‘Your first set of instincts are usually the best ones’: Meet VCA graduating artist Zane Edwards

Meet Zane Edwards, a graduating Honours student at the VCA whose latest series of portraits explore themes of vulnerability, distrust, and desire. In this captivating body of work, Zane takes on the roles of both artist and subject, creating an interplay between the camera lens and their own identity. We spoke with Zane ahead of debuting this series at the 2023 VCA Art Grad Show.

What can you tell us about your work in this year’s Grad Show?

My work in the show is an attempt to visually poeticise a very raw feeling of vulnerability with distrust. It’s all really kinetic or static portraiture, and a lot of it is of myself. When you’re both behind and in front of the camera, there is a great feeling of desire to get a perspective correct, to emulate yourself correctly with a vision for someone else to view it. However, the perspective is always skewed, so I played with that, adding different material proxies to images that to me instruct a viewer that they’re looking at something perhaps they’re not allowed to. It’s the voyeuristic feeling that perhaps rises in the body that is either shied away from or leaned into that I am working with. Connecting me to the audience in some sort of tangible way so I don’t have to be there in person. It’s mostly a way for me to perform, without me wanting to be there.

What inspired your work?

I was reading a lot of psychoanalysis on desire theory, and its links to queer phenomenology. There’s a feeling when you’re looked at with eyes that gaze upon you with lust. In public, cruising areas, within tight spaces. That interests me. It’s all about the dialogue with the eyes and the face of the other person. Many of us have conversations everyday where we don’t speak and just look at each other. Silent, but just as potent. So much of my community that I have lent on for this project have told me accounts and stories of eye dialogue, sexual encounters, feeling lonely in a space with just two people. I get inspired to produce a feeling that usually ‘isn’t there’.

How does it feel to be graduating? What are your plans after graduation?

This will be my second graduation in a series, I’m sure. It’s always a strange feeling to leave something so intensive that has engulfed you in its arms for months and or it to just let you go without saying goodbye. It always feels good to let something go, just sometimes not in the moment, or days, or weeks after. Can I plan to not plan? Of course, I can. I sense a wind changing for me and I plan to ride that, further study is on the cards, traveling to maybe see some of the things I’ve been writing about in other countries.

How has your practice evolved during your Honours year?

What I got out of Honours most is not just being an artist with an intensive schedule, but the people it comes with. I value the connections I’ve made with other artists and academics here more than the work I’ve produced. It’s kind of always how it goes, the conversations about the work are always better than the work itself. So, my practise has evolved to take on those conversations and make work about them, involve them, centre myself around them and find a way to portray them.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to study Honours at VCA?

Take it as it comes and don’t think too hard. Your first set of instincts are usually the best ones. I feel like I stressed about having a cohesive project and output for the end, when I should have maybe going down more rabbit holes (not that I haven’t fallen through some already). Making work intensively sometimes doesn’t work for some artists, so don’t. Or do, as long as you’re finding pleasure in the chaos. It’s been an incredible jumping off point for me, maybe because I love pleasure and chaos so much.

From your perspective, why is art important in today’s world?

Big question with maybe a small answer. ‘Today’s world’ feels like a fallacy, something always conducive of transient aesthetic trends and with opinions of technology taking away an artist’s valuability, which to me is pure feeling. Art, as broad as it is, is important now as it always was because it can channel feeling that much of what people think we’re up against can’t. Although, that questions the authority of the artist, which is another whole text in itself.

You can view Zane's work at the 2023 VCA Art Grad Show on display from 23–30 November at the University of Melbourne Southbank campus. Open between 11am–5pm daily. Plan your visit.

Discover the Bachelor of Fine Arts (Degree with Honours) at the University of Melbourne