Peta Clancy

Peta Clancy works with photography to explore the themes of transience, temporality, mutability and the corporeal and subjective limits of the human body. Whether it is via her engagement with the skin or the microscopic forms, that can so profoundly affect our lived experience, in her photographs the boundaries of the body and the self are depicted as irregular and in a constant state of change. She completed a PhD in Fine Art at Monash University in 2009 with the support of a Monash Graduate Scholarship. In 2010 she was awarded a New Work Grant from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. During 2010-2011 she will undertake a three-month residency at SymbioticA - Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts, at the UWA in Perth with artist Helen Pynor where they will research the project The Body is a Big Place. The project will explore questions arising from the processes and practices of organ transplantation and culminate in a collaborative installation to be exhibited at Performance Space in November 2011. They have been awarded grants from the Visual Arts Board (New Work) and an Interarts (Project) from the Australia Council for the Arts to develop the project. Following her interest in biology, during 2002-2003, Clancy undertook a residency at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, where she investigated the visualisation and perception of the human body and developed the Visible Human Bodies project. She has held solo exhibitions at Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney; Faculty of Art and Design Gallery, Monash University; Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; and Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, UK. Her work has been included in the following group exhibitions Imagining the Everyday - Australian Photomedia at the Pingyao International Photography (PIP) Festival, Shaanxi, China, 2010; U Turn, Glendale College Art Gallery, Los Angeles, USA 2007. She has been shortlisted for the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, Gold Coast City Art Gallery and the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award, Sydney. Her works have been featured in contemporary art journals including Eyeline, Australian Art Collector and Photofile and in the publications Look! Contemporary Australian Photography by Anne Marsh and Art in the Age of Technoscience - Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art by Ingeborg Reichle. Clancy received the Visual Arts/Craft Board Australia Council for the Arts London Studio in 2004.