As a multidisciplinary artist, I create artworks which poetically engage and speculate upon my relationship with coastal environments where I have lived, return to regularly, or to which I have ancestral connections.

  • Judith Klavins is a multidisciplinary artist. Her work often speculates upon her connection to the coast; its flux and unpredictability. This is where Klavins grew up and to where she regularly returns.

    In a family diary, Klavins discovered that some of her maternal ancestors also lived on the coast, on King Island, llutruwita (Tasmania), in the middle of Bass Strait in the early 1800’s. A sealer lived and raised a family with a Tasmanian First Nations woman. The archives reveal that such relationships were often coercive.

    Using a practice led methodology which focusses on the use of minimal materials and ‘careful handling’, Klavins works in co-production with materials. She thinks about these troubling and complex histories, and responds to the gaps in archival narratives by offering an immersive and embodied experience for viewers to encounter, so that they too can experience the anxiety and tension she feels.

    Whilst Klavins does not personally or culturally identify as a First Nations person, her work addresses her maternal ancestral history and the systemic impacts of colonization.

  • Judith Klavins is a multidisciplinary artist. Her installations include sculpture, video, photography, textiles, drawing, and printmaking. In 2022, Klavins graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Art from the Adelaide Central School of Art, and was presented the ACSA Board of Governor’s and Guildhouse Award of Excellence.

    Klavins has won awards and exhibited in numerous group exhibitions across South Australia and Tasmania. She was a Finalist in the Advertiser, Contemporary Artist Award (2024), the Unitcare Services Digital Media Award (2024), and the Don Dunstan Award (2025), at the South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival. Klavins was also awarded two artist residencies; the Ed Tweddell Studio Residency at Central Studios (6 months), and a King Island Artist Residency, along with a joint exhibition ‘waters ways’ at the Floating Goose Studios (2024). She also held an exhibition at FELTspace gallery, with her moving image work ‘across (2025)’.

    In 2023, she was Awarded 3rd Prize in the RSASA Abstract Art Prize: Essence of Place, and was a Finalist in the Gallery M, Contemporary Art Prize.