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Jade Gillis
Artist Bio:
Jade’s practice is engaged in the process of capturing and suspending the fleeting visual delights of her everyday in time, through the mediums of drawing and sculpture. She is particularly engaged with the interplay of light and shadow, and how this ephemera reveals and conceals the spaces she occupies.
Artist Statement:
Through the chipped panes of my living room window, a fleeting interplay of light and shadow is cast. By reimagining my meticulous drawing practice through the process of sandblasting onto glass – a similarly fragile medium – this body of work italicizes the ‘art of noticing’ and call for quiet contemplation and pause.
Kalana Grace
Artist Bio:
Kalana Grace is a young artist based in Sydney, on Gadigal Country and Eora Nation, who explores topics of identity and community through art. Kalana grew up in the Blue Mountains and now practices and studies art in Sydney. As a Queer Mulit-Modal artist, Kalana focuses on portraying people and studying the way humans exist, interact, love, and feel.
Artist Statement:
I wanted to create a homage to Barbara Nitke and her photography. I was awestruck by her investment in showing marginalized sex in a loving and humanizing light, her fight against the legal system to end stigmas in favor of normalizing that which is considered taboo. Sex is something which informs a lot of our social interactions as humans, it influences our laws and our ideas of purity. As a society we hold ideas on who can and can't have sex , what is and isn't perverted. Yet despite this underlying discourse in society over what is widely seen as a private act, there isn't much open talk on sex. Stigmas, taboos, purity cultures … even the law in some cases prevents open discussions and education on sex for many young people. Barbara Nitke’s photography aims to open up conversations about this.
Jess Curran
Artist Bio:
Jess Curran is an emerging multi-disciplinary artist with an interest in gender, health, and the refusal of shame. She blends textile and painting practices with a focus on the self, zooming in on lived experiences of internal and external pain. Her work centers on crafting care for the self and reframing negative self-perceptions.
Artist Statement:
Dyeing to tell you is a large quilt adorned with a hand-made self-portrait that aims to provide care and comfort to the self. The figure is composed using slept-in linen bed sheets that have been naturally dyed with foods and food scraps such as avocado pits and black tea. These fabrics are layered and machine-sewn to form a self-portrait that seeks to mend self-perception in response to experiences of fatphobia and dismissal of invisible pain. The materiality of the piece reframes food as a powerful source of joy, nourishment, and colour as opposed to fearful, weight-centric and calorific readings.
Tash Brobyn
Artist Bio:
Tash Brobyn (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist working on unceded Wangal, Gadigal and Bidjigal Land (Sydney). Their practice explores themes of metamorphosis, the dissolution of binaries, and understanding their relationship to society as an ace queer nonbinary person. They’re fascinated by biology and the inherent queerness of nature as it resists categorisation, creating strange little creatures that reflect this.
Artist Statement:
Knowing, Forgetting, Remembering, is a triptych of acrylic and gouache paintings with accompanying ceramic frames. Moving from left to right the works examine the changing relationship with self and queer identity from childhood to adulthood. I was interested in the idea of understanding your own wants as a young child and the processes of learning and unlearning that are undertaken when growing up in a cisheteronormative society. The imagery within each of the paintings consists of real and speculative organisms that reflect ideas of undifferentiated growth, dormancy and self preservation, and moulting and connectivity. The ceramic frames also reflect this progression, with the first frame being inspired by slime moulds, the second insect pupae, and the third a community and deep sea worms.
Sydney Jarrett
Artist Bio:
Sydney Jarrett is a sculptor working on Gadigal land. His practice explores the semiotics & structures of regulatory bodies and systems of control. He is materially engaged in practices of loitering and gestures of refusal.
Artist Statement:
Rats die with tails entwined is the title of a two-part sculptural installation. The installation takes symbols from road and construction signage and hijacks their imagery. In changing shape and text, the semiotics of heavily referenced colour and design are transformed.
The works rely on pre-disposition to these systems of control to challenge audience expectation and assumption. They use their references to supply context, conflict, and to confuse. They are a direct distortion of command and instruction; they occupy aesthetics of control to present ambiguity and reflection. I am thinking about how these disruptions might help us map loopholes, backstreets, gateways. Map alternate ways through, around, beyond the systems and structures that fail us – medically, financially, legally, socially.
Sophia Olivieri
Artist Bio:
Sophia Olivieri is a young artist working on Gadigal land, her practice investigates ideas of femininity, gender dynamics and public versus private space. She often explores the ways in which images, tropes and narratives are naturalised to us through the media and Hollywood, being influenced by Hollywood films which explore stereotypes of female subordination and hypermasculinity. Often her work looks at different avenues in which existing media and imagery can be reframed, dissected and decontextualised through unconventional materials and surfaces, such as tiling and fabric, utilising materials often associated with the domestic and the feminine.
Artist Statement:
‘Porcelain’ is made up of fifteen laser engraved bathroom tiles which depict mise-en-scenes of women within the space of the bathroom, derived from various films. The work investigates the bathroom as a filmic space, highlighting the various tropes which tend to ruminate within the bathroom such as female objectification, voyeurism, violence against women within the horror genre and female contemplation. The tension between privacy and intervention within the intimate space of the bathroom is further emphasised through the etching of the tiles provides a degree of invisibility until it is manoeuvred by audiences revealing the mise-en-scene’s iconography.Sarah YaacoubNo green eden here, but a restless expanse of multihued contaminations2024found objects (pole, sign, garden hose, white board and two stands), screen- printed book on tarp, concrete, soil bag with cyanotypeDimensions variable Sarah works on stolen Gadigal Land, where she explores the human entanglement with the natural world in sculpture, printmaking and installation. Her projects are informed by archival and field research that lead to material experimentations within the natural and cultural realm. She strongly believes that employing artistic strategies in social, political and environmental realms can improve our collective life on earth.Curl Curl Lagoon’s extensive history of pollution, extraction, and rehabilitation by white settler-colonizers has transformed the once lush wetland into a manicured 'green' space for active recreation.
This sculptural installation seeks to explore the absurdity of polluting the natural environments we inhabit, to uphold western narratives around aesthetics of nature and caretaking. Jeffrey Cohen's notions around “greenness” in environmentalism and art guided Sarah's research. She used screen-printing on found materials to reproduce imagery of archival research and interrupted this specific information with the more subtle use of cyanotype.Joshua Di Mattina-BevenTussle20248 Person Durational Performance, Changing Room Bench1.5 metres x 4.8 metresJoshua is an artist and curator working on unceded Gadigal and Bidgigal land. Their performance practice cruises public space in search of new subjectivities. Their body is an interface of engagement – with people, objects, memory and desire. They use sculpture and choreography to negotiate and tangle these positions.
Sarah Yaacoub
Artist Bio:
Sarah works on stolen Gadigal Land, where she explores the human entanglement with the natural world in sculpture, printmaking and installation. Her projects are informed by archival and field research that lead to material experimentations within the natural and cultural realm. She strongly believes that employing artistic strategies in social, political and environmental realms can improve our collective life on earth.
Artist Statement:
Curl Curl Lagoon’s extensive history of pollution, extraction, and rehabilitation by white colonisers has transformed the once lush wetland into a manicured 'green' space for active recreation. This sculptural installation seeks to explore the absurdity of polluting the natural environments we inhabit, to uphold western narratives around aesthetics of nature and caretaking.
Jeffrey Cohen's notions around “greenness” in environmentalism and art guided Sarah's research. She used screen-printing on found materials to reproduce imagery of archival research and interrupted this specific information with the more subtle use of cyanotype.
Joshua Di Mattina-Beven
Artist Bio:
Joshua is an artist and curator working on unceded Gadigal and Bidgigal land. Their performance practice cruises public space in search of new subjectivities. Their body is an interface of engagement – with people, objects, memory and desire. They use sculpture and choreography to negotiate and tangle these positions.
Brynn Elysia
Artist Bio:
Practicing on unceded Wallumedegal land, Brynn Elysia constructs worlds that explore our assumed social practices through moving image installations, storytelling and satire. In her series UnHoly Cherry, she questions how social constructions of sexuality and sin govern our perceptions and interactions with the body. Her practice promotes safe-sex education, prioritising pleasure, inclusivity and bodily autonomy. Her most recent work, ‘Please Come Again’ invites you on a tour of Purgatory Incorporated, a lost-and-found factory that takes care of your virginity when you haven’t!
Artist Statement:
You might be thinking, where does your virginity go when you lose it? Well to Purgatory Inc. of course, a lost and found factory that cleans up your dirty messes! We welcome you on an exclusive behind the scenes tour to find out how we take care of your virginity, when you haven’t!
You lucky souls are in for a treat, as Purgatory Inc. is very pleased to share with you our brand-new product: Virginity Forever!
Thank you as always and please come again!
Nath Gee
Artist Bio:
Nath Gee is an emerging artist living on unceded Gadigal land whose practice focuses on internal conversations that results from personal experience. Their work aims to take these conversations and provide them with a physical form, usually through textiles, in order to separate these feelings between mind and body. They are also interested in themes around material history - which influences their interest in textiles - mainly looking at the history of these fibres and how they can relate to a modern context with an active perspective.
Artist Statement:
My home had always remained consistent and secure throughout my early life and more recently it became a physical translation of companionship and connection. It was familiar and comfortable; it felt warm and smelt like home; and it always kept me safe and secure; it was my best friend. Since selling it in July, leaving it behind and moving to a different place I have felt lost and confused and alone and tired because I have been without my companion. This body of work is a homage to home, an expression of my love and provides autonomy for a house that feels like a person.
