Winter Wonderland: participating artists

Winter Wonderland is curated by Zanny Begg and Megan Monte, supported by Campbelltown Arts Centre.

Safdar Ahmed

Safdar is a Sydney-based artist and academic. In 2010 he completed his PhD with the Department of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Sydney. His dissertation, Reform and Modernity in Islam, linked the work of various Muslim reformist thinkers to contemporary paradigms of modernity. Safdar also holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Sydney’s National Art School. He works largely in the mediums of drawing, comics and watercolour. He is a founding member of the Refugee Art Project, for which he conducts art workshops with refugees and asylum seekers in detention. This organization was founded to facilitate art workshops for detained asylum seekers, and to display their work in public exhibitions. Safdar is a member of the art collective Undrawing the Line.

Rosie Deacon

Rosie is an artist working in sculpture and installation whose work engages with the spectacle of obsession. In 2010, she graduated from UNSW | Art & Design with first class honours. Widely exhibited, Rosie's practice is an exploration of states of humanity, feelings of belonging, and realms of the absurd. Her works resemble large-scale, fictional geographies, inhabited solely by hand-made animal sculptures. For Rosie animals represent the duality of freedom and control, and she intends to explore our understanding and relationship with ‘wild’ and domesticated animals. Rosie’s work is produced through an intuitive combination of a variety of processes related to aspects of kitsch, craft and folk-art practices, including a diverse and unabashed assortment of natural and manufactured materials.

Heath Franco

Heath Franco is a Sydney based artist whose work explores the grotesque and absurd aspects of suburban life. Heath combines video works with performances in a variety of costumes, backed by an array of bizarre special effects. Though dense with meaning, at their most basic these videos are about the construction and the unravelling of the self through language.

Katie Green a.k.a. Singing Sadie

Katie has a BA (hons) in Performance Studies and Indigenous Studies at UNSW. Katie has performed for a number of years under the alter ego of 'Singing Sadie', touring extensively across Australia, the USA and the UK. She recently completed a residency at PYT in collaboration with Mahdi Mohammadi, film and theatre director from Afghanistan. The duo also hosted a series of picnics, barbecues and dinner parties between asylum seekers and artists, with the aim of bringing these two disparate communities together and to facilitate future creative endeavors. Katie has also been working on a film project, 2168 Shorts, collaboratively with clients of Liverpool Women’s Resource Centre and The Motion Room. In this ongoing project, women are supported to shoot and edit short films about their lives in one of Sydney’s most marginalized postcodes.

Karen Therese

Karen's work is grounded in performance, political activism and community building. Her work often involves initiating programs to promote audience development and participation within the arts, across diverse cultures and contexts and within or about diverse environments. Her work has focused on investigations into ideas of identity and place such as, comfort, displacement, violence and belonging. She is a Graduate of The Victorian College of The Arts (Animateuring) and is an MA-Research Candidate in Creative Arts at The University Of Wollongong. Karen's past work includes: The Riot Act for Campbelltown Arts Centre and Blacktown Arts Centre Winner and Constellations presented at PACT Theatre (2005) , Performance Space (2006). She is currently the Director of Powerhouse Youth Theatre, Fairfield.