B-SIDE 2020

Haydn Allen is a queer artist working predominantly with installation and video. Living and working in Melbourne, he recently completed his bachelor degree in Fine Art at The Victorian College of the Arts. Haydn’s practice is concerned with sustainability and ecology; he uses primarily recycled and scavenged materials. Works often respond directly to waste. Recent exhibitions include ‘Alien Party in the Swamp’ (2018) and ‘To Slash’ (2018) as well as public artwork ‘fun, comfortable, and easy to be with’ at the University of Melbourne Southbank campus.

Manisha Anjali is a writer and artist based in Melbourne. She is the author of Electric Lotus, forthcoming from Incendium Radical Library Press, 2019. Manisha’s installations and performances have been exhibited at c3 contemporary art space, Bus Projects, SEVENTH Gallery, KINGS Ari, Melbourne Writers Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, Emerging Writers Festival and National Young Writers Festival.

Georgia Anson is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Specialising in jewellery, painting and ceramics.

Skye Malu Baker's practice is influenced by fragmentary cultural histories, the temporal slipperiness of the autobiographical and the active properties of the technologies and materials with which she collaborates. Her work is often concerned with the intertextual, the tension between the graphic and the gestural, and with narrative unwinding. Semiotic instability and inconsistencies are invited into her practice as intriguing communicative tools that make space for the poetic and unsayable. She is grateful to practice on Wurundjeri land.

Phoebe Beard is a visual artist living and working in Melbourne/Naarm. Phoebe examines symbols and systems of power, specifically associated with cultivation and community. Working predominately with printmaking and drawing, Phoebe constructs artworks that reference romantic and religious folklore intrinsic to agricultural life and history. Phoebe has most recently exhibited with Blindside Gallery, Good Grief Studios, Watch This Space and Quivering in Quarantine. Phoebe is a current committee member at Kings Artist Run Initiative in Melbourne/Naarm.

Olga Bennett is an artist and researcher from Russia currently living and working in Narrm. She has graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2017 and exhibited at Bus Projects, CAVES, Center for Contemporary Photography, The Substation, KINGS Artist-Run, Monash Gallery of Art, C3 Contemporary, LON and Margaret Lawrence galleries (all in Melbourne), COMA gallery (Sydney), CalArts gallery (Los Angeles) and gallery Kiitos (Japan). In 2019, Bennett completed a residency at Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium. Her recent body of work considers how experiences of physical and emotional vulnerability are reflected in images and words.

Seth Birchall lives and works between Bega, Byron Bay and Sydney, Australia, and Bali, Indonesia.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) from the National Art School in 2003, Birchall began exhibiting in group exhibitions across Australia and Asia, as well as participating in a number of awards and prizes. In 2011, Seth went on to complete a Master of Art from UNSW Art & Design.

Kate Bohunnis works in metal, mould-making, textiles, print and sound. Focusing on identity, gender and queer perspectives, Bohunnis’ installations connect materials with psychological states and behaviours.

Nicole Breedon’s practice suspends fleeting moments of metaphysical experience, capturing objects from everyday and popular culture with perverse detail, in materials and techniques loaned from the canon of classical sculpture and traditional craft. Their work demonstrates a preoccupation with attempting to apply the mathematical certainty by which we understand physics – the celestially large and the minutely quantum scales of time and matter – to the unpredictable and irrational realm of humanity in the middle, and the predictable failure of such an absurd approach.

John Brooks works with textiles, video and installation, making intuitively and working around the way materials behave. He is interested in connections with things, communicating with rocks and potentially projecting thoughts and ideas onto non-human entities.

Rachel Button's practice combines the elemental forces of ‘Spiral Jetty’ with the energy of punk - a clash of prehistory with futurism. The methodology sits between a school play and a science diorama - an enquiry into the relationship between storytelling and the production of meaning. They retreat to an interior world and fire is its beginning. In this mythology, fire was the first tool, and their iPhone camera is its technological successor in the history of human culture.

Lori Camarata is a textile designer and illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia. Lori has a background in textile design and has worked in fashion and homewares for over seven years.

Lara Chamas is a Lebanese, Australian artist, based in Naarm (Melbourne), fleeing from civil war, her parents migrated to Australia, where she was born. Her practice investigates topics of postcolonial and migrant narratives within the context of her cultural identity. Using narrative and experience documentation, storytelling, transgenerational trauma and memory and tacit knowledge; her research intends to explore links and meeting points between narrative theory, cultural practice, current political and societal tensions, and the body as a political vessel. Central to her practice is the expansion of these notions in a more historical and anthropological sense. With discussing geopolitical issues, research and first-hand experience is important to the authenticity of her work.

Andrew Clapham has developed a hybrid practice as a print-based artist and designer. After completing his Honours in Fine Art and Masters of Communication Design at RMIT in Naarm/Melbourne, Andrew specialised in printmaking, branding, illustration, and print design. Andrew now explores the role of craft by merging traditional and contemporary print techniques within art and design. His visual language is strongly influenced by activism and politics and always seeks to engage with the richness and history of manual processes where possible.

Mig Dann is a Melbourne-based artist who is undertaking a practice-led PhD in the School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne. Her art practice is multi-disciplinary and autobiographical, exploring and expressing issues of childhood trauma. Her work is informed by memory and forgetting, absence and presence, feminism, queer culture and decades of lived experience. She is particularly interested in how public art can create new and innovative relationships to existing sites.

