Archive : 2023

One pre-occupation with 20th century modernism was the deformation of the human body and face. Depicted in a variety of different paintings and sculpture the face was consistently altered, cut up, and distorted. This reconfiguration and mutation of the face is now echoed in contemporary culture and notions of body dysmorphia (or digitised dysmorphic disorder). Amplified by selfie culture and social media and a growing perception that one’s body is thought to look wrong and doesn’t adhere to ‘normal’ images of the ‘standard’ body. Untitled Syndrome brings together the modernist white cube gallery with the mediated, monstrous visualisations of digitised dysmorphia and the disfigured contemporary face.

Orchids use sophisticated methods of reward, mimicry and deception to lure pollinators to their blooms. The reward can be nectar(food) or perfume (a token of exchange), and other times the flower imitates something which it is not.  

A species of Oncidium, incites violence for its own benefit, other orchids use sexual deception by visually imitating female insects to attract the male of the species. The dance is repeated, the pollinator always unaware how its energy is harnessed for another purpose. 

By observing and reflecting on nature, one can gain insight into the law of the jungle, draw parallels with the complex systems that surround us, and question what lies beyond the superficial. 

‘I fold, you pop, they bend, we mesh' re-considers everyday experiences; of self and body, of caring for a newborn, and of household objects through a range of imaginative and idiosyncratic practices. 

Routine time, the door, umbrella pins, kitchenware and domestic materials are subjects that undergo poetic transformation through processes of repetition, abstraction and figuration and through physical and conceptual re-configuration of these objects and their relation to the body. 

Through practices that centre auto-biography, iterative making, drawing and sculpture that stem from jewellery-making methodologies, we ask: what happens when jewellery becomes a door and a door becomes jewellery? Where do boundaries between the body, self and world merge? How are familiar and commonplace interactions and forms simultaneously obscured and made recognisable? How can re-arrangement and repeated actions evoke a sense of evolution and the complexity of the whole?

By drawing attention to metaphysical, temporal and material boundaries, challenges are made to simple categorisations and new narratives are spelled about the time and objects of daily existence.  

The stories, underlying facts and what we know. Who tells us, and what do we do with the information? 

This series depicts a collision of fact and fiction with the aim of generating discussion around our consumption of news. The composite images capture unsettling current events, paired with fictional tales from popular culture indelibly etched in our psyche. News and disturbing information is fragmented and re-framed as melodramatic, episodic infotainment ‘feeds.’ 

Tamara Tallent is a Melbourne artist, currently working with drawing, photography and video as a means to explore socio-political issues and autobiography. 

The product of the last four years of studies into drawing and blown glass, this exhibition looks at how maximalist approaches can lead to minimalist aesthetics, essentially considering how ‘a lot’ can amount to ‘a little’.

The strong driving force and overarching theme around my art is healing my inner child, as well as escapism and how those overlap. Through utilising materials such as beads and glue, I find connection with my younger self that allows me to explore intense emotions and memories. ‘Entropy’ uses diverse subjects and mediums to bring to life little pockets of wonder that strive to keep imaginations alive and burning.

Entropy (lack of order of predictability) describes the predominantly unexpected method in which I create. I rarely sketch out beforehand; I make choices guided by intuition and dreams that permeate my mind. This process allows for a natural expression of the subconscious, a glimpse behind the curtain.

I currently reside in the East of Naarm/Melbourne, where I make art almost daily. 

The Good Fortune invites viewers into an enticing, textural, and evocative space. It holds memories, meanings, and bodies. Entering the gallery, audiences encounter an architectural container. Densely padded panels allude to soft luxury and holding cells. In keeping with her Surrealist-informed practice, which regularly brings together unusual objects and materials, fragments of the artist’s body adorn the work. Kipps is fascinated with architecture’s relationship to power and embodied knowledge. Drawing on a cacophony of allusions, The Good Fortune creates an attentive space of surveillance, highlighting the pleasures and possibilities of bodies that engage with art.

Through a collection of drawings, sculptures and found objects ‘A temple of uncertain truths’ examines the alluring power of sitting in the grey space between knowing and not knowing. 

