About

Recent works reflect the ongoing impacts of my grandfather’s escape from post‑WW2 Hungary and his life as a refugee in Australia, and also the duality of being directly descended from three of the Bounty mutineers and the Tahitian people they held captive on Pitcairn Island.  I ponder what this inheritance means for how I understand power, care, materiality and responsibility.  These themes are currently explored in sculptural forms made from plastic kitchen waste and garden debris, such as 'drift', 'past present networking' and 'choke point', and in my textile work-in-progress 'the children of count alfred'.  

Fascinated by decaying subject matter and what it reveals about the relationship between death, regeneration and the human psyche, I wonder if the adage “ashes to ashes and dust to dust” begins to shift—from an image of nutrient cycling to a warning of what may become of us if we fail to honour life and its rhythms.  Using plastic bread bags and tags to create forms that are both seductive and unsettling, making something “beautiful” from a material directly implicated in ocean plastic and environmental harm, I am in dialogue with the ocean journeys of my ancestors and the skills some of them held for living more sustainably with their environments.  

I am drawn to cultural understandings, practices and symbols that persist across time and place, and things shared between diverse communities. I have been privileged to spend time in ceremony with Narrinjirri, Raminjerri, Yorta Yorta and Nyampa First Nations Elders, and in the United States with Lakota, Navajo, Ojibwa and Inupiat elders and medicine people. While in no way speaking for these cultures, I hold these teachings with deep respect and acknowledge their profound influence, which informs my thinking about continuity, reciprocity and respect, and my approach to material and environmental empathy."

1975 Melbourne, Vic, Australia 

2022 Lot 19 Spring Sculpture Prize, Lot 19 Art Space

2018 Lot 19 Spring Sculpture Prize, Lot 19 Art Space

2016 Terrain, with Helene Athanasiadis, The Diggers Store

2015 Earth Heart Beat, Moora Moora Festival

2015 I Know You Myth Me, solo show, Brunswick Street Gallery

2015 Small Works Prize, Brunswick Street Gallery

2015 Future-Hindsight, Respond to This, Castlemaine State Festival 

2015 Fire and Honey, Jinari Mountain and Allis Hamilton (Maun) poetry, stories and sung word. Castlemaine Fringe Festival

 









 

·  Where is the Wild - poetry and writings by Jinari Mountain self published, 2014





















·  Life Drawing Tutor, Seven Sisters Festival, 2014

.  Drawing Down the Moon, private group art classes for women 2013

·  Session facilitator for Interchange Loddon Campaspe, Art and Art Therapy activities, 2009