Tildy Davis’ works are personal constructions imbued with peculiar characters, lush darkness and latent narrative. Extending from the magical realism genre, complex psychological landscapes composed of particular lexicons come together with forms of molten fluidity.

Ara Dolatian received a Bachelor of Fine Art (sculpture) from RMIT University (2012) and Master in Social Science Environment and Planning (2014). His interdisciplinary practice explores the relationships between cultural landscapes and the natural ecosystem. It conflates a number of ideas around the themes of the studio and laboratory and in turn social and environmental politics.

Ara has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been involved with a large number of collaborations and public art projects. To name few: Finalist for the Darebin Art Prize, Deakin Small Sculpture Prize, The Substation Station Contemporary Art Prize, Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize and a recipient for the 2019 Project Developments Funding from Australian Council for the Arts.

Lauren Dunn works predominantly with photography and also occupies the idea of photographic thinking through other materials such as sculpture and video as a means of twisting the codes and conventions of photography. As an active participant in post-photographic discourse Lauren believes the many images surrounding us are an indicator of contemporary consumer politics. With an inherent interest in popular consumption trends and their associated images, Lauren utilises her practise to understand and question the power structures influencing our desires, ethics and the broader impact of commodity culture.

Lauren graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with a BA in Fine Art honours in 2018. Lauren’s work is held in various public and private collections and she has been the recipient of a number of prizes; including the Myer Family Foundation Prize, Abbotsford Convent start up studio residency award and the David Fell Photography Award. Lauren has participated in a number of group and solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and the USA. Selected exhibitions include: Kyneton Stockroom Greener pastures, BUS projects The Green Sheen, Verge Gallery Sydney Still Life Pt II, LON Gallery Fruit & Veg & Parodies, Cal Arts (USA) Heavy Duty. Lauren participated in Spring 1883 (Sydney 2017, 2018 & 2019) with LON Gallery and was a fnalist in the 2017 Bowness Prize and the 2019 Darebin Art Prize.

Majed Fayad uses video, photographic montage and sculptural practice to address popular western culture’s use of eastern culture, asserting the notion that “culture is for sale”.

MJ Flamiano is a visual artist and community arts worker, living and working on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin nation in Melbourne, Australia.

She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (First Class Honours) from Monash University Art Design and Architecture, and a Diploma of Library and Information Services from Victoria University. She endeavours to present critical and often playful investigations into sites and their cultural significance. Her present focus is on exploring Filipinx histories and diaspora through sculptural installation, video, printmaking and text.

Jacquie Owers Gayst is a Melbourne based artist who charges spaces with immaterial media to create immersive, multi-sensory audio/visual environments. Since graduating from VCA with a BFA in 2017 she has shown works at solo FLASHnight Clamour at KINGS ARI, and as part of collaborative group project Glimmer at Red Gallery.

Jessica Grilli is a freelance photographer and secondary school visual art teacher based in Melbourne. She is inspired by the subtleties, colours and textures of natural environments as well as people that inhabit creative places. Recent clients include Lindsay Magazine, Alpha Lab, Benjamin Rose Jewellery, HB Archive x Farn Designs, and Kuwaii.

Erin Hallyburton is an artist and researcher who lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne). Her sculptural practice engages with fat studies and intersectional theory in order to examine the conceptual and material limits of the body, and how these limits manifest in certain sites. Edible and transforming materials enact ongoing processes with the gallery space, highlighting the viscosity of architectural and hierarchal structures that are presented as neutral and static. Hallyburton is completing her Master of Fine Art candidature at Monash University.

Emma Hamilton is a Melbourne-based artist with a keen interest in the materiality of the photograph. Oscillating between sculpture and photography, her practice operates at the intersection between object and image. Hamilton’s work explores disparities between the observed and the recorded: the camera’s view of landscape comparative to our experiential, visual observations.

Hamilton was awarded a residency in the Australia Council Paris studio in 2014, and has since undertaken residencies in Norway and Iceland. She has held recent solo exhibitions at Metro Arts (Brisbane), Alliance Française Gallery (Melbourne) and Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne).

Zainab Hikmet completed her Masters of Fine Arts at RMIT in 2015, following Undergraduate and Honours degrees from Auckland University of Technology. She has exhibited in various galleries throughout New Zealand and Australia and in 2015 was selected to complete a residency and exhibition at Singapore’s Tropical Lab at LASALLE College of Arts.

Stephanie Hosler is a Melbourne-based artist who’s work focuses on navigating and existing in oppressive and inflexible binary spaces. Hosler employs materials underpinned by their ability to change form, evolve or decay to establish a dialogue about fluidity and transformation. A recent graduate from Monash University, they have shown at Intermission Gallery within the university and at Visual Bulk in Hobart, Tasmania. Most recently, Hosler participated in the 2018 TarraWarra Biennale ‘From Will to Form’, as part of Mike Parr’s performance piece ‘Whistle White’.