Drawing upon my Japanese cultural upbringing, childhood memories and moments of uncertainty and unexpected wonder that comes with growing up between two cultures, a hybrid landscape that blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, the familiar and the uncanny, the sacred and the profane begins to emerge.

Maki Ogawa is a Sydney based artist who is interested in exploring and navigating the complexities of the bicultural narrative and the fragmentary nature of memory and self. 

A majority monochromatic palette brings together four Melbourne/Naarm based artists: Angela Hughes, Kristy Hussey, Erin Mathews and Jessica Row. Through collage, printmaking and ceramics, ‘Paper, Scissors, Clay’ explores varied themes of confession, animals, escape, resilience, collecting, history, nature, and community.

Angela Hughes is a mixed media artist who uses drawing, photographs, and collected ephemera to create collages through a process called seriality. She strives to forge emotional connections with viewers through the use of sentimentalism, humour, and narrative. Her current work is approaching the idea of collages from a 3D perspective. Angela has an academic background in visual arts and art conservation.

Kristy Hussey is a multi-disciplinary artist undertaking post-graduate study at the Victorian College of the Arts. She has exhibited in Paris, Milan, Sydney and Melbourne and has been a finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize 2021 and the Wyndham Art Prize 2023. Her work is primarily sculptural using everyday domestic objects, bearing potent memories, as conduits for storytelling — their narratives thoughtfully reframed through order and assemblage. 

Erin Mathews is an artist and curator with an artistic practice based in printmaking, with a focus on history. This drives her current project Cabinet of Curiosities; inspired by historical collections that were stored in draws, niches, boxes, and often set aside in specific rooms. The naturalia and artificalia of these cabinets has inspired Erin to create these works.

Jessica Row is an artist and curator who has exhibited in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, including as a finalist in the 2023 Geelong Acquisitive Print Award and the Australian Stencil Art Prize. Her work primarily involves printmaking with the current series celebrating the beauty in the everyday, whilst amplifying environmental concerns, though printing with tree bark collected around Naarm/Melbourne. She is currently completing postgraduate studies at the Victorian College of Art.

Mel Jane Wilson's exhibition, Tender Buds, features various artworks, including large watercolour paintings, fabric works, and smaller works on paper. Through her abstract works, Wilson captures towering structures and falling shapes inspired by her digital collages. By combining digital and traditional techniques, she creates intricate pieces with vivid colours and endless possibilities.

Mel Jane Wilson is a Ballarat/Wadawurrung-based artist with a Bachelor of Fine Art with Honours from The Victorian College of the Arts.

This body of work emerged in response to a series of rigid constraints. Created in just 6 days, and utilising only material found in the studio, it is the product of intuition and endurance. Subverting tendencies of proliferation and expansion, this experimental body of work compresses and distils through a layering of old work and studio remnants. Collaging together different aesthetic tangents, conceptual threads and time periods to create a series of dense, sculptural paintings. As palimpsests of a history of practice, visual traces exist from as far back as 2017 and demonstrate change but also recursivity. 

Ebony Gulliver is an artist and arts educator living and working on the unceded lands of the Wadawurrung people. She has exhibited in group and solo shows in Melbourne, Sydney and Ballarat. Her practice encompasses painting, installation, curatorial endeavours and site-specific murals. 

Fire is a volatile and erratic element that creates chaos and destruction as it eats through environments, creating its own path of destruction and devastation as it rolls through. The contrast of fire acting as a forceful animal against the dark backdrop creates movement and texture through my paintings. I have first-hand experiences of the rapid changes and damage to the environment due to the impact of fire during my involvements on the fire ground and these experiences inspire my art making.

The Australian landscape is home to spectacular and inspiring colours; deep and vibrant oranges and red colours that lay in the rocks, and this contrasts beautifully against the olive greens and ochres of the treescapes. My work aims to highlight the beauty of the country whilst demonstrating the impact the fires bring to it and the community. Something that starts as such a tiny spark then transitions to a gigantic uncontrollable monster.

I am inspired by Arthur Boyd, Brett Whitley, and Claude Monet. Their use of colour, contrast, and line to create flow with the magic of their brush and knife strokes is outstanding and I try to bring a similar flow to my art pieces.  I love aesthetics and the texture a palette knife can deliver and use this to contrast with black space.

Can art change the world? Growing up, the artist, Sophie Cox, wanted to do just that. To change the world for the better. But life got in the way, and she became an artist. How to reconcile a profession so often seen as doing little for the good of the world aside from decorating wealthy people’s homes? Like a gift, craftivism came to Cox. Craftivism is the practice of using craft techniques for activist purposes. The works you see here are Cox using the aesthetics of art to raise awareness for issues that plague our world. The works themselves are not the action, the changing of the world. They instead act as the catalyst for you, the audience, to act on these issues. To change the world.

Cox is a textile artist and writer who employs craft-based practice to create work with a political focus. Through text and textile, she examines the relationship between everyday life and societal issues. Her works are a series of appliqued banners, embroidered tea towels and other sewn works which employ the aesthetics of activist iconography to create works which speak to the nature of craft, art, and political action. Cox has exhibited in galleries throughout Sydney and in California.

Welcome to my exhibition, "Hidden Becomes Visible," where I invite you to explore the interplay between the invisible and the visible. Just as overlooked things reveal their beauty under the right light, this collection uncovers the hidden aspects within ourselves and the world.

As a neurodiverse individual, I often feel unseen in a neurotypical world. Through this exhibition, I aim to challenge perceptions and showcase diverse perspectives. Using fluorescent and traditional acrylics, my pieces are visible in daylight, blue light, and ultra-violet blacklight, unveiling the hidden sides of nature, the universe, and ourselves.

Within these artworks, you'll encounter abstract subjects like giant space flowers and visual representations of nature and emotions. They express the mix of emotions I experience daily, capturing movement that mirrors the universe's continuous forward motion.

Join me on this artistic journey, where the visible merges with the invisible, and the extraordinary emerges from the ordinary.

When you enter the UV room you will notice the light will change from daylight to ultraviolet light to experience the transition.

Through my artwork, I capture glimpses of the urban landscape portraying scenes that unfold in the midst of our daily lives. Inspired by the ordinary and often overlooked aspects of city existence, I seek to discover and illuminate the inherent beauty within the seemingly mundane and neglected.

Drawing from the fabric of everyday existence, I capture moments that often go unnoticed, inviting viewers to pause and appreciate the hidden charm within the familiar. By shedding light on these overlooked fragments of urban life, I hope to evoke a renewed sense of appreciation for the city we inhabit. Delving into the intricacies of light, shadow, colour and texture, I aim to create visual narratives that unveil the captivating stories unfolding within our cities.

With each brushstroke, I aim to awaken a sense of curiosity and wonder in the viewer, encouraging them to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. By exploring the overlooked corners and forgotten moments, I hope to foster a deeper connection between individual and their surroundings, cultivating an appreciation for what can be found in the most unexpected places.

My hope is to highlight what lies within the everyday urban experience, reminding us that even in the midst of our hectic lives, there is an underlying beauty waiting to be discovered, appreciated, and celebrated.

The theme of my artworks is ‘subconscious’, exploring its power and influence on daily life and how it shapes one's perception of their world. Inspired by the Rorschach test, a tool used by psychologists to assess an individual's thought patterns based on their interpretation of ink blot images, I created my own artistic versions of these images. While embracing the ambiguity and abstraction of my own mind influenced by my subconscious at the time of creation, I defined images that I saw within each blot painting. The resulting contrast between the randomness of the blots and the symmetry of the images reflects the complexity of nature and the mind.

This exhibition is a collaboration of selected works that were created during and after the Covid lockdown adventure. The ispiration for the Wilson's artworks come out of who they are and what they love. Painting, building, creating, cooking, entertaining and potting are favourite activities in the Wilson households.

