Material Journeys: Meditations on Place
Saturday 11 October from 2pm to 3pm
Join artists Shireen Taweel and Zoë Veness with curator Catherine Woolley as they discuss how approaches to making can deepen our understanding of place. Together they will reflect on the role of pilgrimage, return, and repeated journeys in their respective practices.
The conversation will offer insight into the slow, considered processes that shape their work, from engraving and hand-piercing copper to laminating, patinating, and enamelling metals. Drawing on embodied and inherited knowledge, both artists explore how materials can hold memory, mark movement, and speak to the layered histories of place.
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Shireen Taweel’s studio practice rests within a diasporic landscape of shared histories and fluid identities. Her work is deeply embedded in the materiality and cultural transmutation of copper, exploring the contemporary use of heritage artisan techniques to transform the metal. Her recent work refers to the Arabic science of astronomy, celestial navigation technologies, and pilgrimage, to draw speculative imaginings for decolonial representations of the future in space.
Zoë Veness is an artist, designer, and educator specialising in contemporary jewellery and object-making. Her work explores the transformative potential of materials through repetitive and labour-intensive processes including metal laminating, enamel techniques, and the metallurgical phenomena of patination. Shaped by her repeated journeys between Yuin Country and Gadigal Nura/Sydney, her practice explores place as an evocation of movement and time.
Catherine Woolley is a curator and programs producer based on Bidjigal and Gadigal Country, Sydney. She has a decade of experience working across curatorial projects, community engagement programs, and education initiatives in the arts and culture sector. She is currently the Curatorial & Public Engagement Officer at UNSW Galleries.
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Presented in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Matters of Time: Contemporary Metal Practices’ at UNSW Galleries, 29 August – 16 November 2025.