IchikawaEdward (est.2017) is a collaborative artist duo consisting of Joshua Edward and Ichikawa Lee; practicing in the mediums of sculpture, performance, installation and creative writing, the artists are conscious of demonstrating works that speak to non-hegemonic notions of the body, the body’s intimacy with space, the body’s interaction with architecture; including and more specifically the architecture of the object the body exists within or upon; questioning how our bodies rely on or subvert architectures, and what common frictions queer/othered/disabled bodies encounter today. These intentions are realised through the subversion of societal norms, stereotypes and common vernacular; as these are witnessed as the tools of erasure for those whom find themselves marginalised from dominant societal discourse.

Lou Hubbard uses various media, from any discipline, to examine the nature of training, submission, and subordination. Basic materials of domestic and institutional utility—very often personal objects—are tried and tested, then shaped into formal relationships. Objects are subjected to various modes of control and duress through which they must submit to her rules, and emotional resonances are drawn out through careful selection and placement of these found and readily-at-hand materials.

Lou Hubbard teaches in the School of Art, VCA and is represented by Sarah Scout Presents Melbourne.

Yvette James’ practice focuses on fabricating spaces with the aim to affect the body through pre-intellectualised response. Her work strives for a level of conceptual accessibility by concentrating on individualised reactions. Informed by an amateur interest in astrophysics as well as architectural restraints, her work disrupts assumed physical reliances, creating potential responses of unrest.

Yvette completed her BFA at Monash University in 2018. Since then she has exhibited at Blindside ARI and Bus Projects, alongside participating in Hatched: National Graduate Exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. Yvette has recently completed a residency at Popps Packing in Detroit, Michigan.

Therese Keogh is an artist and writer based on the lands of the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, and pays respects to Elders past, present, and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded.

Tess King is a Melbourne based artist who works predominantly with ceramics. She studied Fine Art at RMIT and graduated with First Class Honours in 2016. Tessy considers how meaning is generated through the arrangement of objects and materials in larger installations and playful vignettes.

Anna May Kirk is an emerging artist, curator and organiser who lives and works on Gadigal Land. Working across performance, scent, installation and sculpture she is interested in complicating ideas of care, multispecies relations, time, evolution and science in order to form speculative narratives. Kirk is currently the Executive Producer of Arts and Culture at FBi Radio and the Coordinator of AD Space and is currently completing her Bachelor of Fine Art at UNSW Art & Design. She has presented artistic and curatorial projects at Performance Space, Artbank, Firstdraft, Tributary Projects, The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, CCAS and Kudos Gallery amongst others.

Kaijern Koo is an interdisciplinary artist living and working on Wurundjeri land in Naarm / Melbourne. Confounded by the innate human instinct to decipher and make sense, her practice gravitates towards the fantastic slipperiness of interpretation and the strange logics which often ensue.

Abbra Kotlarczyk (based Naarm/Melbourne) maintains a research-based practice that is articulated through modes of conceptual art making and writing of criticism, poetry and prose. She is a freelance academic editor for socially-engaged artistic research and practice as well as an independent curator. Her practice is hinged on visual and linguistic inquiries that often take place trans-historically through expanded notions of care, queerness, publication, citizenry and embodied poetics.
Born 1984, Mullumbimby, Arakwal country, so-called Australia.
Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, so-called Australia.

Jackie De Lacy is an artist and writer working on Gadigal and Bidjigal land, studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts. They are interested in non-committal systems of knowledge.

Shivanjani Lal is a twice-removed Fijian-Indian-Australian artist and curator. As an artist living in Australia, she is tied to a long history of familial movement; her work uses personal grief to account for ancestral loss and trauma. She is a member of the indentured labourer diaspora from the Indian and Pacific oceans. She employs intimate images of family, sourced from photo albums, along with video and images from contemporary travels to the Asia-Pacific to reconstruct temporary landscapes. These landscapes act as shifting sites for diasporic healing - from which she emerges. A fundamental concern in the work is how art develops and represents culture as it transitions between contexts, while also probing the experiences of women in these situations of flux.

Kirsty Macafee is a Melbourne-based artist working with images across digital and analogue technologies. Her practice is multi-disciplinary and process based, It is informed by an expanded and deconstructed view of photographic practice and engaged in post-photographic and feminist discourses.

Holly MacDonald is a maker of objects and material observations. Her art practice is founded in ceramics and combines painting, drawing, installation and hand building in clay to explore notions of memory and the uncertain nature of perception. Using the handmade ceramic object as an agent, she interrogates the relationship between process and product, touch and vision, object and image.

Tamara Marrington completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Drawing and Printmaking) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2018. In 2017 she was awarded the Stuart Black Memorial Scholarship and the year after shortlisted for the Majlis Travelling Scholarship. Most recently she has been included in LON Gallery’s Viewing Room series, and has had solo exhibitions at Pig Melon (WA) and Melbourne University House. She has been included in group exhibitions at Blindside, Chamber Presents, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA Art Space and The Living Museum of the West. In 2021 she will be an artist-in-residence at Fremantle Arts Centre.

Brahmony McCrossin is an artist living and working in naarm (melbourne) australia. Brahmonys practice predominantly explores the drawn, found and photographic image.

Tahlia McCuskey is a Bendigo and Melbourne based artist currently in her second year of a BFA at Victorian College of the Arts. Using her preferred medium of oil paint, Tahlia works from photographs and explores ways to subtly manipulate imagery to depict eerie scenery.