Ann Wilson's paintings depict the love and passions of her life. She ran a family restuarant for 22 years, so she loves entertaining, cooking, interior decorating, houses and people as you will see in many of her artworks. Ann loves getting ideas from everyday life and magazines. She say's that it's her faith in God that gives her the energy and motivation to create.

Ingrid Wilson is a lover of extremely bright colour, shapes and patterns. Everything about life excites and inspires her. Especially walking outside in nature, animals, people and travel. Her artwork is like a visual diary, telling the stories of where she has been and who she has met. God and the spirit world of angels is a strong focus in her art. She is thankfull to God for all his beautiful creations which give her the inspiration to create in the first place.

Julian Wilson is a keen bush walker and Rogainer. His artwork is inspired greatly by his love of the bush and nature. To him trees are magnificent , standing erect and reaching for the sky. You will notice that in his flower still lifes the flowers are also reaching for the sky. Julian has a deep connection with nature that he hopes the viewer will also feel when they look at his paintings and maybe even inspire them to get out for a walk amongst the trees. His ceramics are all usable and glazed and once again reflect the colours and shapes of the bush.

May you enjoy 'Family Affair with Flair' and be reminded that everyone was born to create in their own unique ways.

Know Me Come Home With Me is an exploration of domesticity, the interior and the intimacy of the places we inhabit. The work of cultivating and commemorating interior space is an intimate and singular daily practice for many; its mundanity and solitude ritualises the completion of domestic tasks. The time spent in one's domestic space is at once the most intimate and the most repetitious of inhabited places. These collated works express the singularity of experience in domestic spaces and the surreal nature of the commonplace.

A small collection of ideas, that blipped across my mind: I made a few into physical objects and wrapped them in bubble wrap.

Then I put them in a truck in Coolum Beach in Queensland and a young truck driver (with some tattoos and a spacer in one of his ear lobes) took them to Brisbane to go to Sydney.

Someone in Sydney took them out of that truck and put them into another truck, which went to Melbourne.

That truck pulled up outside this gallery – I suggested they use the side street because when my son and I went to check out the space – we couldn’t get in – so we gave up and sat on a park bench on the corner, mumbling (if I’m honest) but then after a few minutes … noticed the door.

So yeah, after pulling up outside there, one of the gallery guys here (probably Neil) would’ve received a phonecall and I imagine he joined the truck driver in bringing these fleeting ideas manifested into the gallery space.

And then someone, presumably you, followed some level of curiosity to arrive at this text.

Taking shape as a series of recent experimental paintings, On the line? exhibits Fahey’s negotiation and embodied sensitivity to space and place through the intersection of her rural and urban lived experience. Processes of layering and removing paint, various speeds of mark making, and considered colour application document Fahey’s memories and emotions towards the different capacities and treatment of space she encounters. The paintings arrive at a point of contemplation on human impact, resources, rapid change, stewardship and care for land. Wire is used as a central motif to depict a series of binaries – flexible/rigid, strong/weak, metropolitan/rural, interrupting/creating space. The duality of the material offers itself as a compelling symbol for exploring the inherent paradoxes humankind experiences within the current evolving landscape. Meeting points are created between unexpected forms, alongside matter that is understood and recognised, crafting new spaces in and outside the canvas for ideas to breathe. 

Lauren Fahey is a contemporary painter and object maker originally from Gundungurra country, living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. Lauren’s recent practice aims to negotiate social conditions of the ecological landscape, inviting open-ended questions around the responsibility of land care. Drawing upon a variety of contemporary practitioners and historical artists, her work considers the role of painting and art objects as channels to document and reflect on the contemporary moment. Lauren graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) at RMIT University in 2021

Lauren respectfully acknowledges the traditional owners of this land on which she lives and works: the Wurundjeri and neighbouring Boonwurrung people, and pays respects to their Elders; past, present and emerging.

My non-representational paintings of pixelated halftone dots, derived from my own photographs, have deliberate imperfections and brush marks. These ‘glitches’ and the paintings’ textured surfaces highlight them as human-made objects, in contrast to flat electronic screens. Halftone dots also evoke printing processes and Pop art. The paintings’ titles reference personal memories related to the source photographs, to further imbue a sense of subjectivity, the personal, andthe human. In this process, tensions arise between perfection and imperfection; the handmade painting and the screen; the analogue and the digital; and, the human and the machine. These abstract paintings form a new series of works which sits alongside my established representational paintings.

