Carly Fischer is a sculptural artist from Narrm/Melbourne, Australia who often works collaboratively across sculpture, sound and video to create expansive installations. Her place-responsive practice engages with the smaller details, forgotten fragments, hidden histories and peripheral dialogues of specific places and sites through improvisational and accumulative processes of wandering, field recording, archival research and collaborative experimentation. Weaving alternate narratives through incidental intersections and tangents, these processes generate sculptural, sonic and video responses that slip between form, materiality and context, reflecting on places as complex and shifting sites of interaction and negotiation. Through carefully constructed assemblages of found and fabricated fragments, her sculptures and installations encourage a more intimate and durational engagement with the more peripheral details and dialogues of our local environments.        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Carly’s sculptural practice is particularly concerned with material slippage as a technique to encourage a closer process of looking at and engaging with the details of places. Often ambiguously merging found objects with subtle reconstructions in materials such as wood, concrete, ceramic, paint and paper, her carefully constructed assemblages shift between the mundane, peripheral and forgotten detritus she often references and their labour-intensive, hyper-real replacements. Collapsing forms, materialities and contexts into each other, this slippage refers to the shifting place of objects in our environments, through gentrification, reproduction and commodification, as well as reflecting on the ongoing relevance of sculpture to provide a subtle interruption or commentary amongst these objects and their circulation. Often starting from specific places and sites as a point of departure, her processes of tangential wandering and accumulative research result in sculptural forms that are assemblages of encounters, memories and dialogues. Since 2012, her sculptures and sculptural installations have often incorporated sonic components in collaboration with sound artists, through a similar process of field recording and reconstructed assemblages, experimenting with conversations between sonic and sculptural forms and materialities.

Since 2018, Carly has been collaborating with audiovisual artist Edwina Stevens to develop sculptural and audiovisual projects that are more generative and improvisational responses to local places. Based in Narrm/Melbourne, but also drawing on Edwina’s connections to Aotearoa, their projects are particularly focused on the political importance of smaller details and local narratives. Their often expansive sculptural and audiovisual installations incorporate collected and reconstructed fragments, field recordings, archives and synthesised sound that overlaps and shifts to create generative dialogues with places. Their collaborative sculptural and audio installation 'I feel the earth move under my feet', created in response to a residency at Melbourne's Living Museum of the West, was exhibited at Incinerator Gallery in 2019, and was also included as a soundscape iteration for radio in Radiophrenia 2019, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow. Their following sculptural and audiovisual collaboration 'Conversation Piece' was exhibited at Bus Projects in 2021 and as a 2-channel audiovisual iteration in The Incinerator Art Award in 2021. Their most recent sculptural and audiovisual collaboration 'Velodrome' was exhibited at Schoolhouse Gallery, Coburg in 2022 and at Stockroom Kyneton in 2023. A soundscape iteration of the work was also included in Radiophrenia 2023, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow. In 2024, they collaborated on a soundscape for Carly's sculptural installation 'Ruins in Reverse', exhibited in the former morgue of The Beechworth Asylum, Victoria, as part of The Beechworth Biennale, a site-specific exhibition held in various locations throughout Beechworth, Victoria.

Carly completed an MFA in 2015 at Monash University (Professor Callum Morton), focusing on some of the problems with site- specific practice in a contemporary context. She has exhibited widely in Australia, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, the UK, Japan and the US through solo, group and collaborative projects and residencies, including at Bus Projects, BLINDSIDE, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre and Incinerator Gallery, Melbourne, The Art Gallery of Ballarat, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery, Watch This Space, Alice Springs, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, KWADRAT and REH Kunst, Germany and MU Artspace, Netherlands. Carly has also been a finalist in prizes such as The 2017 Guirguis New Art Prize, The Art Gallery of Ballarat and The 2018 Incinerator Art Award with her work 'Creating False Memories for a Place That Never Was', in collaboration with sound artist Mieko Suzuki. Since 2009, she has collaborated with Mieko Suzuki, Arno Raffeiner and Yukihiro Taguchi on the bi-monthly, curated concept art and sound event KOOKOO at OHM Berlin, inviting sound and visual artists from various international locations. She has been the recipient of Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne and Australia Council Art Grants as well as an Australian Postgraduate Award and The Vice-Chancellor's Award for her MFA research at Monash University. She has previously lived and worked in Berlin and Tokyo and currently resides in Narrm/Melbourne.

carly_fischer@yahoo.com.au

Carly acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which she lives and works, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation and pays respects to Elders past, present and emerging. Sovereignty has never been ceded.