Bridget Waters 
Bridget Waters is a Food & Fibre Artist who makes amazing creations that transform food materials into artworks. The food is therefore used as if it were any other material such as paint, with the artist focusing on the innate qualities of each chosen medium, and highlighting its potential. The result being, stunning food artworks that are both interesting and visually engaging while offering an alternative beauty to the traditional ideal presented.
Waters’ work explores and presents ways of enjoying food, other than through consumption alone. Although food allergies were, the initial source of her ideas, Waters’ most recent research has focused on the encouragement of other people’s awareness of its materiality.
Food plays such an intrinsic part in our lives and health. When something is taken for granted, it loses its’ essence. An essence Waters skillfully regains through elegance and humor.
Waters’ work is not an effort to disguise the material, but rather, an opportunity to challenge and provoke the viewers other senses. Using minimal intervention, the works rely on simple colour/texture relationships to create something more than just food. They become Artworks in their own right.
Previous work ranges extensively from carved bread sculptures, to a dress made out of dehydrated beetroot, installations using dyed rice, forks woven with corn husks, as well as slick and sophisticated catering appointments for corporate clients.
Graham Hay
After growing up on a NZ farm, Graham Hay worked in remote, rural South and Western Australia, for an oil exploration crew, for a farming organisation, and with various Perth restaurants. After graduating from UWA, Edith Cowan and Curtin Universities, he has been invited to and worked within ceramic and art communities not just in Australia, US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, but also in Lithuania, Singapore, Hungary, Norway, Turkey and Pakistan.
In addition to specialising in paperclay, Graham has converted over 20 tonnes of compressed paper (an artificial "hardwood") into sculptures. This year alone, he has exhibited large paperworks at Busselton's Southbound, Cottesloe's, Sculture by the Sea, created a nontoxic fungi infected compressed paper seat for the Melville Sculpture Walk, and a 7000 book installation at a Mandurah library. Public collections in WA, Lithuania, Hungary, Turkey, and USA have acquired his work and his website: www.grahamhay.com.au is a treasure trove of paper and paperclay sculpture information, articles and images.
"Having made many creative birthday cakes for my daughter, and my art from thousands of pieces of paper, clay, biros and even colouring pencils," said Graham, "the idea of making something really big from food is so appealing!" "Plus I have enjoyed the times I have worked creatively with regional communities in the past, such as in Geraldton, Bunbury, Carnarvon, Esperance, Albany, Collie and Newman."
Louise Elscot
Louise is a sculptor who specialises in creating site-specific, landscape-based installations. For the last ten years she has focused on creating sculptural works that are based within or about the landscape. Her sculptural works represent an interaction between the artist and environment and they enable the viewer to examine their own responses to that landscape.
Louise holds a Diploma of Fine Arts from Claremont School of Art, a BA in Fine Arts from Curtin University, and a Graduate Diploma of Education. She has taught art in various secondary schools since 2000, whilst maintaining her own artistic practice.
Louise’s works have been shown in various galleries and locations since 1993. In 1998, Louise was awarded the Young Sculptor’s Award for her installation in Sculpture by the Sea, Albany. In 2002, Louise was invited to Ireland to participate in a four month artist-in-residency, contributing works to the annual Cork Art Trail Festival. She has recently been invited for a three month artist-in-residency in Thailand at the end of 2008.
Louise is extremely excited about being a part of the Creative Challenge project and looks forward to working with food as a medium within the landscape. She sees the Creative Challenge residency as a fantastic opportunity to live, work, collaborate and create with enthusiastic young members of regional communities.
Fiona Gavino 
Fiona Gavino an artist of Spanish/Filipino, Maori and Anglo Australian heritage identifies her self as a typical Australian. As Lycia Trouton (DCA, MFA, BFA (Hons), states on Gavino, ‘she is a valuable citizen in this multicultural nation! Gavino [has] a deep sensitivity towards ecological issues together with a direct handling of materials; at the same time, there is a fragile elegance in [her] methods of making. Inter-culturalism and trans-cultural arts practice still hold a particularly fragile space in Australia.’
