Ivey Wawn (1990) is a dancer working and living primarily on Gadigal Land (Inner Sydney). She makes performances mainly for live audiences and performs regularly in the work of other artists from a range of disciplines. She is committed to dance as a potential form of resistance to social abstraction and commodification, making work about labour, being together, sensation and magic among other things. She is supported to continue working as an artist by working in hospitality, and continues to study a Bachelor of Political Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney (since 2016). Ivey’s work has been supported by Artspace, Arts House, the Australia Council for the Arts, Blindside Gallery, Critical Path, DirtyFeet, First Draft Gallery, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Liquid Architecture, Next Wave Festival, Performance Space, and Underbelly Arts Festival among others. Her practice is also supported by the camaraderie of her friends and colleagues both inside and outside artistic practice.
My practice is based in the body and in dance, but is deeply motivated by ideas and research. Generally my work comes into being through a negotiation of, at one end, deep focus on the internal, and on the other end, formulaic construction of systems of operation for the body, and/or bodies, to act within. The physical practices and processes that emerge in the act of making work, for me are derived from the specific lines of conceptual interest and the structures that those lines produce. I work in collaboration with these ideas and with the other bodies that my practice comes into contact with – be those human bodies, other-than-human bodies or inanimate bodies. I am motivated by the politics of the choreographies that emerge and are constructed in the relationships between things. A lot of what I do is powered by a well-articulated imagination and the ability for my body to physically express the sensations that emerge from my attendance to different things. Hence my practice is a practice of tuning the body, or in the case of a group work, bodies, to express a vast array of ideas and sensations.