George Criddle (born. 1984) is a British-Australian artist, writer, and occasional curator currently teaching at RMIT University and the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. They completed a PhD in 2021 at Monash University and have previously studied at Curtin University in Perth and École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Since 2005 George has been part of international exhibitions and residencies in Kassel, Zurich, Paris and Prague as well as exhibitions in Melbourne at The Living Museum of the West, MADA faculty Gallery, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, and artist-run spaces such as Kings, West Space, Blindside, Slopes gallery and TCB gallery. They are currently on the board of KINGS Artist Run Gallery as Co-ordinator of the Emerging Writers Program with Beatrice Rubio-Gabriel.
In 2013 I was working in a factory turned studio complex. It was an open-plan situation with a mix of practitioners. Individual studio spaces were separated by recycled wooden partitions. I was happy there. After around five months of me working in my space with chalk and wood-dust I was told I was making too much mess which was disrupting the other studio artists.
The caretaker proposed that I move into a more isolated space in the common area. It must have been an old office space — delineated by a beautiful retrofitted L-shaped structure with 3mm glass windows running across it and plywood white panel boards that were beveled with horizontal lines. I fell in love with it immediately, except there was no way I could afford to rent it. Some time passed and I asked the caretaker Corey Mahar and his friend Kieran Champion if they would help me build a modular 90% replica of the structure. I fitted it with some mirrored glass panels and installed it in the common area for a couple of weeks. Everyone was more or less accommodating. The mirrored glass reflected the original studio and other areas of the space. It was quite a disorientating really. Since that time I’ve moved to a new studio complex and the retro-fit structure is now packed away in shelves.