Phebe Parisia’s work draws upon historical and contemporary visual language and culture, including art, design, the media and consumer goods with an underlying interest in psychology. Primarily based in drawing, Parisia combines drawing concepts and practices with sculpture, assemblage and digital collage, utilising traditional and digital art, and industrial processes materials and techniques. 

Parisia’s work is an evolving assemblage, which she considers to be a singular ongoing artwork that involves the addition, subtraction and re-configuration of individual components. Drawing upon both new and existing material, Parisia’s work has the potential of infinite and evolving possibilities. This material re-contextualisation and re-configuration explores the limitations and possibilities of heuristic play and systematic thinking in creative practice. She experiments with the positioning and repositioning of these models of thinking in relation to visual literacy, our relationship to objects and the undertaking of repetitive actions. 

The works produced within her practice examine the relationships between materiality, mark-making, time and affect.  Parisia re-contextualises the various material components of her practice, combining them with utilitarian, industrial and pre-fabricated materials and objects to create a material ‘glitch’ – a re-configuration of a commercially and/or ready-made product that renders its intended function obsolete. In Parisia’s layered practice, such objects and materials are only functional to the function of art. 

In her major ongoing project,  Embodied Objects (2013 -  ) Parisia works from the ontological role of the object in relation to materiality via the creation and sublimation into the ‘embodied object’. Within this the body is considered as a tool, a conduit between thought, action and object. The work produced is non-static, experiential and immediate, added to and able to be re-configured according to location and intent.  The line has no beginning and has no end — its continuous repetition is dependent on materiality of energetic interactions and the mark to become externalised — thinking as an embodied process.

The choice of materials is both deliberate and circumstantial. They are generally non-status items: such as white-coated nylon actioned by hand with black permanent marker, ropes and materials sourced from everyday places. The line work applied to these materials maps an internal topology, revealing the frustration of emotional disruption. The line is approached as a marker of time — the occasional blips of emotional experience describe inward states and external stimuli that become an embodiment of experience and a stream of unselfconsciousness.

Yet the actions within this work are not at all unique. Repetition and ritual is a universal human action. The actions in Parisia’s process are constructed within a moment in time that does not describe the past or the future, only the present in which it was created. Each mark encompasses all information, rendering representation obsolete. Each mark records movement through the body, originating from both internal psychological states and influences from the outside environment.

Phebe Parisia holds a Master of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne (2017) a Master of Material Conservation from the University of Melbourne (2011) and a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) (Hons, first class) (2007) from RMIT University. She has exhibited extensively both in Australia and overseas; notable exhibitions include Personal Structures: Crossing Borders, Global Art Affairs Satellite show at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and AGONY/ECSTACY, City of Melbourne Laneways Commission, 2007. 

As an extension of her materially fluid practice, Parisia has also designed and produced hand-etched jewellery, with exclusive collections held in both the National Gallery of Victoria’s NGV Design Store, and TarraWarra Museum of Art gallery store. In 2019 she also established the project Prenta X, commissioning contemporary artists for exclusive limited edition silk scarves, a collection of which she was invited to present as a part of Melbourne Fashion Festival 2020.