Tia Madden
Artist Bio:
Tia Madden is an artist and writer based on Dharug Land in the Blue Mountains whose installations, texts, and drawings examine the overlap between drawing and writing. Histories of asemic poetry, abstraction, mark-making and undeciphered writing systems come together in her practice to consider how visual forms preserve and transmit information, and how that information might be received and misinterpreted in distant futures.
Artist Statement:
Dormant Codes presents a speculative cypher as a tool for deciphering the ancient Greek Phaistos disc, an artefact that remains undeciphered to this day. By offering a fictional, contemporary solution to an ancient puzzle, the work questions if the act of deciphering, decoding, and misreading can transform meaningless marks into a language, and if ancient, undeciphered writings can still transmit meaning across time.
Sarah Ong
Artist Bio:
Sarah Ong (she/her) is a Chinese-Malaysian, Vietnamese-Cambodian Australian emerging artist living in the unceded land of the Bidjigal people in Sydney’s Southwest. Through her artistic practice of sculpture and performance, Sarah Ong investigates effort and labour and address the world's economic issues, which affect both art and everyone’s way of living.
Artist Statement:
Making with Bamboo is a performance intended to reject the traditional expectations of sculpture and art by highlighting creation and the labour process, rather than succeeding a final aesthetic form. Informed by the efforts and labour enacted by her parents, Sarah’s performance utilises the body and bamboo, a plant charged with socio-cultural influence, to explore how organic materials are valued and how they might reflect our way of living.
Molly Holland
Artist Bio:
I am an emerging artist based in sculpture and installation, living and working on Gadigal Country. Fostering a symbiotic relationship between my body and materials I exchange with, I collaborate with the malleable nature of clay in all its fired, greenware, unfired, glazed and unglazed states to transform my lived experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder, into physical forms that reflect the tension held within my body.
Artist Statement:
Working from clay, and the way it converses with other materials in both its fired and unfired states, I draw on a psychologically engrained way of experiencing the world with a heightened haptic and tactile sensibility, that stems from my lived experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The tactile sensibility instilled in my body through this experience is a psychologically engrained way of seeing the world and engaging with surroundings and has been since I was a child.
Gosha Heldtz
Artist Bio:
Gosha Heldtz is a Gomeroi artist who works predominately in sculpture and painting. Originally from rural NSW, she moved to Sydney in 2021 to study a BFA and is now undergoing honours at UNSW ADA. Gosha’s work is deeply rooted in her Indigenous identity and the duality of how that exists within different spaces. She often works in large-scale with vibrant colours referencing pop culture and specific Australian motifs. Her recent practice centres around the deconstruction of Australian patriotism and the effects of such a culture on Indigenous bodies. Drawing from both communal and personal experiences, Gosha uses her work as a tool to connect and reach a wider audience that may be uneducated on the indigenous experience.
Blue, red, and white: the colours of the Australian flag that define a nation, and stain my childhood. These colours and stars are ever-present, hovering above pubs, filling cheap shops, and surrounding historical monuments. Growing up in rural Australia, I became all too familiar with that blue starry flag and the colonial imagery that came with it. It was everywhere-flown in neighbor's backyards, on mates utes, at school events, and especially on January 26th. Australian patriotic identity.
Artist Statement:
Was something I was forced to coexist with for many years. In response to this year's theme of Alchemy, I reflect on the transformative potential of art to expose and reframe these symbols, revealing the underlying impact they preserve. My work 'True Blue' explores the tension between Indigenous bodies and these 'Australian' symbols, which supposedly represent us all.
Through my work, I reframe these symbols, exposing the influence they've had on me, often as the only Aboriginal person in many spaces. I use lo-fi mediums such as cardboard and street art techniques to transform everyday materials into forms of resistance and protest. This choice reflects my aim to shift symbols of national identity from revered emblems into objects of critique and reflection. By deconstructing these icons, I question their validity as representations for anyone other than the white man. By altering their context and form, I aim to reveal the layers of trauma and assimilation ideologies they continue to perpetuate.
Sehej Kaur Sehmbhi
Artist Bio:
In current and infinite digital realms where ways of storing and storying are creative and abundant, Sehej harnesses media arts and its inherent multiplicity as an archival tool, where sonic, visual and interactive measures create a gateway to re-writing patient futurities in bodily, cultural and autonomous embrace. From depths of the interweb to domestic surroundings, Sehej's mergings and disruptions of physical and digital medium seek out new found ways of healing and feeling.
Artist Statement:
In diasporic and medical upbringings, Sehej's work engages in the Unfolding tensions between western and eastern practice and resisting extractive structures of wellness culture and sterile landscapes.
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