Alice Woo Hwa McCool

KEY ROLES

2023~ : OSCA – Creative Producer

2022~ : fine print magazine – Facilitator

2020~24 : Nexus Arts – Gallery Manager/General Manager

2019-22: FELTspace – Co-director

2019: Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) - Gallery invigilator

WRITING/EXHIBITIONS/COLLABORATIONS

Upcoming: Bus Projects - Friend/Free (to love) - Curated with Ena Grozdanić

Upcoming: Sawtooth ARI - Other together - Curated with Ena Grozdanić

Upcoming: OSCA x Documentary Film Society - Curated with Kim Sums and Yusuf Ali Hayat

2025: Suite7a: Memory Halo - Curated by Jemi Gale
2024: firstdraft – Broadening the joining - Exhibition essay for Lisa Myeong-Joo

2024: un Projects: un Extended - Everybody Everywhere All At Once - cowritten with Is Randell

2023: Post Office Projects - Loose Ends exhibition with Jonathan Kim (SA), Lisa Myeong Joo (NSW) and Sunyoung Lee (Korea) - Curator

2022: PHOTO 2022 - Together exhibition with Henry Wolff (SA) - Collaborator

2021: FELTspace - Body Work exhibition with Kate Bohunnis (SA), Henry Wolff (SA), Stephanie Doddridge (SA) and Maya Victoria Pask AKA Queenie Bon Bon (Vic) - Curator

INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE

2024: fine print magazine – COMMON WORDS: Biennale of Sydney writers retreat – Facilitator

2024: Creative Australia - Visual Art Publishing Review: Roundtable – Participant

2024: Regional Galleries Association SA Access + Inclusion in the Arts Forum - Presenter

2023: Post Office Projects - Exhibition Program Selection Panel

2022: Helpmann Academy - Working With Galleries - Presenter with Sebastian Goldspink, Caitlin Eyre and Gillian Brown, facilitated by Patrice Sharkey

2022: Guildhouse - Studio Program Selection Panel

2021: Adelaide Central School of Art - ARI Forum - Presenter

2021: Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) - Studio Program Selection Panel

MENTORSHIPS/GRANTS/AWARDS

2025: Hyphenated Projects - Starter Pack mentorship and micro residency program participant

2024: Creative Australia - (re)situate Biennale Delegates Program Participant

2023: Mentorship with Talia Smith - Independent Artist and Curator

2023: Arts SA Project Grant - Independent Artists and Groups, Artform Area: Visual Arts

2021: City of Adelaide - Arts and Culture Quick Response / Cultural Promotion Grants

2007: University of South Australia - John Christie Wright Memorial Prize, Awarded to an outstanding student majoring in Painting

EDUCATION

Graduate Diploma of Management (Arts & Culture), University of South Australia, 2019

Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours), University of South Australia, 2009

"We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves. We look for a taste of it in the food we order and the ingredients we buy. Then we separate. We bring the haul back to our dorm rooms or our suburban kitchens, and we re-create the dish that couldn’t be made without our journey." — Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (2021).

The traditional colour spectrum 오방색 is a prominent pattern found in Korean arts and traditional textiles. The colours of red, blue, yellow, white and black represent five cardinal directions; south, east, centre, west and north respectively. This idea of five orientations being brought together to visually represent Korean traditional culture finds resonance with the underlying concepts and artworks of Loose ends.

The journey to understanding personal and cultural identity is never a straight line or clear path. There are ruptures along the way, historical, cultural or geographical barriers, that fragment this line of enquiry. This exhibition relishes the fragments - the loose ends - inviting us to let go of where one has been or where one is going, and reminding us that knowledge is forged along the way.

Loose ends curated by Alice Castello, thoughtfully considers the complexities of self representation, personal history and cultural hybridity. Bringing together works by Lisa Myeong-Joo, Jonathan Kim and Sun Young Lee, this exhibition threads together their their personal enquiries and notions of identity, belonging, alignment and subversion, using mediums such as performance, jogakbo, drawing and dance. These varied expressions, a culmination of different pathways and journeys, are interwoven by a shared cultural heritage.

written by Nanette Orly

Body Work

Body Work is centered around modalities of labour situated on and within our bodies; exploring how bodies are employed as sites of labour or implicated by acts of labour. Through their work, Kate Bohunnis, Maya-Victoria Pask aka Queenie Bon Bon, Henry Wolff and Stephanie Doddridge challenge and reinterpret representations of labouring bodies.

At a time when there are so many social restrictions placed on our bodies, how does the labour we undertake intrinsically cross our own physical borders?

body/ work

i am a work interrupted

by a colonial gaze

by a colonial violence

by a colonial law

born into a system I did not consent to

a system future generations don’t consent to

yet tied to

we know

will die to

your language is undoing while your prisons are doing

brothers cuffed to slave labour

economic boom to bust

hands built to carve wood

now rest

wrapped around steele bars

the options of a colonial body

a choice

the options of a colonised body

don’t exist

i am fauna, i am flora

i am dirt and dust and water and rock

trauma within the land, is trauma within the body

work needs the body

the body needs work, work for the body

the colony’s body needs work, our bodies work for the colony

a body in need of freedom

a body in need to be moved by the seasons and winds

a natural force of modality, moves my gravity

the body needs freedom

freedom needs work, freedom needs the body to work

did we have a word for freedom before enslavement?

i often think about what resting would feel like

because when i open my eyes every morning i already feel the weight of knowing

but i still have questions

what is the bush medicine to heal wounds inflicted by the colony?

will we seek to stop waves, that poverty product drift on?

how much wood would i need to burn their buildings down?

a body so badly bruised from working on the mines, he now works with a numb arm

a numb neck. my uncle.

can you replace the pain with new pain

good pain

feel good pain?

like fuckable pain

like ride that dick pain

don’t fuck with white dick pain.

i sat with a student of mine, we cried about chronic disease

within our families

our tears fuelled by sadness

grief and frustration.

sadness for there is no escape

frustrated that the colony still has such deep roots into our existence, our bodies.

i wanna float like whites girls on Instagram, eating vegans diets, eating blueberries in the sunlight

it all starts with a glass of warm water.

i can’t find calm in my body, as there is no calm in the land, not even my instagram is calm, flooded with news of another death in custody, two deaths, a rally, four deaths, a memorial, five deaths, another funeral, four hundred and something deaths.

i float in grief.

- Dominic Guerrera

Born in South Korea, Alice lives and works on unceeded Kaurna Yarta as an intercountry adoptee. She has a broad range of experience in the visual arts sector, spanning curating, writing, creative producing, event coordination and the delivery of public programming.

Alice is a Facilitator at fine print magazine, an independent magazine cultivating critical and experimental discussion around contemporary art, both online and in shared spaces and a Creative Producer for OSCA (Open Space Contemporary Arts), a South Australian arts organisation dedicated to the development of new models of participation and arts engagement across city, urban and regional locations. Her previous roles include Gallery Manager and General Manager at Nexus Arts and Co-Director at FELTspace. She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) and Graduate Diploma in Arts and Cultural Management from the University of South Australia.

In 2024, Alice was selected as a participant within the Creative Australia (re)situate Biennale Delegates program.

Loose ends

Body Work

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