Phnom Penh: Art for Kep, the artist residency programme based at Knai Bang Chatt on Cambodia’s southern coast, today announced that Australian visual artist Julia Higgs has begun a two-month residency running from 22 August to 22 October 2026. Working across drawing, sculpture, installation, and site-responsive performance, Higgs will spend the residency in close dialogue with Kep’s forest edges, shoreline, and light, building new work from direct, repeated encounter with the place rather than a fixed starting concept.
Based between Canberra and the coast of New South Wales, Higgs describes her process as one of patient observation. “I explore, watch, listen,” she says. “I return to places and observe what changes over time, letting work develop from my experience of being there.”
Sustainability has guided her material choices for the past five years. In Kep, she will continue working with repurposed fabrics, paper, charcoal, natural fibres, and biodegradable materials, extending techniques recently developed during a natural-dye and batik workshop in Indonesia. She plans to experiment with pigments sourced locally in Kep, including turmeric and Kampot pepper, treating them as both colour and a direct link to the place that produced them.
Higgs’ recent work reflects this approach: Remanence (2022) recorded a frozen block of ink melting slowly onto paper over 24 hours in the Finnish woods; I like it gentle (2023) used a feather, a repurposed motor, and charcoal to generate a continuous, self-drawing line; and I drag a line out in the sand (2021) saw her own body, harnessed to an object, trace a path across a beach at Airlie Beach, Queensland, and photographed from above by Brooke Miles.
Higgs first passed through Kep in 2012 while travelling through Cambodia and has carried the memory of the town’s calm — its rainforest, shoreline, and colonial-era buildings slowly reclaimed by nature — ever since. The residency gives her the chance to sit with that memory rather than pass through it, letting the landscape and community shape a new body of work.
She holds a Master of Visual Arts from the Australian National University and has completed residencies in the Netherlands, Finland, and the United Kingdom, alongside recent posts at the National Gallery of Australia and Queanbeyan Regional Council. Her exhibition history spans solo, joint, and group shows across Australia and Europe, including About Drawing at Gladstone Regional Art Gallery and Museum (2023), which curator Claire Robinson credited for demonstrating Higgs’ commitment to research-led practice and her willingness to push drawing beyond traditional formats.
During her time in Kep, Higgs will lead a community workshop inviting local participants to respond creatively to their surroundings using a range of disciplines and ephemeral materials — building on years of community-engaged projects in Australia, including giant puppet-making in Woden and International Women’s Day drawing sessions in Queanbeyan. She intends to close the residency with an open studio or public sharing of the work developed over her two months on the coast.
Photo by: Supplied
