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Kristy Gordon

Kristy Gordon

PhD Candidate
Arts, Design & Architecture
School of Art & Design

Website: www.kristygordonart.com.au

Email: kristy.gordon@student.unsw.edu.au

Supervisors: Emma Robertson, David Eastwood

Kristy Gordon is an artist and practice-based researcher in the field of expanded drawing practice, whose work encompasses digital and analogue drawings, carved assemblages and site-specific immersive installations.

Kristy has received artistic grants from Central Coast Council (2020) and Randwick City Council (2021). She has assisted in setting up night public art exhibitions: Randwick NOX (2021) and Broken Hill Desert Equinox (2022), where she also exhibited site-specific slow art installations powered by solar energy. She has been a finalist in the Gosford Art Prize (2019), Hidden Rookwood (2022), the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize (2022, 2023), Collabora8Women Art Prize (2023) and in 2022 she won the prestigious public art prize Eden Unearthed. Kristy’s work is held in private collections and public institutions, including a permanent installation in the main entrance hall at St Vincent’s Hospital, Darlinghurst.

In her academic capacity, Kristy is committed to developing a community of research practitioners. In 2022 she co-founded the student-led initiative HDR Studio Crits, an ongoing inter-institutional dialogue that brings together artist-research candidates and research alumni from UNSW, Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) and National Art School (NAS) to discuss and further their research practices.

Prior academic achievements

  • Bachelor of Art: Communication Studies (photography, PR), University of Newcastle (1999)
  • Dean’s List, UNSW Art & Design (2019)
  • Master of Art (drawing, painting), awarded with Excellence, UNSW Art & Design (2021)
  • PhD Programme Certificate (The Aesthetic Experience and the Aesthetics of Slowness), University of Aalborg (2023)

Kristy Gordon’s PhD research investigates slow art as a consciously embedded creative process, using a practice-based methodology in expanded drawing. In this project, embodied gestural drawing and cumulative repetitive mark-making processes, specifically with contemporary materials such as iPad, iPencil and power tools, reveal how ways of drawing with ‘fast’ materialities can produce new forms of slow affect. It contributes knowledge of the practitioner’s intention, process and material approach to slowness as a way of working with the velocity of contemporary life.

This work is situated within the developing genre of slow art, which the research traces through theory and in the Australian and international exhibition contexts. Where the dominant paradigm of slow art is currently audience experience of an artwork, this new research foregrounds the affective encounters between artist and artwork during the creative process, identifying the points of intersection between slow ethics and slow aesthetic experiences generated by creative ideation, process, production and exhibition.

Towards this research, in 2023 Kristy participated in an international doctoral program with Denmark’s University of Aalborg, progressing scholarly enquiry into aesthetic experiences and the aesthetics of slowness, which is driving practice-based innovation and new scholarly enquiry in her field.

The outcomes of Kristy’s research are digital drawings printed on various substrates and projected, as well as dimensional drawings carved with handheld power tools, and immersive installations in galleries and public spaces.
  • ‘Velocity and Slowness’. Paper Presentation, Drawing Research Network (DRN) Drawing in Relation: Sound and Motion (online), Drawing Research Network, April 2023.

Non-traditional research outputs

  • ‘Deepwater’. Sculpture in Group Exhibition Collabor8Women Art Prize (Finalist), Ellipsis Gallery Sydney, November 2023
  • ‘Deepwater’. Sculpture in Group Exhibition Blue Surpasses Dimension, Saywell Gallery Sydney, August 2023
  • ‘Deepwater’. Sculpture in Group Exhibition Materiality, DrawSpace Sydney, August 2023
  • ‘Deepwater’ and ‘Wave Motion II’. Expanded drawing installation in Group Exhibition Tim Olsen Drawing Prize (Finalist), AD Space Sydney, October 2023
  • ‘Shallows’. Expanded drawing installation in Group Exhibition HDR Art Lab, AD Space Sydney, July 2023
  • “Rockpool/ A Pensive”. Digital drawing in DRN Drawing In Relation online exhibition, Loughborough University, 2023
  • ‘Cloudspace’. Immersive installation in Group Exhibition Eden Unearthed Art Prize (First Prize), Eden Gardens Sydney, November 2022
  • ‘Catching Fallen Stars II’. Sculpture in Group Exhibition Desert Equinox, Broken Hill, September 2022
  • ‘Catching Fallen Stars’. Sculpture in Group Exhibition Hidden Rookwood (Finalist), Sydney, September 2022