Student Profiles

Christian de Vietri

Artist
Bachelor of Arts (Visual Art)

I wanted to go to an art school in Perth, and two friends, Annabel Dixon and Jarrod McKenna, who were already enrolled at Curtin, persuaded me to come. I was initially enrolled in another course, but I thought the balance at Curtin of 75% practical work 25% theory would allow me to experiment more with the processes of making art.

My time at Curtin was fun, games and hard work. I enjoyed university life, and it was a stimulating environment in which to grow artistically and intellectually.

The friendships I made during art school were the highlight of my degree. There were many talented people in my year, and I think we pushed each other to make better and better work. I enjoyed working in this communicative and competitive environment. We talked, worked, laughed, drank, and slept together. There was a lot of cross-pollination. We have continued to work and exhibit together after art school.

I did not have contact with all the staff at Curtin, but while working in the sculpture department, Rodney Glick and Bruce Slatter were particularly influential to me during my time at Curtin. I valued their criticism, and I identified with their art work, so we had a good dialogue.

At the end of my degree I went on to do a 6 month student exchange at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. Since then I have been working and exhibiting in Europe and Australia.

Contemporary Art is defined by consistent breaks with tradition, so nowadays the role of the artist is hard to define because it is in perpetual evolution. Its impact is difficult to observe, as its consequences occur in the minds and imaginations of people and in society, and this occurs over many years. I have invented my own position. This is what it means to be an artist – you must create and define the necessity of your own existence. Job vacancies, in an official sense, do not exist for this position. It depends on each artist’s vision and the work they create. I’m interested in developing art that can play host to disjunctive relationships, made of differences (cultural, conceptual, aesthetic) which do not lead to a familiar recognition or identification but generate a new way of connecting to an object, a new logic of association, a new logic of existence. My creative process often begins in boredom. In boredom, an emptying takes place, and emptiness becomes receptiveness, pulling things out of their usual contexts. This opens up ways for a new configuration of things and therefore also for a new meaning, by virtue of the fact that it has also deprived things of meaning. Within this open terrain, new realities emerge that reinvent existing ones. Sculpture for me is a means of materialising an imaginary territory. By using a variety of sculptural and industrial techniques, I have been trying to shift familiar circumstances into ambiguous states of being – an attempt to create transcendence within the bounds of contemporary quotidiana. My artwork and ideas continue to develop.

It has taken time for me to develop the filter through which I view the world – this has meant being observant, critical and receptive to my surroundings and to myself. It has taken me many years to develop the sculpture skills necessary to translate this vision into form, and many exhibitions to convey it to others. It is a constant process.

The art world can work in strange ways. There is always room for the outsider with no education to blow in and go straight to the top, but these people are few and far between, and often do not last or are discovered when they are dead. To attempt a successful art career within your own lifetime, I would recommend a degree at Curtin University. You will acquire practical and conceptual skills, learn about art theory, and most importantly you will develop friendships and professional relationships with other people in your field.