Pia van Gelder is a Canberra-based electronic artist whose practice is concerned with our understandings of energy and how they shape our relationship with technology, bodies and our environment. Van Gelder works across facilitation, curation, education and research, all fields that inform her creative work. Originally based in Sydney where she was involved in two artist run initiatives and the regular event for people doing strange things with electricity called Dorkbot, van Gelder’s practice finds its foundations in communities and their collective activities.Van Gelder’s work has been shown at the Black Mountain College Museum (NC, USA), Kyoto Art Centre, SuperDeluxe Tokyo, ISEA, Langgeng Art Foundation and iCan in Yogyakarta. Her work has been commissioned by Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Performance Space and Carriageworks and is currently on tour nationally as a part of the group exhibition Material Sound.
Pia van Gelder’s work moves between interactive installation, performance and participatory spaces that invite people to experience energies directly through touch, sound, light and making. He practice has often involved designing and building custom electronic instruments that create sound and video while other works have operated in more participatory engagements, collaborating with the public to develop new understandings. Recently she has turned her attention to thinking about energies in a plural way; how they operate and interact in the world. She has engaged in this research through historical enquiry, looking at archives and interviewing people to produce new artworks and writing that respond to these findings from the scientific to the spiritual.