Residency Program 2026–27

Cool Change is excited to announce our 2026–27 residency program.

1️⃣ 4 May – 4 July
Jimi DePriest & Lia T

2️⃣ 13 July – 12 September
Annie Huang & Reegan Jackson

3️⃣ 21 September – 21 November
Lillian Colgan

4️⃣ 11 January – 13 March
Katie Lenanton

Across four eight-week residencies, participants will have access to a combined studio and presentation space at our King’s Complex office space to develop new work.

The program supports practitioners across art forms to realise ambitious projects, offering dedicated time and space alongside opportunities for professional development.

Jimi DePriest and Lia T, working together for the first time, will draw on their combined experiences in electronic art and sound design to explore how ‘clutter rejection’—an adaptive method observed in echolocating bats—can function as a vector for navigating dystopic chaos. Regarding this process as a behavioural response to the infiltration of urban noise into the acoustic terrain traversed by bats, the duo’s conceptual approach will problematise and reconfigure echolocation as a site of artistic inspiration and technological invention.

With Lia prioritising sound design, Jimi will work as the visual artist and engineer, utilising the CC studio as a space for material experimentation, technological development, and research. Working with a four-channel audio system, DIY electronics, and video projections, Jimi and Lia will catalyse a mercurial ecosystem of ultrasonic frequencies, digital synthesis, data signals, sensors, and moving images. Their collaboration will materialise an entropic sonic field, guided by a shared curiosity for chaotic feedback.

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Jimi DePriest is an emerging electronic artist and researcher whose creative practice is influenced by their research interests in composing Marxist and anti-imperialist analyses of automation and weapons technologies. Fusing tactical media with bio-art, their work often distils the material consequences of neoliberalism and potentials for resistance into conceptually potent visual symbols.

The interdisciplinary nature of Jimi’s practice has enabled them to develop skills across critical theory, wet-lab media, electronics, and filmmaking. They seek to continue expanding this practice to produce increasingly complex and transgressive electronic media installations while broadening the conceptual scope of their work to touch more explicitly on themes of cyberfeminism and psychoanalysis.

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Lia T is an electronic musician and sound artist living in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia. Her solo work and collaborative pieces can be found on a range of labels, including Felt, Theory Therapy, Companion, Music Company, and Best Effort Records. She has also contributed to radio stations locally and internationally, including RTRfm, NTS, Skylab Radio, Rinse FM, and Kindred, amongst others.

Lia has worked on sound design and composition for artist-led projects, including, most recently, soundtracks for Mummy’s Plastic’s Fringe World show The Wetness (2026), Fremantle Biennale’s Sound Sauna (2025), Melville Midwinter with dancers Daisy Sanders and Lara Dorling (2024), and Paul Boye and Vladimir Todorovic’s exhibition Cabinet of Algodreams (2021) at UWA’s Cullity Gallery.

Drawing from their interest in the collective experience of language and technology, Annie Huang and Reegan Jackson will explore internet memes as a shared cultural language. Focusing on widely circulated audio fragments—catchphrases, vocal tics, and remixed speech—their work will examine how these sounds move through algorithmic systems, becoming collective signals of time, humour, emotion, and cultural reference, while remaining ephemeral and intangible despite their ubiquity.

Through computational processes, these fleeting signals will be translated into digital models before becoming sculptural objects in porcelain, metal, and glass through the melting capabilities of a kiln. Interactive sound and visual elements will also be explored, with audio inputs generating and manipulating forms in real time. In seeking to materialise what typically only exists in circulation, the project will reflect on the ways digital sediments affect contemporary experience.

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Annie Huang is an artist based in Boorloo/Perth. Her practice considers the cultural complexities experienced by intersectional identities through the lens of Eastern and Western contexts. Informed by material and theoretical research, she utilises ceramics, video projection, animation, and new media installation to speculate and reflect on contemporary narratives surrounding the ‘foreigner’ and ‘insider’.

Annie is currently a sessional teacher and PhD Candidate in Fine Arts at the University of Western Australia. She has participated in various exhibitions, talks, residencies, and group projects, both nationally and internationally, including, most recently, at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre (WFAC), and Seoul National University, amongst others.

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Reegan Jackson is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia. Reflecting on the tensions involved in navigating the systems that shape contemporary experience, his practice centres on material exploration through the reworking of materials to expose their inherent qualities, functional roles, and the broader structures that inform their conditions.

Reegan’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, notably including The ISEA2026 Symposium (the 31st International Symposium on Electronic/Emerging Art) in Dubai, the 2025 Australian Ceramics Triennale at Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre (WFAC), and Unfettered (2018) as part of SymbioticA’s Unhallowed Arts Festival at the University of Western Australia.

During her two-month residency at Cool Change, Lillian Colgan will explore deviance, irreverence and improvisation as creative tools for upsetting naturalised systems of power and oppression. She is particularly interested in how these methodologies can influence the everyday challenges that trans people encounter—highlighting the pockets of agency (or even pleasure) that people use to survive within an increasingly inhospitable world.

​Informed by research conducted through interviews and conversations with local queer and trans community members, Lillian will develop a new body of work sitting somewhere between installation and social practice. During her CC residency, she will also establish a regular reading group, engaging with texts such as Mira Bellwether’s Fucking Trans Women (2010) and the 1970s magazine New Femme (started by The Chameleon Society of Western Australia).

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Lillian Colgan is an artist based in Boorloo/Perth. Her practice explores how normative social power shapes embodiment and considers how material play can be used to unpack complex feelings and offer insights into queer and trans identity. By drawing on her personal experiences, she generates multidisciplinary installations, typically involving sculpture, textiles, video and/or sound.

​Since graduating in 2014, Lillian has exhibited nationally at galleries including LWAG, PICA, FELTSpace, Firstdraft, Artspace, and Wollongong Art Gallery. She has participated in development programs and residencies with Performance Space, Vitalstatistix, Proximity Festival, and Parramatta Artist Studios. Lill has facilitated creative workshops—including the Trans Alterations Workshop at Goolugatup and We Have Many Layers at Cement Fondu—and is currently employed as a Teaching Artist at AGWA.

Returning to Boorloo/Perth from Helsinki for her CC residency, Katie Lenanton will reconnect with her hometown through the curatorial project Bar Tender (2022– ). Both a mobile pop-up art bar and a long-term relational artistic and curatorial project, her work draws parallels between the labour and social dynamics of a curator and a bartender. During service, she will listen patiently to the ideas, challenges, and hopes of artist-patrons, offering her advice and support over a wildcrafted drink.

Motivated by worldbuilding, change, and togetherness, Katie will utilise artworks, objects, and foraging practices to transform the Cool Change office into an environment for intimate social encounters. Through 1-on-1 conversations, she strives to create space for sharing, altruistic support, and solidarity. In addition to offering her time and bartending services by appointment, Katie will also host a larger gathering.

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Katie Lenanton is an intersectional feminist curator, researcher, writer, and editor. She works with mediums like exhibition-making, social practice, wildcrafting, conceptual cocktails, installations, participatory sculptures, scent, sustenance, and publishing. Her practice is collective and site-specific, often taking the form of gatherings, workshops, and collective writing. She doesn’t work alone, and her practice is shaped through collaborations with artists.

Active in the cultural field since 2003, Katie’s roots are in DIY communities, contemporary art, publishing, and community organising. Asking the important question “Who is in the room, and under what conditions?”, she strives to make things happen in ways that feel comfortable, nourishing, and generative for everyone involved. She holds an MA in Curating, Mediating, and Managing Art (Aalto University, Finland), and is a co-founder of Feminist Culture House (2019– ).