Tiffany Cole, Anne-Marie Jean and Naomi Zouwer

Tiffany Cole, Anne-Marie Jean and Naomi Zouwer are current PhD candidates at the ANU School of Art. The common manifestation of their research is the combining and bridging of 2 and 3D visual languages as a means of articulating their individual investigations. As illusion, object and material presence shift in an out of focus for viewers, human relationships and experience with nature, nostalgia, personal history and social context are broached and questioned in a forum of richness, sumptuous beauty, humour and tactile abundance.

Tiffany Cole

Tiffany Cole was born in Coffs Harbour NSW, and now lives and works in Canberra ACT. She completed a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) at the Canberra School of Art, ANU in 2006, graduating with first-class honours and the University Medal. Cole also won a number of prizes and scholarships at the completion of her degree through the EASS Scheme including the Canberra Contemporary Art Space Residency Award, and the Spanish Embassy Young Australian Artists' Travelling Scholarship. Cole was also the recipient of the QANTAS Foundation Encouragement of Australian Art Award in 2010, which took her research to South America and Northern Europe. Cole has exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions in the ACT, and is now currently a PhD candidate at the ANU School of Art in the Painting Department.

Tiffany Cole works in the field of the still-life. Her work explores ideas about collecting, and of the values we assign to ordinary objects, in their ability to hold memory. Cole’s work focuses on our bodily experience of viewing painting, and how materiality and scale can evoke senses such as tactility. Through integrating illusionistic oil painting with installation, the artist creates works which represent commonplace objects and domestic environments, whilst playing with notions of the real and artificial by merging the painted world spatially with our own.

Anne-Marie Jean

Anne-Marie Jean is a painter and visual artist, a current PhD candidate in painting at Australian National University School of Art and Publication Manager at Art Monthly Australia magazine. She has lived, taught, painted and exhibited in both Australia and New Zealand since graduating from a BA with Honours in painting at ANU in 1996. She maintains strong links to New Zealand where she lived from 2000-2012. 

Jean’s current work and research explores the painters experience in nature and the nature of the materials of painting. In the studio she investigates through 2 and 3D languages her own experience walking and painting in forests in Australia and New Zealand and the ways in which the materials and languages of paint and painting can embody a physical and phenomenal experience of nature for viewers.

Naomi Zouwer

Naomi Zouwer is a PhD candidate in the Textiles Workshop at the School of Art. She teaches Art and Design at CIT and is a published children’s book illustrator.

Naomi’s current PhD practice-led research explores the intrinsic value and social role of objects and still life painting traditions. She explores stories of migration including her own family's archive. Knowledge systems such as taxonomies, encyclopaedias and collections inform her work. All of this is viewed through the lense of Foucault’s notion of heterotopic space, allowing her to read multiple layers of meaning into her work.
Using textiles and painting techniques Naomi’s work oscillates between 2D and 3D space. Removing the background of her work dislocates the still life object and is an analogy for her migrant history. This speaks to the current political narrative surrounding refugees.