Lara Thoms
Lara Thoms is a Melbourne based artist working across social engaged, site-specific and participatory fields. From 2014-2016 Lara received a Creative Australia Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts to explore these fields.
Lara was also recently shortlisted for the Victorian Creative State commissions to artistically reimagine the death industry. As an artistic associate of both Aphids and Field Theory, Lara has recently worked on ICON- a large -scale public art project utilising the new Federation Square Screen, and is soon to premiere The Director, a performance in collaboration with a funeral director at ArtsHouse. All of her projects sit within the common theme of reconsidering social hierarchies, highlighting the unexpected and being politically responsive to site. Other recent work includes Before The Siren (2017), a large-scale public artwork exploring how women gather socially, politically and recreationally across generations for Perth International Arts Festival; 9000 Minutes (2016) a live broadcast by Field Theory from Queen Victoria Markets as part of the inaugural Public Art Melbourne Biennale Lab, Lara’s solo and collaborative projects include work shown with Liquid Architecture, Gertrude Glasshouse, Next Wave, Substation, Melbourne Art Fair and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA).
As an artistic associate with Aphids, Lara’s inter-disciplinary collaborative projects have been presented at PICA, Brisbane Powerhouse, Dromana Drive In, Malthouse Theatre, Artshouse and Performance Space.
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Mish Grigor
Mish Grigor is an artist who works in performance across a range of collaborative formats. Using autobiographical tools, humour, and fiction, she is intent on examining, wasting and/or cherishing time spent with other people. Interested in the unpredictable, Grigor frequently utilises dialogical spaces, conversational strategies, and other tools of enforced liveness. Based in Melbourne since 2017, she is Director of APHIDS with Lara Thoms and Eugenia Lim. APHIDS functions an as umbrella under which the three artists shield themselves from the grand artist subject, in the process creating a practice that is greater than the sum of its parts.
APHIDS works in various medias, from theatre to gallery contexts, text based work, and occasionally slumber parties. In 2019 APHIDS presented ‘Exit Strategies’, a work about the impossibilities of leaving histories behind, at Artshouse Melbourne. In 2020 they will present ‘HOWL’, a community parade of historically censored art, at the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. She is also one third of POST, formed in 2003, a collaboration who work between popular entertainment and experimental art practices. In 2020 POST are presenting ‘Oedipus Schmoedipus’, in both English and Cantonese, for AsiaTopa Melbourne. The work examines death inside and outside the frames of the western theatrical canon. Originally a commission from Belvoir St Theatre and Sydney Festival, it was translated and adapted for Hong Kong audiences in collaboration with Hong Kong Rep Theatre and West Kowloon Cultural Precinct, and re-adapted again for Australian audiences and diasporic Cantonese speakers.
POST’s previous work ‘Ich Nibber Dibber’ was a Sydney Festival/Campbelltown Arts Centre commission which toured to Sydney Opera House and Malthouse Theatre. Another highlights is ‘Who’s The Best?’, a Sydney Theatre Company commission that toured to capital cities nationally through Performing Lines’ initiative ‘Mobile States’, and then to the Netherlands for Noorderzon Festival. Mish also works as a performer.
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