Art Talks
What a beautiful afternoon at the fabulous newly polished Main Bar. Our first ArtSig (Art Signed or Signature) went off with aplomb on the gorgeous sunshiney deck. A casual affair with about 25-30 people rocking up having a wine and a chat before Erin McCuskey interviewed the wonderful Ballarat Photographic Artist Aldona Kmiec about her project We R You.
Image by Erin. Smile by Aldona.
Erin’s nickname (though longer than her actual name so maybe not a nick?) for Aldona is Ms Everywhere. She explained this was because Aldona has recently had works in the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, is one of the City of Ballarat Cultural Ambassadors, had a residency at Under the Floorboards, works within Ballarat Arts Alive and Ballarat CoLab, was commissioned for work with ArtsAtlas. All this doesn’t include the various exhibitions and workshops both here and abroad.
Aldona was born in Poland and migrated to the UK when she was 27, and then to Australia just 5.5 years later. Some of the questions Erin asked Aldona were:
- What drives you?
- You say you always wanted to explore the world, what does that mean for you?
- What would you say is a major achievement for you to date?
- How does who you are inform your arts practice?
Then we moved onto more specific questions about the We R You project:
- What is We R You and how did you become involved?
- What have you learnt about yourself through this project?
- Recently one of your works was ‘added to’, I was outraged but you had a different response, tell us about that.
- A local journo said ‘This project has captured the public imagination.’ Why do you think?
- What is the value of public art to a community?
There were also some great questions from the audience. Of course you only get the answers if you were there. So don’t miss out next time, likely in December.
If you’d like to recommend we talk to someone then please jot their names and projects/works in the comments. They will need to be BAA member, so start finding out who is and who isn’t and point them to the membership info.
So thanks for coming out ratvillians, we also hope that you will support our sponsors of this event Yum Studio and Main Bar by liking their facey pages and talking about how fabulous they are…
Glenn at Main Bar, image by Erin.
More news on ArtSparks coming soon.