ABOUT

 
 
Merilyn Fairskye

Merilyn Fairskye is is a visual artist living in Sydney whose video and photographic work explores the effects of powerful events of real life on humans and the environment. Current work about the relationships between technology, atomic landscapes and community has taken her on location to the Polygon in Kazakhstan, Sellafield, Chernobyl, and other key nuclear sites. This has resulted in an art film, video installations and photographic series that have been exhibited in Australia and internationally.(Full CV available as a pdf download.)

Her work has been presented in over 180 exhibitions and festivals, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of NSW; Songzhuang Art Museum, China; the National Palace Museum, Taipei; Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival, Doha; the International Film Festival Rotterdam; Videobrasil; Kassel Documentary Film Festival and the Sydney Film Festival. Her feature-length art film, Precarious, was nominated for the 2012 Al Jazeera Documentary Channel long-form film award.

Her work has been recognized through artist residencies in the US, Italy, France, UK & Australia, numerous Australia Council and Australian Film Commission grants and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. It is held in most public collections in Australia, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and the Getty Center, Santa Monica. It featured in the three-part television arts series The Good Life, (ABC TV), and My Favourite Australian (ABC TV), and has been extensively written about in the art and general press including Sydney Morning Herald, Artlink, Cahiers du Cinema, Asia Pacific Arts, Art & Australia. It is the subject of a book chapter in A Secret History of Australian Art (Rex Butler).

Fairskye has been invited to submit proposals for numerous public art works with substantial budgets. She has been awarded 12 major public art commissions, alone or in collaboration with other artists, since becoming a professional artist.