Heloise Roberts and Moira Fearby met at art school in their teens and share a deep desire to create. Over the span of their careers, they have exhibited their work in galleries both locally and nationally.
Heloise and Moira’s work is steeped in conceptual concerns and spans the mediums of painting, drawing, digital technologies and sculpture. In 2013 they gained recognition when they won the $20 000 Black Swan Heritage Prize for the work ‘Living City’, and again by winning the Castaways Sculpture Award $5000 Sustainability Prize; in 2021 with the work ‘Pathogen’ and in 2023 with the work ‘Insidious’. Most recently, their work, ‘Echoes of Duality’, was selected as a finalist in the prestigious 2024 Perth Royal Art Prize for Landcape. They have exhibited their collaborative large-scale portraits at PS Art Space in Fremantle and have been finalists in the 2014 and 2016 Black Swan Portrait Prize.
Heloise and Moira share an affinity and fascination with the natural world. In several recent collaborations they explored the interplay between man and the environment through the medium of sculpture. The artworks were installed in the natural environments of the coast and forest to add context and clarity to the concept. The use of recycled materials to create these works drew awareness to both the philosophical and physical impacts of humanity’s single-use consumerist culture. The artists conducted a series of community workshops in the Margaret River township in 2023 in partnership with Nature Conservation Margaret River.
In 2024, the artists have embarked upon a series of collaborative large-scale landscapes that evoke notions of memory and sense of place. These pieces, crafted from drawn and painted wood panels, breathe life into iconic landscapes, imbuing them with traces of nostalgia to echo the artists’ connection over time to southwestern Western Australia.