THE WALLS ART SPACE
MEDIUM RARE: ELLAMAY FITZGERALD | MIXED EMOTIONS: PART 1
MIXED EMOTIONS: PART I is a collaboration between three Asian Australian artists who live and work on the Gold Coast and Brisbane region. Through video, performance and music, this work is a celebration of Asian heritage and reflects upon the mixed-race experience; whereby identities exist within a space that is between multiple cultures.
Growing up, ELLAMAY FITZGERALD experienced a loss of ethnic identity due to a disconnection to her Thai culture. She found support in the online and arts community, connecting with other Asian Australians who shared similar experiences of up-bringing, challenges of identity and societal pressures to assimilate.
Directed and filmed by Ellamay, Mixed Emotions: Part I reflects the artist’s own journey of self acceptance and a calling to reconnect to her Thai roots. The work was created site-specifically on the headland of Burleigh Heads with Performance Artist, Wanida Serce and Harpist, Lisa Tran Kelly.
ELLAMAY KHONGROJ FITZGERALD b. 1992, is a Australian Thai Artist living and working on Yugambeh Country QLD. Her work explores the human condition through experimental imagery of the female form and its connection to the natural environment. Recently Ellamay has shifted her focus to explore her own Thai culture and mixed Asian identity through her arts practice. Offering a female gaze, Ellamay uses her lens based practice as a platform to challenge social norms, elevate people from diverse cultural backgrounds and under-represented voices.
Ellamay graduated with a Bachelor of Photography from QCA Brisbane, 2014. She has presented works both solo and collaboratively for Generate GC 2021, Bleach Festival 2020, Placemakers Gold Coast, Mint Art House, Level Up Gallery, Level One Seventeen Gallery, Running Duck Theatre Company, SUNSTUDIOS Sydney and QCA Brisbane.
Ellamay is currently a Resident at Mint Art House in Burleigh Heads, Gold Coast.
As part of SWELL Fringe Festival THE WALLS ART SPACE will present MEDIUM RARE; site-specific art and sculpture symposium: responding to the physical and psychological landscape, here and now. MEDIUM RARE is an initiative that supports artists to make and document contemporary artworks in the outdoors and other sites, in their own time and on their own terms. The symposium will showcase documentation of the artists projects and open up discussion about the landscape that we find ourselves in. SWELL SCULPTURE FESTIVAL is Queensland’s largest outdoor sculpture exhibition and takes place on Currumbin Beach from 10-19 September.
