Jiann Hughes is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, born in Belfast who calls Melbourne home. She works collaboratively across the forms of installation, participatory practice, social process and situated public art, creating speculative fabulations to challenge boundaries and toy with methods of influence and dynamics of power.
She works across media, often using moving image, audio, and sensors, but has also been known to work with heartbeats, breath, earthworms, and pigs. An enduring theme in her work is the revealing of what comes to matter in our entanglements with technology. Her approach is collaborative, her work shaped by the material practices of many bodies, including those of discourse.
Jiann is a member of RMIT’s Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST) research hub and was chosen to represent Northern Ireland for the European Future Artist-Maker Lab where she investigated processes of CNC digital fabrication in artwork production and created a body of work for an exhibition that toured Europe. A graduate from the Sydney Film School, her artwork has been encountered in streets and galleries in Australia, Hungary, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, and the UK.
Jiann submitted a practice-based PhD at UTS Sydney and was awarded a Masters degree in Community Development from the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She has extensive experience working with and representing the experiences and creative expressions of displaced people; working seven years at the Asylum Seekers Centre of New South Wales, five years for Médecins Sans Frontières Australia, and working with recently arrived migrants at Auburn City Council, one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse LGAs in Australia.