Anna McDermott's practice explores the relational exchanges arising between space and the body. Through performance-based video, sound and installation, my work questions how we move and are moved from both personal and socio-political perspectives. My artwork constructs spaces for vulnerability, revealing the subtleties existing between touching and being felt, looking and being seen, speaking and being heard. I choreograph the poetic languages of the body, space, touch and spoken word into intimate encounters that decentre ocularity and privilege intuitive, embodied receptions. Materialising as 'a choreography of breath,' my work encapsulates the affective potential to elasticise the boundaries of our interior selves. Utterances and fragments intersect to evoke the multitudes of bodily experience

Christine McFetridge is a New Zealand born photographer and writer based in Melbourne. Her practice meets at the intersection of text and image and she is currently working on a collection of short stories to accompany a long-term photographic series based in Christchurch following the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. She has contributed essays to Imprint: Quarterly Journal of the Print Council of Australia, Territory Journal (USA) and Common Ground Journal (AUS), and has written numerous catalogue essays for exhibitions in Australia and New Zealand. McFetridge is a contributing editor to PHOTODUST and Arts Writer for Chapter House Lane. She co-hosts the podcast Ch&Ch with Charlotte Watson.

Kari Lee McInneny McRaeKari Lee McInneny-McRae would like to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which they work; the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. Kari would like to pay their respect to elders both past, present and emerging and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded on this land. It is a privilege to make and exhibit art on these Countries. As a settler, Kari acknowledges their implicit role in the invasion, colonization and occupation of the stolen lands on which they work. This land was and always will be Aboriginal land .

Lachy McKenzie is a writer from Melbourne. In 2018, he was fiction editor at The Lifted Brow and subeditor at MUSEUM magazine.

Josephine Mead is a visual artist, curator & writer, residing on Wurundjeri woi-wurrung Country. She works through photography, sculpture, installation and writing to explore personal notions of support. Her recent work has positioned female family members as support-structures, considered the body as a site of discursive practice, explored notions of deep listening; examined the temporal and sonic nature of writing and photography; and charted notions and experiences of queer-love.

She has exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions, in Australia and abroad. She has undertaken residency programs in rural Victoria (The Macfarlane Fund), Mexico (Arquetopia Foundation), Portugal (Córtex Frontal), Turkey (Tasarim Bakkali TAB) and Germany (ZK/U). She was an inaugural Room to Create studio artist at Collingwood Yards. She co-founded Co- Publishing (with Christine McFetridge) in 2020 and was a founding Artistic Director of MILK Gallery in 2022. In 2023 she participated in the Writing in the Expanded Field program through the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). She was Chair of Artistic Directors for Blindside Gallery from 2020-2022 and re-joined the Blindside team as Community Coordinator in 2024.

Madeleine Minack is an interdisciplinary, contemporary artist who works primarily in installation and sculptural practice. Based in Melbourne, she has recently completed her Bachelor of Fine Art, Painting, at the VCA. Madeleine’s practice derives from a process of accumulating discarded found objects to produce small, intimate sculptures which reflect minute details of normally unnoticed everyday matter. Through this process of collection, she creates something that from a distance looks insignificant but, upon close examination, becomes detailed, complex bodies of works. Formed out of a found materials, wax, and string binders, her sculptures form a home or nest for that which would normally be lost.

Jordan Mitchell-Fletcher’s work is engaged with the idea of materiality as encompassing a conglomerate of relations in which matter is modified by time, change and process, rather than being something inert. Working with responsive, generative and durational materials, the intention is to construct a temporal arc, an open-ended situation in which the presentation is just a moment in the timeline of the work. The practice exemplifies the processual life of the artwork in order to open up possibilities for how the work is engaged and encountered in a given space. Enacted over time, these gestures are assembled into the installation as residues that emerge from the work’s array of processes.

Lia Dewey Morgan is a queer creative based in Naarm. Her work embraces her trans body as an incubator for new models of resilience against extreme crisis.

Sophie Morrow (b. 1993) is an artist from Melbourne, Australia, whose multidisciplinary approach focuses on sexual identities, performativity and the language of desire.

Olivia Mròz (b. 1989, Melbourne, Australia) currently works and resides in Melbourne. She holds a Bachelor of Photography (Fine Art) from Photography Studies College completed in 2015. She is currently in enrolled in a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

Betty Musgrove is an artist (she/they) based in Melbourne who currently works predominantly with textiles. I moved to Melbourne in 2009 after visiting for a few weeks and having an amazing time connecting with a vibrant art and performance scene that felt full of possibilities. I was half way through a Fine Art bachelor’s degree in Brisbane, but during that visit I found the RMIT printmaking department and was really excited by it, so I applied and finish my undergrad there. But the main thing that underpins my practice is that I grew up in an extended family of artists. In particular, I was heavily influenced by witnessing my mother Sue work on her textile practice throughout my childhood. Sue is an amazing textile artist and imparted the skills that have given me the foundations of my practice. We’re very close, and growing up she would teach me a wide range of art and craft techniques like copper enamelling, drawing, painting, and textile techniques such as cross-stitch, long stitch, machine quilting and embroidery, appliqué and basic fabric printing and painting.

Ruth O’Leary is a Melbourne based artist who works primarily with performance, video and painting.

