Every day: dusk-midnight

Judith Klavins
across

12 February - 8 march

Artist Statement

Judith Klavins is an emerging multi-disciplinary artist, living in tarntanya Adelaide and working on Kaurna Land in South Australia. Her experimental installations include sculpture, video, photography, and printmaking.

Using a practice-led methodology and working with minimal materials and ‘careful handling,’ Klavins speculates on the daily lives of her maternal Tasmanian First Nation and sealer ancestors, who lived on King Island, lutruwita Tasmania, in the middle of Bass Strait, in the 1820-1840’s.

An ancestral diary, and a recent King Island Artist Residency, has led to her develop a new moving image work across (2025). The diary described her ancestors’ practice of ‘making a smoke and raising the wiff (flag)’ to trade wallaby skins with passing ships.

This act became the basis of her Windsignalling instrument series. To help her unravel her complex learnings and re-connect through time and place, Klavins began sending short messages from the island, back across the skies to her local beach. Upon her return, she has started trying to decipher her own messages in her new moving image work, across (2025).

Whilst she does not personally or culturally identify as a First Nations person, her work often addresses her ancestral history and the impact of colonization.

Artist Bio

Judith Klavins is an emerging multi-disciplinary artist. Her installations include sculpture, video, photography, textiles, drawing, and printmaking. In 2022, Klavins graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Art from the Adelaide Central School of Art and received the ACSA Board of Governor’s and Guildhouse Award of Excellence.

Using a practice led methodology which focusses on minimal materials and ‘careful handling’, Klavins creates artworks which poetically engage and speculate upon her relationship with coastal environments where she has lived, returns to regularly, and to which she has ancestral connections. By re-framing the gaps in archival collections and family narratives, Klavins responds to the troubling and complex histories often documented between sealers and Tasmanian First Nation’s women.

Klavins held her first large solo exhibition Stories in Ink: John Scot(t)’s Diary (1836-1847) at the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Art, Hobart, Tasmania (2016-17). Her work responded to her ancestor’s transcribed personal diary located in the Tasmanian Archives, Hobart. Following this exhibition, the University of Tasmania purchased five works for their Fine Art Collection and these works were exhibited in Here and Elsewhere: New Acquisitions from the UTAS Fine Art Collection, Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart (2019).

Klavins has won awards, and exhibited in group exhibitions, across South Australia and Tasmania. Two artist residencies in 2024 enabled her to develop new works for her recent exhibition waters ways with Amanda Seacombe at the Floating Goose Studios and this new work, across (2025).