2024 SUPERMASSIVE ARTISTS

SUPERMASSIVE is APHIDS’ program to engage and support the development of the experimental arts community in Australia and beyond. As one of Australia’s leading experimental and artist-led companies, APHIDS looks to forge and sustain relationships with early career and more senior artists, building partnerships and pathways for future opportunities. SUPERMASSIVE demonstrates our commitment to broadening the knowledge and sustainability of arts practices that share and expand APHIDS’ artistic methodologies and approach.

Dr George Criddle is an artist, writer, and occasional curator with English/Australian heritage who makes socially engaged artworks engaging with history, family, land use, and colonial silence. They completed a PhD in 2021 at Monash University having studied previously at Curtin University in Perth, and École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. They currently serve on the Kings Artist Run Gallery board and teach at the Victorian College of the Arts and La Trobe University in Naarm, Melbourne.

Theona Councillor is a Naaguja-Wilunyu woman whose ancestors are from the Greenough and Bowes Rivers. With over 20 years of experience in the music industry, Theona has recorded three albums, performed at numerous festivals, and facilitated many singer-songwriting workshops and cultural events that support and celebrate her Naaguja Culture. Extending these skills to the theatre, Theona is currently working on the creative development and co-production of Murla-na Bula Wula Bulangul – a thoonbijee or ‘opera’ which tells the Councillor family’s oral history of frontier violence that took place in Western Australia’s Midwest in 1854.

Emmaline Zanelli (b.1994) is a lens-based artist uses combinations of video, photography, sculpture and performance. Influenced by aesthetics of absurdity and surrealism, she creates work that finds humour and meaning in the everyday. In recent years, her work has explored themes related to fabrication, memory, and labour. Emmaline completed a BVA at ACARTS in 2015, and a MA in Photography at PSC in Naarm/Melbourne in 2021. Her work has been exhibited in galleries nationally including Stills Gallery (NSW), Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (WA), The Centre for Contemporary Photography (VIC), and the Art Gallery of South Australia. In 2022 she was selected as the winner of The Churchie Emerging Art Prize and named as one of the recipients of the Adelaide Film Festival Expand Lab Commission. She is currently working on an experimental video work exploring the social environment of Roxby Downs, a remote mining town 600km North of Tarndanya built to support the operations of BHP’s Olympic Dam mine.

Charlie Lee is a set and costume designer, and artist interested in using material-led processes as a means of queer worldbuilding, particularly in dance, devised, and community driven works. Their work centres trans* and ecological lenses to build speculative worlds that erode power structures and hegemonic forms of knowledge. Charlie is currently completing a BFA (Production) at the VCA. They are also part of the Emerging Writers Program at SEVENTH Gallery and co-facilitate a Trans Ecology Club at Terrain bookshop.