Working primarily with recycled materials and plant fibres to create 3D sculptures my work calls for the attention to the 'natural' the sustainable and the need to celebrate it. My practice focuses on the coming together of cultures through the universal language of weaving. Bringing together the threads of community to create new ways of understanding
Australian identities.
The 2008 Awesome Arts Creative challenge offers me as an artist the fabulous opportunity to work with some of the most inspiring people in the country - the youth of regional Australia.
This year’s theme of food will reach out to excite the senses and offer all involved a smorgasbord of creativity to ‘Feast’ on.
Amanda Barrett Hayes
(Movement Director and Teacher)
Amanda holds an M.A. in Movement Studies from Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Originally from the US, she is trained in classical and contemporary dance and choreography, and holds a B.A. in Theatre Performance from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Amanda enjoys teaching young aspirants as each class is a magical learning experience. She currently works as a movement director and tutor for the WA Opera’s Young Artist Program. Merging her performance background with a visual arts approach to food is an exciting concept she looks forward to exploring on the FEAST Creative Challenge project.
Minaxi May
As a visual artist, Minaxi exhibits art, creates public art, commissions for art projects, arts festivals and is a facilitator of community art. Minaxi has a BA in Visual Arts, a MA in Art Therapy and qualifications in Multimedia, Graphic Design and teaching as well as skills in animation and fashion. She is currently a PhD candidate at Murdoch University. Maxi is particularly inspired by art methods such as installation and print, using bought, reusable or ephemeral materials including plastics (acrylic, toys, objects & vinyl) stickers, food, fabrics and new/multi-media. Maxi’s work investigates themes of popular, urban and media cultures and their impact on notions of beauty, consumerism, design and the everyday with a focus on colour, pattern, repetition and play. She has received numerous prizes including the Artsource Gunnery Residency at Artspace, Sydney, where she presented a studio showing, Playtime. Her work has been exhibited both locally and nationally, with her solo exhibition Tagged: Celebrity.Change.Commodity. continuing to tour throughout Western Australia in 2008 (three years). Maxi’s work is featured in private collections internationally and in Australia, including the Cruthers Collection. Minaxi has a keen interest in artistic and community collaboration. In the past, whilst supporting her art practice, here and overseas, she was employed as a vegetarian cook, which cultivated her passion for cooking. She is enthused by the possibilities of food for its diverse pliable, colourful and decorative abilities when used as an art medium.
Marnie Orr
Marnie Orr is an interactive dance performer (www.anonanon.biz), installation designer, and co-director of ROCKface (UK) researching parallels between site-specific dance and ecology. She is an active member of the transcultural trans disciplinary movement research collective InVivo.
Marnie presents workshop laboratories in Australia and the UK, extending participants’ physicality, oral language, sensory awareness and perception. Through fun immersive activities and hardcore workouts, the labs develop body mapping processes within outdoor environments.
Marnie trained as a Bodyweather practitioner with Tess De Quincey’s Sydney-based dance company, 1999-2001 (www.bodyweather.net), has performed in Stuart Lynch’s 24-Hour Performance events, and Sharon Pacey’s Baggage productions. She co-founded ToyBox Circus (1993-1998) travelling Australia in a solar-powered studio truck, and has created cutting edge experiential marketing strategies for Kick Arts in Cairns and WA’s Bridgetown Blues Fest.
Marnie co-produced large-scale multi-media dance events with Leah Grycewicz including the touring Pre-Millennium Drinks (1998) and Stratus999, a 3-month city-wide installation in Cairns (1999). Orr was named Best Up & Coming Talent 1999 in an Arts Queensland publication.
Helen Seiver
I enjoy a challenge of not knowing where a process might lead. I enjoy enabling people to discover that they can make art that is just as relevant as art made by 'an artist'. And, I enjoy being part of the bigger picture, taking the scarey plunge with other people and discovering more about myself.
