B-SIDE 2018

Aaron Billings is a Melbourne-based artist exploring the intersection of interior emotional spaces and the natural environment through works on paper, comics, screen prints, and embroidery. In addition to his art-practice, he runs independent fashion label ‘Bats of Leisure’ and runs embroidery workshops at SIGNAL Artspace. His commissioned work been featured by VICE, published by The Lifted Brow, Voiceworks, Going Down Swinging.

Ruby Hoppen, born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, holds a BFA, studying in Montreal at Concordia University and back home at RMIT. Juggling family life and an art practise, Hoppen has exhibited her work locally and internationally and runs quilt making workshops. She lives and works in Melbourne with her partner, two kids and dog.

Using mostly found materials and scraps, Hoppen makes her quilts using an instructional framework informed by oral history and symbolism. Hoppen playfully investigates the tropes of ‘women’s work’, pokes fun at domesticity and the under appreciated nature of the Gentle Arts by manipulating found images in old bedsheets and scraps of fabric. By reimagining the role of the woman artist as social commentator, she uses these images to draw out the discarded corners of human existence. Donated clothing, mass produced cartoon printed sheets from a stranger’s childhood, whether it is stained or sun bleached or ripped and discarded, no scrap goes unused.

Andrea Eckersley is a Lecturer in Fashion Design, at RMIT University. She completed a PhD in Fine Arts (Painting) at Monash University whilst also chasing around two little boys. Primarily interested in the way the body interacts with abstract shapes, Andrea’s work investigates the material aspects of painting with a particular focus on its surface. She has recently coauthored the book Practising with Deleuze: design, dance, art, writing, philosophy. Andrea is the art editor at the Deleuze Studies Journal and has exhibited at Anna Pappas Gallery, Sarah Scout Presents, Platform Public Contemporary Art Spaces, Nellie Castan Gallery, Craft Victoria, c3 and West Space in Melbourne.

Steven Rendall’s work is littered with references to technology, art history, horror movies and pop music. Materials, images and meanings are scavenged and rearranged in various ways.

Rendall was born in the UK in 1969. He moved to Melbourne in 2000 where he currently lives and works. Steven Rendall is a lecturer in the School of Art at RMIT University. He completed a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) at DeMontfort University in Leicester, undertook post-graduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools in London and completed a PhD at Monash University in 2015.

Rendall has staged numerous exhibitions in Australia and the UK. His work is in various collections including The National Gallery of Victoria, The Monash University Collection, Artbank, RMIT University Art Collection, The City of Melbourne, St. Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne and St. Helier Hospital, London.

Camilla Gough is a Melbourne-based jeweller. Her formal training is in sculpture and every commissioned piece can be viewed as a small piece of art. