Joe and Chanelle

Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier are collaborators engaged in a continuous flurry of experimentation and invention.

A kite consists of wings, tethers, and anchors. The wings glide against the air when in flight and the tethers connect the span of those wings in order for the kite to be airborne. Two things working together to keep an idea off the ground. But what of the anchor? Who is at the end of the line? Are they moving or are they static? When we look up and see a kite flying high, seldom do we think about who and what is keeping it anchored.

Like kites, artists Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier know how to inhabit multiple spaces at once. The one up high, the one below, and the vast space in between, both in life and in their practice. Working across two studios under one space with one intention, with multiple media, this team of artists intuit their way through the middle chasm despite their working styles being polar opposites. Joe works intuitively, feeling things out in a call and response kind of way. Whereas Chanelle likes goals, end points, strategy. Two archetypes meeting in the middle, “He often is more responsible for the ‘why’ and I’m more the ‘how.’ We both have veto power on the ‘what,’” says Chanelle.

However, how Joe and Chanelle get to “what” isn’t as simple as it seems. When feasting on stories from residencies they’ve shared abroad, it became apparent that despite working styles, it was Chanelle who was more comfortable away, flying high, and Joe who preferred the tethering of his A to B: his familiar, his home. When asked about the space in between these two preferences and how that affects them working as a team, something major split the air, releasing them both from the complexities of their conceptual art practice and anchoring them to the uncompromising reality of bodied life.

In 2023, Chanelle was diagnosed with stage four ALK+ NSCLC: a rare form of incurable lung cancer that is not caused by smoking. Chanelle is living with a terminal illness. The pair tell me they are steady in the understanding that this new anchoring has presented a powerful sense of immediacy in their life and work, like no other. Chanelle is strong and active and because of this, together they remain fiercely present, conceptually uncompromised, and dedicated to understanding this new space in relation to their practice with an added force and new-found agility. A space of catharsis, grief, and joy. Right now, while capable and still working, they speak plainly to their community of artists, peers, and mentors, offering an invitation to really engage personally and professionally with them, now.

Joe and Chanelle’s respective studios are teeming with things to look at, listen to, and smell. There are multiple places to sit, to see out of, to see into. It’s indubitably clear that these two people, in these two spaces, working together in one huge life, know more about how to occupy situations than anyone else I’ve met. They respond to everything with gusto: the highs, the lows, and all that funky stuff in between.

With this intimate information comes a chance to look into the intimate experiences Joe and Chanelle have been facilitating in their practice prior to prognosis. Lovingly influenced by the Situationist International movement of the 1960s, Joe and Chanelle have been simulating experimental “situations,” in true Situationist style, by setting up temporary environments favouring the ephemeral experience of authentic life.

Play Something Else Cowboy, 2020-2022, is a reciprocal-style art-happening that invites fellow artists, arts workers, and friends alike to a cowboy themed bar. Yee-haw! The installation—at Joe and Chanelle’s home in Surry Hills—has an actual bar in it, with the pair making cocktails, facilitating genuine connective discourse between people. A middle ground to get drunk on. Originating as a quasi-response to the world in lockdown, in 2020 the pair began to connect people, far and wide, for a Herculean week-long session of social sojourns. As nebulous things do, the bar’s schedule shifted into a weekly program to suit the tides of the world but also the project itself.

For two years (!) Joe and Chanelle kept the bar high; presenting themselves “available” as a means to generate dynamic and unfeigned chat over cocktails; a place people could meet life with the abandon of booze. The amount of care and balance required to aid such a thing blows my mind. It feels radical, punk, and so chic to think about how uncapturable outside of experience this happening was. It exists in its own ambience, on the threshold of a wildly rigorous conceptual framework. Other than the physical bar (and curated cocktails), the only thing the pair provided were concise topics to discuss with their guests, mildly steering conversations toward or away from this thought or that one. As a result, anonymous quotes sit engraved on crystal cocktail glasses: temporal thoughts immortalised on the rim of a vitreous thing, anchored to the reality that we’re all Holding Something That Can’t Be Held. Life.

Joe and Chanelle’s current collaborative project is called Farewell Tour (which is also the name of their band). It’s about saying goodbye to the work practices of the past to posture towards their future goals, “making space for new work that prioritises ease and happiness… prioritising the music related collaboration we have always wanted to pursue.” Long-form psych-rock, interlaced with field recordings, Farewell Tour is another deeply explored sound project developed over two years, spaced out over several residencies at Bundanon on the south coast of NSW. It presents another way that Joe and Chanelle invite people into their art practice. Coinciding with an ongoing, experimental cassette tape practice in collaboration with an external creative team, Mixtape Radio is a robust sound archive presented as a monthly broadcast on Resonance Extra in the UK.

Documentation of Joe and Chanelle’s time at Bundanon reveal pictures of printed kites anchored to gallery-white walls, with amps, pedals, and guitars sitting atop repurposed tent canvases, showing the team’s respective working styles. Joe’s practice is steeped in experimental sound using vocals, guitars, mixing to and from cassettes, “This audio practice is a cathartic release and source of focus; to manage grief and anxiety while developing new performance skills and experience.” Chanelle works with printed textiles, making merchandise and gifts utilising text and motifs bolstering the team’s main prerogative in prioritising work that genuinely sits in the space offered with purpose and care not just for themselves, but for others around them.

When asked about the intricacies and logistical balance required to work collaboratively, and if it is in fact “easier” when there are two, Joe and Chanelle chortle in unison, “there’s so much negotiation.” They tell me the thing that keeps them anchored, acting as conceptual parameters, are slogans like “criticality through care,” “not nothing,” and “happiness or horizontal,” which not only read as strategies but also as aphorisms. Terse, concise, and pertaining to a general life truth, aphorisms, although often associated with Guy Debord, founding member of the Situationist International movement, date back to ancient Greece and Hippocrates of Kos—considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine. Why this interests me is because the first ever recorded aphorism translates to, “Life is short, art is long” which feels strangely pertinent when reflecting on the work and lives of Joe and Chanelle.

After chatting over the phone, then email, and then in person in their studios—all happening over the course of a few months—the ambience of each of these spaces, dripping with charm and profound warmth, they hand me a gift (as if their availability wasn’t gift enough) upon exiting. It is a cassette rendering of episode one from their Mixtape Radio broadcasts titled, The Kite and The Storm. It’s a beautiful thing. Opening the lid, a tiny print of a kite is exposed. In awe I say, “can I do with it what I want?” as it embarrassingly plummeted to the ground. Chanelle bent to pick it up as Joe sigh-laughed, “the idea is to keep kites up” they say together. Two people acting in unison: one flying high, one down below—both making their way to the middle while keeping everything else afloat—art, love, life, death, myth, sooner, later, now, or never.

That is how I’ll think of them forever.

Exhibition
Farewell Tour Live At The Renshaws
Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier
The Renshaws’
July 5th – 20th
Opening Night Performance July 5th 
Doors 6pm

This profile was originally published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025.
Images courtesy of the artists