Eva Varga 
With a degree in visual arts majoring in sculpture, Eva Varga has turned her hand to painting professionally using a variety of mediums including oils, acrylics, house paints and mixed media. Much of her 2D work is textural, evoking a feeling of movement, depth and controlled abandonment.
While using images, dreams and imagination as her basis, Eva Varga paints what she feels, to create works which are fresh, diverse, often abstract and sometimes quirky.
Jerrem Lynch
Jerrem's a young (24) visual artist with a degree in Bachelor of fine art (curtin university) 2004. Over the past 3 years he has been working in the displays industry working as an interactive systems developer and commercial artist. Outside of work his art practice bridges many mediums from Painting, sculpture, digital imagery, live video mixing, animation and sound art.
His art mainly deals with human interaction, through emotional attachment and by inspiring myths and stories based around his work.
Jerrem has always been more interested in art which exists outside the gallery. Lately he has been developing his skills in live video mixing/ performance for public projection. He feels this is an exciting new medium which enables plenty of community involvement and also engagement when projected in a public space. It is also a clean form of street art that has high impact but no physical damage.
"I have many different ideas of how I could collaborate as part of the creative challenge...
- collabrate in the production of short video clips to be used in live video mixing and projection. Of which filming, and computer skills can be taught in a fun and interactive way;
-costume making for the above video clips or other performances;
-simple animation techniques or puppet making which could be performed on put into a live video mix.
Lauren Simpson
I have been working with young people since I was 15, however this new change of going to Leonora has got me very excited!
With one AWESOME Festival under my belt, I am ready to push myself to an exciting new level and get my hands dirty during the Creative Challenge FEAST.
Rose Skinner
My artwork is not intended to make a particular statement about our society, it is however created to provoke thought and inspire a new way of seeing the familiar. This position enables the work to be experienced perceptually allowing the viewer to form their own unique thoughts and ideas by drawing on a personal connection and understanding of the common objects used within the installation. My use of throwaway items and their repackaging into engaging and intriguing objects underlines my own views on consumerism drawing a connection to the world we live in and our subsequent effect on the environment. By intertwining elements to tantalise the senses i uitilise light, colour, scent, sound, taste and touch as a means to experience the work on a deeper level. The materials and elements that I use are imperative to the emotions experienced by the audience creating an elevated level of energy and mood linking positive emotion to the life and the memory of the work.
Sarah Wilkinson
Sarah Wilkinson is an arts worker based in Perth, WA, currently working freelance in festival events, theatre productions and community performance projects. Most recently she has worked with DADAA WA, the UWA Perth International Arts Festival and SWERVE Inc.
Sarah's passion for festivals and theatre has led her to work on a number of amazing projects over her career as a director, producer, co-ordinator, performer and writer. Sarah's work is a combination of outdoor performance/events and community and cultural development projects.
Highlights include; Lost Generation, DADAA WA, Inform, PVI Collective, Stretch Festival, City of Mandurah, Nyoongar Boodja, Mr Cha Cha's Ballroom, UWA Perth International Arts Festival, Krismes Karaoke, Christmas Island Neighbourhood Centre, Darwin Festival, 1000 Voice Choir & Flask Choirs, Perth International arts Festival, Walylup Dreaming, City of Fremantle, We Are Family, Deckchair Theatre and Exile.
Rebecca Baumann
Rebecca Baumann completed a BA in Fine Arts at Curtin University of Technology in 2003. Since then, as well as being a practising artist, she has worked on a diverse range of projects across festivals, film and theatre.
Rebecca's art practice spans the mediums of photography, bookmaking, sculpture and installation, and her recent work has explored themes of happiness and anxiety, celebration and spectacle. She is excited by the possibilities of a contemporary food art installation, and eing able to facilitate something that embraces the colour, and the decay. Rebecca is ready to 'stir the pot' with some inspired young people for the FEAST Creative Challenge!
