Rob Kettels

I am an artist and PhD candidate based in Perth, Australia. My art practice addresses specific slippages and errors – in art and the natural sciences – which continue to define the ways in which the environment is perceived in contemporary Western culture. Drawing from current continental philosophy and interdisciplinary discourse, I investigate the prevailing division between the inorganic and organic. I make sculpture, assemblage, audio-video, photography, painting and undertake durational performance in order to articulate my experience of Land. The methodology I engage involves journeys into geographically remote areas in Western Australia. Over the past two years, I have collected and employed materials that are by-products from the mining industry. These raw materials now provide an entry point to explore complex modes of history and ways of knowing. By proposing an alternate point of view, my artwork aims to question the established metaphors used in the imaginary of the geologic. In 2017, I received a Bachelor Degree in fine art (First Class Honours) from Curtin University, and in 2018, I received a Curtin University postgraduate research scholarship which I am currently undertaking.