Creative Fellows Josephine Rowe and James Rushford.
From a strong field of nominations, the inaugural Ian Potter Creative Fellowships have been awarded alongside eight Sidney Myer Creative Fellowships.
The Creative Fellowships provide unrestricted, tax-free grants of $200,000 to mid-career Australian artists, creatives, and cultural leaders.
These two-year Fellowships are intended to give recipients the time, space, and resources to develop their practice and take creative risks. They are unfettered, with recipients free to spend their grants as they see fit.
Earlier this year, The Ian Potter Cultural Trust announced it would join the Sidney Myer Fund's longstanding Creative Fellowships program, funding two additional Fellows per year.
The decision to join the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowships program resulted from insights gained from an external evaluation of The Ian Potter Cultural Trust in 2022.
This evaluation aimed to inform the Trust about how it could further support Australian artists beyond its Emerging Artist Grants. Out of this, it was clear that artists needed support beyond the early stages of their careers, for a longer period that was not tied to specific outcomes.
In total, $2 million in funding will flow to ten outstanding individuals including Rushford and Rowe, selected as the 2024 Creative Fellows.
Fellow Josephine Rowe. Image: Dom Krapski.
Josephine Rowe is a writer of fiction, poetry, and essays. She is the author of three short story collections and two novels, including A Loving, Faithful Animal, which was longlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin and selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice.
Rowe has twice been named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist, and her story collection Here Until August was shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize.
She holds fellowships from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University, the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, Literaturhaus Zürich, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others.
Her new novel, Little World, is forthcoming from Black Inc. and Transit Books. She currently lives in coastal Victoria.
Fellow James Rushford. Image: Keelan O'Hehir.
James Rushford is a composer-performer whose work draws from concrète, avant-garde, improvised and collagist musical languages. He also holds a Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts.
Rushford has longstanding performance practices on piano, synthesizers and electroacoustic devices and portative organ – bringing to all of these a delicacy of touch and a harmonic sensibility in which unorthodox tunings coexist with influences from fin de siècle Impressionism, the twentieth century avant-garde, and many strains of popular music.
Rushford has created original work for BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Festival Présences Électroniques, MONA FOMA, Unsound New York Festival, Adelaide Festival, and many more.
A voracious collaborator, he has engaged with experimental music's highest-tier practitioners, including Klaus Lang, Annea Lockwood, David Behrman, Tashi Wada, Haroon Mirza, and distinguished writers Dennis Cooper and Christos Tsiolkas.
Rushford previously received an Ian Potter Cultural Trust Emerging Artist Grant in 2020 to commission a one-of-a-kind microtonal keyboard, the Tonal Plexus, to help advance his innovative compositional practice.
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