Rie lives and works on Wurundjeri / Woi-Wurrung Country, Melbourne, Australia and
acknowledges the traditional owners and custodians. She would like to pay her respects to elders; past, present and future and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded.
acknowledges the traditional owners and custodians. She would like to pay her respects to elders; past, present and future and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded.
PRACTICE
My practice looks to explore, illuminate and reconfigure connections between collections of material and conceptual phenomena via mixed-media spatial dialogues and installation works.
I seek to highlight tenuous, ignored or overlooked relationships between things in the world - ideas, experiences, memories, materials, images, places, histories and culture - and bring to light unseen or new conversations between them.
My process begins with a specific concept of 'site' that informs the creation of the work. These sites are initially developed as two-dimensional collages, research documents comprised of text, drawings and photographs - that enable me to map and draw out relationships between different phenomena.
A recent site of exploration looks at the links between my own body, habits, subconscious patterning, the 'gesture', handwriting, mark-making and the development of written (European) alphabets.
The site then acts as a working tool, landscape and container to expand and direct the next cycle of embodied research and material development; fieldwork; archival research; and, studio-based research.
Explorations are then synthesized into material components - sculpture, painting, drawing, photography - and activated in spatial dialogues and installation arrangements. These arrangements are grounded in a collagic and non-hierarchical ethos and embrace an unfixed status of both meaning and material.
The resulting work can be viewed as an intentional, honed and materialised articulation of the initial site research, that aims to produce opportunities for new awareness and both an embodied and cognitive experience for the viewer.
I was awarded a PhD from RMIT School of Art in 2022. Recent exhibitions include The body holds itself at The Wandering Room, June 2025; my PhD examination Unseen Equations (Smoke and Mirrors) at Artery Project Space, February 2022; and,The Vessel and the Path at Assembly Point and Brunswick Temporary, 2023. I currently teach Fine Art Drawing and Visual Art Sculpture at RMIT.
