Student Profile

Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont

Artists
Bachelor of Art (Fine Art)

We had heard positive things about the art course at Curtin, in terms of the staff and facilities.

At time at Curtin was invaluable in terms of making connections with people within the arts community, our lecturers and our peers. We formed a successful collaboration during our degree, and we still work together successfully 7 years later. We formed many friendships with likeminded people and developed the foundation of our professional arts practice. Winning the award for best students working in time-based media and performance at our graduation was another highlight.

We respected the lecturers working within the art school at Curtin as many were professional artists, working within the Perth arts community, nationally and internationally. The technicians we worked with were also very helpful and friendly.
We received great support for our work when we needed it.

We have been working together collaboratively since 2001. Our work spans performance (concentrating on song and dance), film, photography, design and theatre production, with an ongoing interest in the elements of pop culture. We began by applying for smaller group shows and doing whatever we could to get our work shown. After a few years people began to notice what we were doing and we began to get offers for exhibitions and performances.

To date we have exhibited in galleries such as the Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney), The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Canberra Contemporary Art Space; The Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), The Gallery of Modern Art (Queensland) and Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts (St Kilda).

A couple of big highlights were winning the City of Perth Art Award in 2007 with our photograph So That Liberty Shall Not Perish From This Earth from the Heart of Gold Project 3 series. Another was accepted into the prestigious Primavera exhibition at the MCA. In 2010 we won the ‘Brownlow Medal’ of art awards, the prestigious $100,000 Basil Sellers Art Prize for works about sport with our entry Gymnasium. It is Australia’s second-richest art prize.

We have some design and art direction work coming up with STEPS Youth Dance Company and have also been working on a musical called Heart of Gold with fellow Curtin graduate, Thea Costantino, since 2004, which was completed in 2009. We hope to find further work in these areas to complement our art practice.

Our degree most definitely helped our career path. The review process in art school helps you to carefully consider the way you develop new work, how you visually present it to an audience and also how you speak about it. Sometimes it was challenging, but we learnt a lot from those assessments. Also your peers and lecturers are a great support network in the arts community, post graduation. Coming straight from high school into a degree, that kind of network is very important.

We would recommend the degree to people who aren’t looking for traditional arts training. The course at Curtin is very focussed on contemporary art, which is what we were looking for. Having a studio space to work in full time and to be able to receive feedback and support from lecturers and peers was invaluable. It is a great environment to prepare you for a career as a professional contemporary artist. The lecturers were quite open minded too – there were no performance majors when we were there, and they were happy with us doing performance and film work instead of painting, which was our major at the time.