Tessa Zettel (Gadigal land/Sydney) is an artist, writer and researcher working across disciplines to imagine and enact potential worlds. Her projects respond to their contexts, mixing speculative futures with overlooked cultural practices and situated more-than-human knowledge. Creating temporary communities around particular questions or propositions, they incorporate experimental forms of mapping, drawing, live art, performance, publishing & exchange alongside everyday activities like reading, listening, fermenting & foraging.
With Susie Nelson she co-founded micro-publisher Cloudship Press, making slow book works held in collections from Rikhardinkatu Library, City of Helsinki, and HIAP archives (Helsinki), to Inside Out Art Museum (Beijing) and National Art School Library (Sydney). Tessa is also a co-director of embodied climate change research collective Weathering (with Astrida Neimanis & Jen Hamilton), not-only-artist-run space & library Frontyard Projects, public art/landscape architecture group Collective Disaster, and (with Sumugan Sivanesan) the hyperstitional performance/publishing project T. Rudzinskaite Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society. She previously worked within The Librarium, the Summer School for Applied Autonomy, and Makeshift, whose site-based projects appeared in such exhibitions as If you were to live here… 5th Auckland Triennial (5th Auckland Triennial, 2013) and In the Balance: Art for a Changing World (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2010). She is a current member of Bioart Society, Finland.
Since 2004 Tessa has taught sessionally in Interdisciplinary Design programs at the University of Technology Sydney, the University of New South Wales Art + Design and the University of Sydney.