I am seduced and charmed by brief encounters and the lingering memories they leave. I am trying to (albeit, futilely) relive these experiences by creating playful textile and sculptural stand-ins for lost friends, lovers, and soul mates. There is a song called Sleeping Satellite by Tamsin Archer about watching the failed Apollo space missions and how sometimes disappointment can feel like betrayal. The song is great. 

Then there is the old trope of two star-crossed lovers. Desperately in love but hopelessly separated. They pine, look up at the night sky and find comfort in the possibility that they might be gazing up at the same moon. But, what happens when there is no moon. How do we locate ourselves - should we send our prayers and hopes and desires into a dark sky? Should we rely on the stars? 

This work is about possibility and finding even one twinkling beacon to keep you going. The recurring motifs of stars, moons and shells relate to my Romani heritage and folklore stories that have been passed down through generations. 

‘Salivating Fear’ explores the raw energy of fragility encompassing our lives. While recent experiences have shown how resilient and adaptable, we are, the illusion of security once owned is lost.

MAKI explores that energy through a traditional Muslim healing practice performed only by women, called ‘Salijevanje Strave’, by combining this with techniques of manipulation, layering and sculpting in water.

MAKI is a visual artist based in Naarm. Originally from Croatia, born during the Yugoslavian war and a refugee in Berlin, MAKI's practice conceptually explores the impact her past has on her present.

This body of work is titled after Opaline- an iridescent, milky glass developed in 17th Century Italy, which was known to cause iris reflexes. Opaline Vector invites the viewer to make inquiry into their own perception through the interaction of colour. 

Colour is perceived temporally, and relative to how one is moving through the space; a dance between pigment, light, and one’s own sensuous registration occurs.     

Katie Harvey is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist who grew up in regional NSW. Her practice is grounded in painting but extends itself to video and installation works.  

Her color-theoretically driven, perspective-based painting approach, traverses between realism and abstraction, predominantly occupied with light and visual metamorphosis.

Representation of landscapes, architecture, grids, and gestural figuration are recurring in her oeuvre. The choreography of these themes and Katie’s use of pigment and color theory invite the viewer toward a deeper analysis of perception and explorations of the psyche.

Katie completed her Honours in fine Art studied at RMIT, Melbourne in 2019, and studied at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

Mere lines and compositions that once sat as pure abstraction have elevated into imaginative realms of existence. A process that starts with personal intuition now leads  through the ideals of pareidolia, opening up the abstract into a figurative invitation to push on ones imagination to see deeper than just colour and ambiguous markings. 

This exhibition explores the ways in which elements of mythology and folklore permeate our modern experience on a daily basis.

My work explores the relationship between acquired synesthesia and UFO sightings. With influences as diverse as Nietzsche and Buckminster Fuller, new insights are synthesised from both opaque and transparent textures. Ever since I was a student I have been fascinated by the ephemeral nature of meaning. What starts out as vision soon becomes corroded into a carnival of futility, leaving only a sense of nihilism and the prospect of a new order. As intermittent forms become clarified through frantic and diverse practice, the viewer is left with a testament to the darkness of our future.

This exhibition discusses the cycle of power exercised by the West through holding onto emulating imperial models of society and aesthetics of ancient antiquity, specifically through the Eurocentric male gaze. Through my print and collage-based practice, I explore the major role a glorified Greco-Roman world has had on shaping modern Western society since the Renaissance, through 18th-19th century movements into today. Alongside my current formal fine art education, my arts practice is also informed by ‘outsider’ sources, including Naarm’s/Melbourne’s zine community, comic book illustration, and street art. These influences and styles further suggest related ideas of appropriation, masculine and cultural identity.

I am currently residing and creating in Broadmeadows, Naarm/Melbourne. I am going into my second year of my Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) course at RMIT specialising in printmaking.