By Mikayla van Loon
For someone who is only in her early 20s, Jess Coldrey has achieved a lot in her artistic career.
Her most recent achievement was winning the Agendo Art Prize for her self portrait Pet Drone #1.
The 2021 John Monash Scholar was also selected to be Yarra Ranges Tech School’s first artist in residence, which is where she completed her award winning artwork.
Inspired by the 1960s futurism movement in fashion, this project was something Ms Coldrey had been picturing for a number of years.
“It’s this big wave of design and creativity from when people travelled to the moon for the first time and all these ateliers in Paris and around the world and designers experimenting with what would a woman who is in space look like or what would a man wear a few hundred years in the future,” Ms Coldrey said.
“It was this real experimental time in fashion focused on futurism and imagining the future, so I drew a lot of inspiration from that sense of imagination and reference to style.”
Being able to explore her new found interest in technology and mechanics, Yarra Ranges Tech School (YRTS) really was the ideal place for Ms Coldrey to express her creativity.
“I’m really fascinated by technology and engineering, having worked in that space a bit and I really wanted to bring a new language to the debates about technology, one that was a bit more emotional or empathetic and that was my inspiration for styling the artwork.”
YRTS has a number of 3D printers, laser cutters, autonomous bots and drones on campus but it was the universal mechanical arm that caught Ms Coldrey’s attention.
“I just find them so beautiful and graceful. It’s kind of strange to say but the way they move around is very graceful, like a ballerina so I was just super excited to jump in and learn how to use that and get it to interact with me and play out some skits.”
Learning to program the mechanical arm, Ms Coldrey used it in a number of her retro futurism artworks.
As a woman in the STEM space, Ms Coldrey wanted to bring some creativity and neutrality to the discussion around technology and posed in the artwork herself for that reason.
“I think there is a lot of polarisation in society, not just in terms of politics or issues but even with technology, people are either for or against technology in quite extreme ways,” she said.
“I wanted to have a safe, in the middle, neutral person in this proposition about relating to technology, where people could meet in the middle and talk about what they saw in it or what their own emotions and perceptions about what the situation is, kind of like a mutual place for people to have conversations about technology.”
By winning the Agendo Art Prize, Ms Coldrey was the recipient of $10,000 which she plans to put towards buying a drone, a 3D scanner and a small mechanical arm, as well as fund part of her next artist in residence experience in France.
“It’s really great to have some recognition and support about the project and I’m just really excited that I’m able to, through winning the award, I get to share the project with more people and hopefully spark more conversations about technology that have that different tone to them.”
Ms Coldrey’s next artist residency program will send her to France to live in the Botanic Gardens for two weeks, where she plans to create endo pain visualisations with flowers after she was diagnosed with endometriosis just a few weeks ago.
