Jude van der Merwe has over 30 years’ experience in the visual arts and cultural sector and is an independent senior consultant and curator specialising in exhibition and cultural development, arts and culture policy and strategy and public art development and implementation.   

Jude is a founding member and currently lead curator of the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (IOTA24) and works closely with artists, artisans, galleries and organisations from Australia and Southeast Asia.  

She is current Vice President of the World Crafts Council Asia Pacific Region, Board Member of the World Crafts Council Australia; member of the Advisory Board Curtin University for the School of Design and the Built Environment.   

Ron Bradfield Jnr is a Bard, Jawi man of the saltwater peoples around Djarindjin, Western Australia. Born in Mooniemia (Northampton), he grew up in Jambinu (Geraldton), but now calls Walyalup (Fremantle) his home.  

As the CYO of Yarns R Us, Ron supports artists, arts professionals, arts organisations and institutions across Australia and overseas and is currently the Community Engagement Facilitator, with the John Curtin Gallery at Curtin University. 

As a storyteller and artist, Ron tells and makes stories that unpick his own personal experiences surviving our society and what it is to be ‘Australian’. As the eldest son of a Stolen Generations mother, Ron presents stories of himself as a child, as an adult and as an ex-serving member, of the Australian Defence Force. 

Tapping into the physical memories of a time past through the use of familiar objects and Australian culture markers, Ron retells his stories, challenging today’s Australians about how they remember the places they grew up in and the experiences they had, well away from the reality of Aboriginal and Islander peoples. 

(Image Credits: Ron Bradfield Jnr wearing his artwork In Plain Sight 2019. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Moyle, 2019.)

Tom Mùller is an established multi-disciplinary artist with an active international practice spanning the realms of site-responsive, temporal and permanent projects. His work has been included in major exhibitions and Institutions including The National at Carriageworks, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Adelaide Biennial, Biennale de la Chaux-de-Fonds, and the upcoming Northern Alps Triennale in Japan. He has been the recipient of multiple Australia Council grants, the inaugural winner of the Qantas Contemporary Art prize, a mid-career fellowship from the Department of Culture and the Arts. In 2009 won the Basel international residency program through the Christoph Merian Stiftung. He was mentored by the Russian-American conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov in New York, and studied Anthroposophy at Emerson College in London. He holds a BFA (first class honours) in Sculpture from Curtin University of Technology. 

In parallel to his personal practice, Tom is also the co-founder and Artistic Director of the Fremantle Biennale. 

In a number of senses Tom Mùller is a big picture artist. Globalisation, the environment, space and time all fascinate him. He seems to prefer vast data sets, expansive geographies, sweeping timeframes and sequences of history. And yet, at the same time, Mùller is attentive to fine detail, to the specificities of things local, to the poetry of small, momentary and fleeting things that resonate. In this big picture sense Mùller is interested in structures, processes and dynamics. He understands the universe as an infinitely complex network of endlessly interconnected systems. In the natural world these systems are manifest everywhere, from the minutest forms of matter through to the grand architecture of the cosmos. In the corresponding human realm these dynamics are expressed through information and communication technologies and other network infrastructures. An astute observer, subtle activist and deeply humane artist, Mùller posits far-reaching analytical links and associations between the seemingly distinct but invariably interconnected elements that together comprise the architecture of our world. His work is rich in ironic and sometimes humorous insights into how we grasp and assimilate knowledge and about the dazzlingly complex systems we inhabit. Even as we calculate the chances of eventual worldwide calamity, Mùller’s thought-provoking practice offers vantage points from which to imagine optimistically better futures. His diagrams and graphs create rhythms in the chaos and suggest the emergence of other worlds and alternate horizons.