Onyx B Carmine

Onyx Beltane Carmine is a writer and a cross-disciplinary artist. Working under their birthname of SJ Norman, they have produced a prolific body of experimental performance and installation work, and have won numerous awards for both their writing and their artistic practice, most recently a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship. Working with extended duration, process-based, and endurance practices, as well as intimate/one-to-one frameworks, Norman’s primary medium is the body: the body as a spectacle of truth and a theatre of fantasy; a siphon of personal and collective memory; an organism with which we are infinitely familiar and eternally estranged; a site where histories, narratives, desires and discourses converge and collapse. They seek through much of their work to implicate the body of the audience and the body of the performer as co-agents in magical acts, through which we might forge hybrid languages of ritual and queer de-colonial knowledge-making. They are a diasporic Koori, born on un-ceded Gadigal land of Wiradjuri, Wonnaruah, and mixed Anglo-Celtic ancestry. Since 2006 they have been based between Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom, and are currently living on Kulin lands.

Onyx B Carmine 2019 Orange House by the Sea Artist Residency recipient, along with Thembi Soddell.