Card Zero Studio is:

a multi-artform creative practice that builds smaller scale works from big ideas

an anchor for experimental and divergent artmaking that incorporates inputs from independent artists, researchers and non-artists

a starting point for art that unfolds problems and asks more questions

an exercise in creating encounters that position the body as central to self

in support of radical imaginings

a way to play with absurdity, irreverence and incompleteness as vehicles for fluidity and possibility.

In addition to housing creative studio work and collaborative projects, Card Zero Studio is also the home base for Niki’s arts therapy practice.

Niki Schild (Director)

About me:

I am a multiform artist and arts therapist with a rhizomatic approach to life. Through these roles, I make and defend space for emergent, mysterious and artistic dimensions of experience, which I regard as a universal birthright. Some thematic interests: ecological identity, the relational wiring of the human animal, and the relevance of culture to health.

My artistic practice has foundations in dance. I trained in ballet for about 13 years, and while I never wanted to be on the company ballerina track, my dance practice continues to be rooted in elements of classical technique. I also spent years in jazz funk, street tap and contemporary dance classes, which created a base for freestyling and experimentalism. As an adult, I broadened my palette in a major way by falling in love with dance forms constellated along the historic routes connecting Asia, North Africa, the Mediterranean and Europe. I am drawn to the rippling ways that dance is used across time and space to exchange and encode information. This is an ongoing focus of my artistic literacy, and drives an emergent philosophy of movement that extends beyond dance to artmaking and creativity generally.

From this grounding, I came to the fascinating territory of dance movement therapy, in which I have specialised training under the umbrella of creative arts therapy, and which I am qualified to provide clinically by the standards of AHPA. I am aligned with socially progressive approaches to therapy and opportunities to expand capabilities in this field of practice and healthcare more generally.

I have also been working with plants for the past decade, and am a community-taught gardener with a passion for herbalism and plant lore. Both my artistic practice and therapy practice provide opportunities to surface novel applications of this side quest. This includes nature-assisted methods in arts therapy, and translating knowledge into artistic language.