Jemila MacEwan is a female artist born in United Kingdom, currently working in Australia.
Media: Sculpture, Painting, Photography, Installation, Performance.
My own human survival is connected to the survival of my art practice. This is not about basic survival but a spiritual survival. How does making art stop me from being dead before I am dead? This question alerts me to the conflicts present in humanity and culture.
To negotiate our collective cultural terrain, I adopt multiple disciplines; sculpture, performance, video, and painting. I approach each media as a method for metaphysical and material transformation; transformation is an elemental part of all existence, and the trajectory of that transformation can be altered by conscious intention. I conjure forms that literally evoke processes of transformation – volcanoes, ghosts, cocoons and human/plant hybrids. In my practice, I contemplate the transformation of material and form as a collaboration between myself and elemental forces. I allow all of my work to become vulnerable to external forces and processes which remain mysterious to me.
Jemila MacEwan is a Scottish-born Australian interdisciplinary artist based in New York. MacEwan’s work is characterized by the reconfiguration of the body and familiar objects into uncanny beings, which negate the world around them. Their bodies are simultaneously of this world and a window into alternative realities where accepted hierarchies are rearranged. She received a Masters of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in Australia. Her work has been exhibited at Arquetopia (Mexico), Governor’s Island Art Fair (New York), the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York), the Melbourne International Arts Festival (Place of Assembly, Melbourne), and the Gertrude Street Projection Festival (Australia). She has been generously supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, the Dame Joan Sutherland Fund, the Ian Potter Cultural Council and the Graduate Women of Victoria.