Sanja Pahoki is a Croatian born visual artist currently living in Melbourne, Australia. Pervasive technologies such as photography, video and neon are employed by Sanja to explore observations from everyday life. With a background in philosophy and psychology, and working primarily with photography, Sanja is a keen and sensitive observer of social interactions. Existential concerns such as irony, anxiety and angst are prevalent in her artworks. Sanja is currently the Head of Photography at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and is represented by Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne.

Katie Paine is a Naarm-based artist and writer investigating semiotics, hauntology and the archive. She recently completed her MFA at the University of Melbourne, for which she was awarded a Graduate Research Scholarship, the Peter Redlich Memorial Art Prize and a Cranbourne Scholarship. She has exhibited at Lon Gallery, F.S. Meyer Gallery, CAVES, TCB, ACMI, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Kings ARI, La Trobe Art Institute, Blindside, George Paton Gallery, VOID Gallery, Irene Rose, SEVENTH Gallery and Bus Projects. She writes for publications such as Performance Review, Vault Magazine, Art + Australia, un Magazine, Running Dog, Runway Journal and Art Almanac alongside a variety of art galleries.

Sean Peoples is a Melbourne-based artist who works in the fields of sculpture, painting, video, and digital art. His work brings together disparate elements using imitation, appropriation, and collage. Recently, he has been exploring ideas around home decor, politics, and the internet. He has exhibited in Australia, New Zealand, USA, Spain, France, Germany and India. In addition to his solo practice, Peoples is also one half of The Telepathy Project, a collaboration formed in 2005 with artist Veronica Kent based on the possibilities of alternate forms of communication. He is represented by STATION, Melbourne and Sydney.

Anatol Pitt is an artist and writer based in Melbourne. He holds a degree in Art History and Anthropology from the University of Melbourne (2014), is completing a degree in Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts. He’s been involved with a range of organisations including Liquid Architecture, Gertrude Contemporary and TCB.

Lekhena Porter is a freelance artist and photographer from Aotearoa, New Zealand based in Birraranga (Melbourne). Their practice is largely based around analogue photography and its ability to capture its subject in a raw and authentic way.

Chunxiao Qu is a multi-genre artist who does not have the artist statement.

Lisa Radford + Sam GeorgeLisa Radford + Sam George have been working together since 2008. Their practices use conversation and oral histories to produce works that refer to documentary processes, shared narratives and coded language. The nature of their collaboration means their performative work has, in the past, taken the form of beer coasters, a very large knotted-flag , a normal sized flag printed with an unreadable collection of emails, an award winning painting rejected by ANL but decoded by a visiting ex-navy general and, videos of spliced and cut responses to an abstracted de-contextualized questions spoken and mimed.

Marko Radosavljevic is a Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist and jeweller. He graduated from Monash University with a degree in Fine art in 2014.

Aaron Christopher Rees practices in the expanded field of photography; distinct ideas and working methods are linked to the processes of photography, vision and the act of seeing. Rees generates artwork through process based photographic and structuralist video techniques of making.

Recent notable exhibitions include the exhibiting as a part of “Melbourne Now,” at the National Gallery of Victoria, Firmament at NAP Contemporary, States of Disruption at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Horizon at Caves Gallery, and not for the sake of something more at Sarah Scout Presents.

Rees has also exhibited as a part of PHOTO 2021, Spring 1883, Channels and Next Wave contemporary art festivals. In 2021 he was the recipient of the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize.

Sara Retallick is an artist and researcher living and working on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm. Her work explores human perceptions of sound through constructed sonic encounters. Currently, she is investigating sound in underwater environments to expand sonic contexts and to push the physical limits of listening and understandings of sound.

Sara also performs live with exploratory electronics, bass and voice. She has contributed to various live projects over the past 18 years, having performed shows for Dark MOFO (2016), Melbourne Music Week (2021), and Shepparton Art Museum (2022).  The evolving nature her live practice aims to harness the freedom to experiment, offering genre-crossing encounters that span soundscape, noise, sound collage, pop music and improvisation.

Sara has exhibited internationally at Reina Sofía in Madrid, Sapin (2020) and I.S.E.A. in Durban, South Africa (2018). Nationally, Sara has presented installations at RISING Festival (2021), BLINDSIDE (2019), and Bus Projects (2017).

Steven Rhall is a post-conceptual artist operating from a First Nation, white-passing, genderqueer, positionality. Rhall's interdisciplinary practice responds to the intersectionality of First Nation art practice and the Western art canon. He interrogates modes of representation, classification and hierarchy using installation, performance, process lead methodologies, 'curatorial' projects, sculpture, and via public & private interventions. Rhall exhibits internationally, lectures at the Victorian College of the Arts, is a PhD candidate at Monash University on Birrarung-ga land (Melbourne, Australia).

Roberta Rich was born in Geelong, Australia in 1988, and is currently based in Melbourne, Australia. Roberta's work responds to constructions of 'race' and gender identity, sometimes with satire and humour in her video, performance, installation and multi-disciplinary projects. Drawing from historical, socio-political, media and popular culture, Rich engages with notions of "authenticity" and its relationship to constructed identities and their forms of representation. In doing so, Rich aims to de-construct colonial modalities through arts practice while ascertaining empowering forms of self determination, often referencing her own [diaspora] African identity and experiences.

Cailtin RoyceCaitlin Royce is an artist practicing on the unceded lands of Dja Dja Wurrung and Naarm. Her art practice engages with video, photography and assemblage-based installations to explore connections and possibilities between human and non-human beings.

