The Accessible Arts and Bundanon Trust Artist-In-Residence Program announces a creative and career development opportunity for five artists with disability or who are d/Deaf from NSW and the ACT. Congratulations to the selected artists: Carly Marchment, Edward Barnes, Gemma Hudson, Negin Chahoud and Tereza Crvenkovic.

Each year, Accessible Arts partners with the Bundanon Trust to present an annual residency program for artists with disability or who are d/Deaf. This prestigious program comprises a seven (7) day residency in at the renowned Bundanon Trust estate – a beautiful rural property near Nowra that was gifted to the Australian people by famous Australian artist Arthur Boyd. The estate now supports arts practice and engagement with the arts through residency, education, exhibition and performance programs.  

The Bundanon Trust Artist-in-Residence program is the largest of its kind in Australia, making it highly sought after by artists nationally. “The residencies have been important steppingstones in the careers of many successful Australian artists, and this is what makes our annual initiative an incredibly valuable creative and career development opportunity for artists with disability.”

The residencies will take place from 4 – 10 November 2024 and will make a big difference for these five talented artists. 

Carly Marchment

Born in 1980 in the Macleay Valley Region, Marchment is a disabled Australian artist based in Crescent Head, NSW. Her practice focuses on painting and mixed media, primarily using oils to create portraiture and figurative works. Inspired by her surroundings, she captures the connection between people and their environment, aiming to evoke emotional responses through her art. She is exploring themes of inaccessibility and discrimination within the disability community. Marchment is currently creating a body of work showcasing simplicity and abstraction that is being informed by her own mobility challenges. Through her work Marchment aspires to ignite meaningful questions and foster conversations that resonate powerfully with viewers, inspiring them to reflect and engage.

Edward Barnes

Edward Barnes is an artist based in Gumma, NSW. He is part of the collective “Artists in Action” which runs out of Phoenix School of Arts in Bowraville. His unique style is characterised by the use of bright colours, bold outlines and thick brushstrokes. He excels in confident, imaginative drawings. Ed has always lived with animals including rabbits, chooks and ducks, and this has given him a particular interest in painting wildlife. He has exhibited numerous times and developed a big following. His enjoyment of painting keeps growing over the years as does his art practice. He undertook an artist’s residency supported by the Country Arts Support Grant which resulted in a collaborative show called “True Story”. This year he was the 1st Prize winner of the inaugural Phoenix Art Prize for People living with a disability at Nambucca Valley.

Gemma Hudson

Gemma Hudson is an emerging writer, director, and actor who splits her time between Sydney (Gadigal Land) and her hometown of Canberra (Ngunnawal Land). Gemma’s favourite genres to explore are horror and comedy, through which she likes to explore her experiences as a queer disabled woman, as well as write about questions she just cannot get out of her head. Gemma has recently completed a mentorship with Belvoir Street Theatre through the Accessible Arts NSW Next Level program. She has also been an artist in the 2024 Canberra Theatre Centre New Ideas Lab, and was part of Canberra Youth Theatre’s 2024 Writer’s ensemble. She is currently part of The Lab playwriting program at KXT. Past work includes writing and directing netball slasher ‘PLAY ON’ (SUDS 2023) and cowriting and directing queer roller derby Shakespeare adaptation ‘Rolleo and Juliet’ (SUDS 2024).

Negin Chahoud

Negin is an Iranian Australian refugee whom migrated to Australia with her family in 1989 at the age of eight. Thirty-four years later, Negin is an artist residing in the Southern Highlands, NSW. Negin’s practice allows her to unpack the dichotomy of homeland longing and displacement with complex feelings of legal rights and general safety in Australia. She is proud to fuse trauma-related practices with socially engaged art to tell her story and encourage others to work through theirs.

Tereza Crvenkovic

Tereza Crvenković is a multidisciplinary artist who works across literary writing, storytelling, digital and photographic media, dance, performance, and cross-cultural genres. A 2-x kidney transplant recipient (1992 & 2017) and stroke survivor (2009), her creative work explores the complexities of life with chronic renal failure from childhood onwards. Tereza’s objective is to foreground the personal, silent narratives of the patient/survivor and the disabled otherwise concealed from public view. Her practice is driven by a belief in the transformative potential of the deeply personal to generate socio-cultural and political change. For this reason, bodily, sensory and psycho-emotional experience are central to her work. Tereza’s creative work was part of a group exhibition at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in 2023. Her literary work has appeared in Hektoen International, Spineless Wonders and Ars Medica. Tereza holds an MPhil in Performance Studies (USYD), an MA in Theatre Studies (UNSW), a BA Hons in English Literature (USYD) and Grad Dip in Creative Writing (USYD).

Image Description: Headshots of the five artists selected for the 2024 Accessible Arts and Bundanon Trust Artist Residency Program. There are five vertical columns with a headshot in each column, featuring from left to right: Gemma Hudson, Edward Barnes, Tereza Crvenkovic, Carly Marchment and Negin Chahoud.