Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 20 October
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
We’ll explore how theatre can combine politics and storytelling. With theatre director Sue Giles, visual artist Bindi Cole, interdisciplinary artist Steaphan Paton and chair Luke Hockley.
Eavesdropping on Artists
A series of interactive talks, presented by the Wheeler Centre, in which prominent artists discuss shows presented as part of Melbourne Festival.
The catch? The artists must talk about artworks from outside their own practice.
Come and find out what artists really think about each other’s work, in this fascinating, cross-disciplinary discussion on the practice and presentation of art.
Featuring
Luke Hockley
Luke Hockley is a performing artist, a strategic advisor and a communication coach. His company Midnightsky is a performing arts company. It partners with leaders to create projects that change the world, shares skills in creating strategic stories and teaches people how to be compelling communicators.
He is the recipient of a Green Room award, was nominated for a State of Design award and is a fellow of the Williamson Community Leadership Program.
The companies he has worked with include KAGE Physical Theatre, the Victorian Department of Health’s leadership programs, Dancehouse, Leadership Victoria, BP Australasia, Film Victoria, Carbon Down, Consumer Affairs Victoria, Expressions Dance Company, ANZ, the Centre for Sustainability Leadership, Melbourne International Arts Festival, MFB, Neurosciences Victoria and Northern Health.
Sue Giles
Sue Giles has been artistic director of children’s contemporary arts company Polyglot Theatre since 2000. With the company she has created participatory works ranging from large-scale play spaces to theatre created with children at the centre of the art and art making. Polyglot’s work is recognised internationally as a leader in experimental, interactive and installation theatre for children
Steaphan Paton
Steaphan Paton is an interdisciplinary artist based in Melbourne. A member of the Gunai and Monero Nations, he grew up in Gippsland. His practice explores tradition, race and colonialism informed through his worldview being Aboriginal Australian.
Paton was highly commended for the Lin Onus Award at the 2007 Victorian Indigenous Art Awards for the drawing Dyillah (2007) and was a finalist in the 2011, 2012 and 2014 Awards.
Paton was commissioned by the City of Melbourne Laneways Commission 2011 for his project Urban Doolagahl. His exhibition at the Melbourne Museum, Booruns Canoe, was a collaboration telling of intergenerational knowledge through the art of canoe-making and is now part of the permanent collection at the Melbourne Museum.
Paton’s recent series, Cloaked Combat, is part of Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria. Paton has a keen interest in the environment, archaeology and in continuing Indigenous knowledge, traditions and stories. Steaphan is the founder and director of new artist run space, N/A Space, which seeks to foster the careers of dedicated young emerging artists through providing opportunities to exhibit their work and have studio space. N/A Space holds monthly exhibitions following the lunar calendar.
Bindi Cole
Award-winning artist Bindi Cole was born in 1975 in Melbourne, Australia. She studied at Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE and the University of Ballarat. Bindi is a resilient and ingenious Melbourne-born photographer, curator and new media artist with Wadawurrung heritage who speaks compellingly about taboo topics through her photographs, videos and installations.
Cole’s early interest in photography was curtailed by the trauma of her mother’s heroin addiction and death from cancer, causing her descent into depression and drugs. During a transformative prison term, Cole found Christianity and recaptured her self-belief. Her deeply personal and powerful artistic practice focuses on identity and the exploration of tensions within.
Cole works to expose the questions most are afraid to ask. Her artworks are at times so personal, cathartically imbuing them with a gritty honesty that the viewer’s experience can verge on voyeurism. Cole’s work exposes the latent and unspoken power dynamics of global culture in the here and now. She subtly but powerfully reveals some uncomfortable truths about the fundamental disconnection between who we are - the communities and identities by which we shape our sense of self - and how the prevailing culture attempts to place and define us.
In 2010, Cole was listed as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Melbourne. Since her first solo show in 2007, Cole’s work has been widely exhibition in solo and group exhibitions including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, National Portrait Gallery, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (Brooklyn, USA), Museum of Contemporary Art (Taiwan). Her work is held in various collections across the world. Cole lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.