Britt Salt's practice is an ongoing spatial experiment where fundamental elements such as line, form and space intertwine. Employing repetition and materials that have an inherent ability to create movement, her work centres on the symbiosis of art and architectural practice and questions how these genres influence the notion of place and impermanence in contemporary urban environments.

Britt received the Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Artists in 2010, which supported residencies in the U.K., France and China. In 2015 she undertook a residency in Tokyo, which culminated in a public installation at Youkobo Art Space. Her work has been selected as a finalist in numerous awards including the Paramor Prize 2017 and Gold Coast Art Award 2015. Most recently Britt has completed residencies at Arteles (Finland), Heima (Iceland) and the Australian Tapestry Workshop. She has worked on significant large-scale commissioned artworks for Fender Katsalidis Architects, Büro North and Asia Pacific Airports Melbourne.

Rachel Schenberg is an artist and writer, currently living in Naarm/Melbourne.

Jacqui Shelton is an artist and writer born on Barada Barna land, central QLD, and based in Narrm, Melbourne. My work uses text, performance, film-making and photography to explore the complications of performance and presence, and how voice, language, and image can collaborate or undermine one another. I am especially interested in how emotion and embodied experience can be made public and activated to reveal a complex politics of living-together, and the tensions this makes visible.

Ben Sheppard is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia.

Lizzy Simpson lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. Driving her work is a lifelong interest in natural history, human history and ecology.
Simpson uses a variety of media often combining video, living and growing things and text into immersive and participatory installations. She graduated from the Master of Fine Art from RMIT University 2017 where she was awarded the Mary Oliphant Prize and the Project 11 residency to Yogyakarta Indonesia. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in Europe and Asia.

Darcy Smith is an emerging artist predominantly working in sculptural installation using glass and text. Glass is an integral material to Smith’s practice, as both the physical and metaphorical relationships that arise from glass both manipulate and sway the trajectory of investigation after moving forward from the ideas of change through the effects of trauma. In recent projects, Smith has used live events to explore how processuality and choreography through everyday movement can exacerbate problems that then lead to reflect the presupposed constructed social norms that situate females in the social sphere.

Smith completed her BFA Honours at Monash University in 2016 and is currently undertaking her MFA at Monash University. Recent exhibitions include: 12:21 in collaboration with Maddy Anderson Gaffa Gallery, Sydney NSW 2018, Memory Palace, curated by Jake Treacy at Dirty Dozen, Melbourne VIC 2017, National Emerging Art Glass Prize, Wagga Wagga NSW 2016 and Fresh! Craft Victoria, Melbourne VIC 2016.

Tai Snaith investigates the nature of visual storytelling, nostalgic viewpoints and personal histories. She works across a broad range of mediums including painting, sculpture, spoken conversations and large public realm commissions. Her current body of oil paintings were begun during her residency at Bundanon in 2023 and continued into 2024 where she has been working in a whole derelict house in North Fitzroy as her studio. Tai will be presenting a solo exhibition of paintings with Nicholas Thompson Gallery in August 2024.

Tai (born Melbourne 1980) graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) from the Victorian College of Art in 2002.  Tai has work held in numerous public and private collections, including Artbank, NGA, Bayside, Great Victorian Rail Trail and the State Library of Victoria. Tai has written and illustrated 6 picture books published with Thames and Hudson Australia, shortlisted for the world Illustration Awards in London and the winner of the Banyule works on paper prize.

Jade Spokes is best known for her sculptural high-end wearable art pieces made from discarded and repurposed materials. Working with the waste of consumerism and transforming the debris into items of high-end couture pieces that explore the boundaries of an items use value. Spokes redefines the boundaries between art and fashion by disrupting the white cube wherever possible. She does this though activated showings of her work, dressing models in an open and unbound way that makes the viewer question their own position as a spectator. Working closely with Bridie Lunney during her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Monash University, Jade Spokes developed an elegant and sophisticated attention to detail in her exploration of the significance of the body within her work. Her work has been highlighted by Monash Lens in an article regarding sustainable practice.

Clare Steele is an Australian photographer would lives and works in Narrm (Melbourne). Through her practice she seeks to construct a contemporary narrative of people’s emotional and physical connections to place and each other.

In 2015, Clare graduated with a Bachelor of Photography from Photography Studies College, winning the Award for Photojournalism/Documentary Photography. Clare's first book (self-published) J.W. was shortlisted for the Unseen Dummy Award 2016 in Amsterdam and received a commendation from Australian Photobook of the Year Awards 2017. Her publications can be found in the permanent archives of The National Library of Australia, Martin Parr Foundation England, The Library Project Ireland and The Asia Pacific Photobook Archive. Clare’s work has been widely exhibited both locally and internationally and published online and in print. In 2018, she took part in a residency program in Sevilla, Spain. And most recently having two solo shows in Melbourne of her series’ Descendants and Beneath.

Molly Rose Stephenson is an artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. She has recently completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) with First Class Honours at Monash University, and has completed her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) in 2019.

Theatrical, occultist and playful, Molly’s practice exists in a constant state of disorientation, flux and instability. Primarily working within sculpture, installation, food and painting, she interrogates the interplay between the manipulation and natural mutation of the botanical, object and marine world in a crude and orchestrated manner. She does so in hopes of critiquing and reflecting upon our engagement with non-human, non-being entities.

