ARTIST BIO

Chelsea Carkeet (they/them) is a First Nations Wagiman, Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), and Yanyuwa artist with Anglo-Celtic, Chinese, and Māori heritage. They currently live and work on Maganjin, the custodial lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people.

In 2024, they graduated with a Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Arts (CAIA) at the Queensland College of Art and Design (QCAD) and are currently enrolled in the Bachelor of Visual Arts Honours Program.

Their work explores temporal drawing strategies to represent their Indigenous ancestors’ stories and connection to Country. Using the genre of science fiction they envision their ancestors as anti-heroes, speculating how these ancestral narratives and knowledges might manifest in the future, imagining a world where past, present, and future converge.

Using lens-based methods such as chemigrams and rotoscope animation, their work intersects through projection to enact a form of Indigenous archiving. These forms reflect on the ethnographic lens that once limited my ancestors' agency, while creating metaphysical space for matriarchal knowledge systems. Their work aims to bridge this metaphysical and literal gap created by their ancestral displacement between the Northern Territory and Queensland

Most recently, Carkeet’s work has been selected to be one of the featured artists for the Judith Wright Centre 2025 Facade Projection Program. They have also exhibited at the Queensland State Archives as part of the “Beneath This Skin” exhibition and was nominated by QCAD staff to exhibit in the Undergrowth 2024 exhibition. They were also invited to exhibit at Woolloongabba Art Gallery’s “Urbania II.”

In 2024, they were presented with the CAIA Art Award for achieving the highest academic distinction in the Contemporary Australian Indigenous Arts Degree. Their consistent excellence was further acknowledged with Academic Excellence awards in 2024, 2023 and 2022.