A Dialogue Through Silk
workshop on silk painting techniques
PAVÉ ATELIER
Clare Thackway and Victoria Pham, two Paris based Australian artists , will each share their experimental and emerging approaches to silk painting that they have independently developed over the last few months.
Victoria’s practice is a process of re-learning or re-imagining through memory, using steam and wax to draw, contain and direct paint on silk.
Clare’s work with silk is a departure from her oil painting, a process with unexpected outcomes and elements of chance. She uses acrylic gutta and dye and the domestic actions of ironing and washing.
Clare Thackway, Milk and Venom, 2024, dye on silk, oak frame, image: Grégory Copitet
Victoria Pham, Frozen Fungi, 44 mycelium sculptures and 2-channel 15 minute soundscape, 2024, Cement Fondu. Image courtesy of Jessica Maurer.
Les Artistes : Victoria Pham & Clare Thackway
Victoria Pham is an Australian artist, evolutionary biologist, writer, and composer whose work spans art, science, and technology. Based between Paris and Sydney, she holds a PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and began her career as an archaeologist. Her practice focuses on deep listening practices, translations of memory through ecology and familial histories. She has exhibited and been commissioned by institutions like TATE Britain, Sydney Opera House, and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and has featured in festivals such as VIVID and BLEED.
Clare Thackway, a representational painter of inner lives, often like a filmmaker to familiar images and symbols, reworking them in each exhibition. Known for her forthright and intimate portraits and figurative paintings, the body in Clare Thackway’s paintings becomes a semaphore through which she contemplates moments of human experience, from the emotional to the societal. Informed by ideas in psychology, feminism and the history of painting, she considers how internal and collective experiences affect the ways in which we hold ourselves.The artist works with the fluid associations of cloth and pattern, illuminating the inner threads of our implicit memories and the deep and intricate connectivity between people.
