive methods of making. She explores ephemerality and impermanence through thematic ideas surrounding memory and forgetting, and the temporary nature of fleeting moments. In search of a kind of freedom and relinquishing agency over the process of creation, her most recent body of work has showcased a fascination in motion, energy and transformation through spatial investigations.

Locating in Disarray by Juliette Claire

Locating in Disarray is a multisensory performative installation by Juliette Claire, emerging from loss, mourning and ecological grief. The artist draws upon a biophilic methodology, connecting to our innate affinities with the natural world. Juliette’s work is inspired by close personal losses enmeshed in the impacts of the human driven Sixth Mass Extinction. Locating in Disarray engages visitors in sensory encounters, activating the gallery space with aroma, sounds and movement. Her ongoing intention is to build reciprocal relationships with place, people and more-than-human-bodies, situating art practice in opposition to a hierarchical and extractivist approach to life.


Juliette Claire is a mixed-media artist based in Naarm, practising on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art Sculpture (Honours) from RMIT and an Advanced Diploma of Object and Jewellery Design from Melbourne Polytechnic. Juliette’s work focuses on ecological loss and mourning within the web of the Capitalocene (emphasising capitalism’s role in the ecological crisis). Using multisensory installation and performance, her works are spatial, durational and engage the senses. She explores the ephemeral through often biodegradable and immersive installations shaped by durational ‘repetitive acts’ – such as growing flora, harvesting flowers for ink, stringing hundreds of individual flowers to make rope, and walking over plant material to make marks. Juliette’s art practice critiques extractive systems that dominate nature by prioritising reciprocity and imagining other possible futures no longer subsumed by capitalism.

Inpatient by Tess Hider

Inpatient features soft sculptures responding to her recent hip surgery, hospital stay, and recovery, as well as a lifetime of disability-related experiences. The large scale of the works bring attention to the realities of invisible illness, while the soft forms create a humorous, and comforting aesthetic that allows the topic of disability to be more approachable for the viewer. Shapes, colours and motifs associated with Tess’s experiences presented in Inpatient bring attention to the marginalisation of disabled communities and invite us to address ableism in society and offer greater accessibility through art.

Tess Hider is a multidisciplinary artist working across installation, painting, and craft. Her work visualises personal experiences, emotions and feelings associated with disability and chronic pain, and the personal, social, financial, and political impacts. She uses humour, Pop art aesthetics, and large scale to engage with serious topics of pain, illness and medical spaces in a light-hearted way. Tess offers her own experiences to prompt conversations about wider disability awareness in society.