Online art-making

Be inspired by these four Australian artists to explore your creativity and nourish your wellbeing while at home through these online art-making activities.

Each artist shares ideas for art-making at home, insights into their artistic practice, and reflections on the connection between art, wellbeing and mental health.

Jessie Brooks-Dowsett

Renee Yerondais

Katie West

Antonia Sellbach

Jessie Brooks-Dowsett

Arts Therapist, Educator and Artist, Jessie Brooks-Dowsett takes us into her home studio to share a bit about her practice and the connection she finds between art, wellbeing and mental health.

“Art is a mercurial form of expression, it’s capacity to be defined varies, but I feel it is open and available for everyone. It’s the thing that will ultimately and always get us through” - Jessie Brooks-Dowsett

About the artist:

Jessie is a Melbourne based gestural abstract artist, she grew up between the beaches of Sydney’s east coast and the bushy mountains of Melbourne’s Dandenong ranges, her connection to nature is a formative element in her work, reflecting a personal dialogue between environment, experience, interaction and moments of time.

Jessie engages her senses and uses her body as a conduit for the art making materials, exploring the relationship between self, experience and environment. Working in a mix of acrylic, inks and pastels, Jessie uses experimental methods to create marks that speak to her instinctual bodily responses, in reaction or recollection of her daily experiencing.

Renee Yerondais

Renée surrenders her body to dance at home, and shares some tips on how to get started with your own iso practice.

“Allow your body to be moved by the music with abandon, let go of your thinking mind to witness with love not judgement”. - Renée Yerondais

About the artist:

Renée Yerondais is fascinated by the human condition and our existential experience of living. She trained in philosophy of the mind before discovering the power of her body, through meditation practices, including dance. She’s danced consciously since 2007 and offers classes in Melbourne and you can find her on Facebook and Instagram @5rhythmswithreneeyerondais

Katie West:

Artist Katie West invites you to a session of natural dyeing and drawing to create some pieces to enjoy in her own home while reflecting on a not always easy relationship with drawing and entirely ‘blank canvases’.

About the artist:

Katie West belongs to the Yindjibarndi people of the Pilbara tablelands in Western Australia. The process of naturally dyeing fabric underpins her practice – the rhythm of walking, gathering, bundling, boiling up water and infusing materials with plant matter. Katie creates objects, installations and happenings that invite calm, reflection and attention to the ecologies we live within and participate, following the understanding that the health and wellbeing of the environment is a reflection of the health and wellbeing of people.

Antonia Sellbach:

Artist Antonia Sellbach invites the viewer to engage with the simple, soothing process of abstract, geometric collage.  This is easy to do at home, collage is portable and can be done at any desk or on the floor with minimal supplies (paint, brush, cardboard or balsa wood). The outcomes and variations can be almost endless. 

Sellbach's artworks explore the ways in which ordering and reordering objects becomes connected to our internal thought processes as well as how we communicate externally, a process she refers to in her research as 'linguistic abstraction'.

About the artist:

Antonia Sellbach is an abstract painter based in Melbourne, Naarm. Her work explores the variables of working with modularity and rearrangeable abstract forms. Her recent Phd ‘Productive Limitation: Painting Abstract Emergent Languages through Serial Form’ explores these notions as they relate to contemporary abstraction. Both Sellbach’s art practice and her surrounding research ask us to evaluate how we relate to and communicate with abstract forms.

Alongside her arts practice, Sellbach has worked as an arts educator and grants writer. She is represented by Nicholas Thompson Gallery in Melbourne.