Molly is currently working on a commissioned body of work for the City of Knox, Immerse 2021. She has also exhibited at galleries such as SEVENTH Gallery, No Vacancy Gallery, and Buxton Contemporary, with an upcoming show at Canteen Studios. She has also been published with SEVENTH Galleries Emerging Writers Program and Heart of Heart's Press, and is the founder and co-curator of the online exhibition, Quivering in Quarantine. 

Molly has been longlisted for Hatched 2021: National Graduate Showcase, awarded the COVID-19 Quick Response Grant from The City of Melbourne, the NGV's Women's Associate Award, an Individual Creative Grant from The City of Boroondara, as well as the John Vickery Scholarship with The Victorian College of the Arts (VCA).

Leyla Stevens is an Australian-Balinese artist and researcher who works predominately within moving image and photography. Her practice is informed by ongoing concerns around gesture, ritual, spatial encounters and transculturation. Working within modes of representation that shift between the documentary and speculative fictions, her work deals with a notion of counter histories and alternative genealogies.

Dell Stewart’s work combines various processes often regarded as belonging to the world of craft (ceramics, textiles, animation) with a deeply embedded personal history. These practices and references assemble in immersive environments, often offering no clue to the boundary between the artwork and the space it occupies. A personal, subjective symbology pervades the work making each iteration another chapter in a narrative of a life lived doing. Stewart has organised and participated in numerous exhibitions, and has shown extensively in Australia and overseas – recently at West Space and Craft Victoria – with a particular interest in fostering new material connections and collaboration.

Jacqueline Stojanović (Australian, b. 1992) lives and works in Melbourne, where she completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Monash University in 2014, and a BFA (First Class Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2015.

Taking a position that weaving is an ancient carrier of culture, Stojanović’s practice considers histories of the handmade through the processes of weaving, drawing and installation. Stojanović adopts the language of abstraction and explores weaving in an expanded way through an open use of materials from the industrial to the domestic.

Adam Stone is a Melbourne based artist who received his BFA (Hons) from the Victorian College of the Arts. Since graduating Adam has exhibited widely and undertaken residencies in Beijing and New York and locally with City of Bayside and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery.

He has been the recipient of numerous grants and prizes, including the Montalto Sculpture Prize, the Fiona Myer Award, the Orloff Family Charitable Trust Scholarship and travel grants from the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and the City of Boorandara. Recently, he has been a finalist in the McClelland Gallery Sininni Prize, the Fishers Ghost Prize, the M Collection Prize, The Deakin Small Sculpture Prize and the Churchie Emerging Artist Award.

Masato Takasaka is a Japanese Australian artist and academic based in Melbourne. Working with a diverse array of found objects and materials, his installations form boisterous spaces where art and design interact together to create multiple, nuanced, levels of chaos and control—not entirely unlike Masato himself.

Camille Thomas is a Melbourne/Naarm based artist with a background in drawing. Taking from an academic understanding of the medium, they consider their drawing practice an act of translation. Historically they have also engaged in sculptural, installation and text-based practices. They graduated Honours from VCA in 2019, having completed their undergrad at RMIT the previous year. They are a current board member at TCB Gallery and have shown in group and solo shows at galleries such as TCB Gallery (Melb), KINGS ARI (Melb), Suite7a (Syd), M16 Artspace (Canb), and C3 Contemporary (Melb).

Madeleine Thornton-Smith has obtained various qualifications including a Bachelor of Arts/Visual Arts (Monash, 2013), Honours of Fine Art (Monash, 2014) and Diploma of Ceramics (Holmesglen, 2017). In 2017 she achieved First-Class Honours in Object-Based Practice (Ceramics) at RMIT. Madeleine has exhibited in various galleries throughout Melbourne, including Monash University, Topshelf gallery, Seventh, Lamington Drive and Craft Victoria.

Henry Trumble is an Australian photographer. Photography fills most of his waking moments. His process is his purpose as he works with traditional and contemporary methods. Henry's lens captures how he sees and what he finds with an eye for the absurdity in life.

Henry works with the best marketing agencies, art galleries, architecture studios and designers. Collaboration is one of his driving forces and he’s inspired by the dynamic nature of photography to simultaneously capture reality and turn it on its head.

Henry holds a Bachelor of Visual Communications from The University of South Australia and completed the Photography Intensive at Columbia University in New York in 2013. He has since spent three years living and working in Berlin. Henry is currently working on projects in Melbourne, Australia.

Lesley Turnbull is a photographer. Through photography – sequential, fragmented or otherwise, I am exploring transformative potential of landscapes and the ambiguity of gender. I am interested in the way photography and visual representation contributes to social and political understandings of identity and subjectivity, and as an artist locates myself within practical and theoretical spaces that allow for experimentation to develop new and resolved work.

Hana Vasak is ceramic artist who embraces creating sculptural vessels. Her ongoing development in exploring new forms often takes visual inspiration from sculpture, natural forms, ancient pottery and her travels. Each piece made has evolved from another and allows Hana to continue refining her studio based practice to create pieces that merge sculpting and hand building techniques and that subtly play with shape, form and texture.

Parkin Vatanajyankur is a film maker and photographer.

