PhD Fine Arts (UNSW), BFA Hons (UNSW), BCA (UOW)
Rochelle Haley is an artist and researcher engaged with painting, drawing, movement and performance to explore relationships between bodies and physical environments. For over ten years Haley has worked at the forefront of the intersection of visual arts and dance: an emergent area of expanded painting research gaining international momentum. Her interdisciplinary approach to movement merges painting and choreography to investigate space structured around the sensation of the moving body. Haley’s work aims to re-imagine the dynamism of material surfaces of representation to discover methods that are sensory, kinaesthetic, and rhythmic.
Haley’s creative research contributes to interdisciplinary and experimental approaches to the expanded fields of painting and choreography. As a contemporary visual artist working with dance, her works have been programming ‘firsts’ for the inclusion of dance in publicly funded galleries / museums including Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, UNSW Galleries, and internationally, at Drawing Spaces, Lisbon. With collaboration with choreographers, scientists at the MIT Media Lab and research projects in creative robotics, her practice addresses experimental drawing methodologies.
She has staged 12 solo exhibitions and participated in over 47 national and international group exhibitions and collaborations, including curatorial selection for shows and performances at leading national venues Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney. Her work has garnered national media coverage including ABC Radio National, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Art Monthly Australia, Artist Profile Magazine and Art Collector. Haley has been an artist in residence at Artspace, Sydney; KRP studio, Ubud, Indonesia; Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, France; Performing Arts Forum, St Erme, France; Drawing Spaces, Lisbon, Portugal; Rimbun Dahan, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Bundanon, NSW.
I have been a finalist in national art prizes since 2013, including the John Fries Award presented at UNSW Galleries (2018), the Sunshine Coast Art Prize (2019), the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Prize (2013) and the Portia Geach Prize (2013).
My artworks are held in several collections, including the public collections of Artbank and the NSW Attorney General’s Department. Internationally, my art practice is used as case study material by the Paris College of Art’s Summer School curriculum. I have been commissioned to create works for Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, the Museum Of Contemporary Art Artbar, The John Fries Award, and Cement Fondu gallery.
2021-2024: Australian Research Council Linkage Grant,"Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum" ($392,181), UNSW, AGNSW, MUMA, NGV & TATE
2019-2022: PEEK Austrian Federal Government Grant, "Dancing with the Non-Human: the Aesthetics of Encounter" ($560,495 [€364,005 exchange rate 21/02/2021]), Petra Gemeinböck, Marie-Claude Poulin, Rob Saunders, Rochelle Haley, Roos van Berkel
I have successfully attracted over 10 competitive grants, including domestic funding from the Australia Council Arts Projects Grant, Copyright Agency Ignite Career Fund, Create NSW Artist Project Grant, Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant, NSW Artists’ Grant (NAVA); and major international funding from the Austrian Science Fund.