Leanne Waterhouse​Leanne Waterhouse is a multi disciplinary artist living and creating on the land of the Wodi Wodi people of the Dharrawal Nations and pays respect to elders and acknowledges the first artists on this land.

Leanne uses walking and observation as a process to create written translations, vocal soundscapes, graphic scores and installations using found objects to physically and metaphorically explore sites.

Grace Wood is a Narrm (Melbourne) based artist. Grace creates collage-based installations that anatomise the inconsistencies and eccentricities of the internet archive, art history, and the status of the contemporary photographic document. Her work is concerned with digital technology’s capacity to generate, alter and namelessly disperse images.

Grace’s images of images are presented on fabric, flattened to vinyl on walls, changed into silk, and transformed from photographic prints into wearable items. Her works are objects of adornment, but also flattened representations of objects lost or changed. Using found photographs, internet images, archival documents and iPhone snaps to create new mythologies and alter archives, she manipulates the constructs of power inherent in all image-making.

Grace received a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2014. She exhibits regularly in Australia and overseas, with recent exhibitions including A weird kind of fiction-consumption, LON Gallery, 2019; Ersatz, Cool Change Contemporary, 2019; The world, a liver (receives everyone and everything), Mayfair Gallery, 2019; Edibles, St Heliers Street Gallery, VIC, 2019; AARK Residency, Korpo Finland, 2019; Looking but not seeing, Benalla Art Gallery, 2018; There is a pain - so utter, Gertrude Glasshouse, 2018; and Like a Hasselblad on the moon, West Space, 2017. Grace is represented by LON Gallery, VIC.

Benjamin Woods was born in Melbourne in 1988, and grew up with two older sisters, who were role models for a creative life. With their lead, Ben got on the path to become an artist early, studying sculpture at VCA from 2007-2012, where he received BFA Hons and MFA. He has been showing artwork since 2011 and is a current PhD candidate at Monash University (MADA). His research stems from experience in embodied practices, and how sculpture can express and connect these experiences through processes of forming over time, across contexts. Ben enjoys complex Venn diagrams, yoga practice, queer theory, and honey.

I would like to pay respect to elders of the Kulin Nation past, present and becoming, the traditional owners and custodians of the lands, waters and airs that make all our lives possible. I acknowledge that First Nation sovereignty of this land, and all Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island lands, has never been ceded.

HeeJoon YounMelbourne-based artist HeeJoon Youn is a graduate from Victorian College of the Arts. Her works are naive attempts to make sense of a sometimes overwhelming life. Recent exhibitions include Seventh Gallery, Caves and Blindside.

Zoë Bastin (b. 1992) is an artist, curator, sometimes writer and self-described rat-bag. As an artist who makes performances, sculptures, videos, photos and runs a radio show she’s fascinated by the porousness of the body, where it starts and ends and how culture inscribes ideas of gender and sexuality onto our physical form.

Since childhood she has been fascinated by gender roles in dance class; particularly who’s allowed to do what and why. Her work challenges limitations placed on feminine and femme bodies shifting ideas about gender. Using her own style of creative dance mixed with contemporary performance art Zoë creates works that explore difficult psychological terrain. From the homophobia of her religious childhood to delving into the gender politics of ballet her works are often hard hitting. But from this deep emotional investigation comes the joy of dancing itself.

Bastin recently submitted her PhD at RMIT University, where she was researching gender by transforming patriarchal hierarchies in bodies and objects. In 2021 Zoë she is working with a team of six dancers on an immersive performance called That Which Was Once Familiar presented by Dancehouse and Bus Projects for Midsumma Festival and curating an exhibition with Claire Watson called CONFLATED for NETS Victoria. Zoë is co-director of Idyll Projects a siteless exhibition platform founded with fellow artist Jessica Curry.

Bastin has previously exhibited and performed at Bus Projects, The Substation, Wyndham City Council, SEVENTH Gallery, MADA Gallery at Monash University, Testing Grounds, School of Art Gallery RMIT University, Tinning St Presents, c3 Gallery and BLINDSIDE.

Kawita Vatanajyankur is a Thai artist based in Bangkok, best known for her eloquent and powerful feminist practice as a performance artist. Her work explores the burdens of hard physical labour expected of women in traditional Thai society. Vatanajyankur’s feats of physical endurance and strength create a tension that starts with physical discomfort and concludes by transforming pain into a thing of power and beauty.

She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art from RMIT, Melbourne in 2011. She has exhibited widely across Australia, Asia, USA and Europe including Bangkok Art Biennale, 2018; ‘Island in the Stream’ 57th Venice Biennale, 2017; Asia Triennale of Performing Arts, Melbourne Arts Centre 2017; ‘Negotiating the Future’ The Asian Art Biennial, Taiwan 2017 and Thailand Eye, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2015. In 2019, Vatanajyankur held her largest museum show to date at Albright Knox Art Gallery in New York and has forthcoming exhibitions in 2021 at Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum Collection for the touring exhibition 'Decolonizing Eurasia' to Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, German and Singapore Art Museum.

Vatanajyankur’s work is held in major collections including the National Collection of Thailand, Singapore Art Museum, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (Dunedin Art Museum), Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum, MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art (Bangkok), as well as university collections and private collections in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe and America. She is currently represented by Nova Contemporary, Bangkok and Antidote Organisation, Australia.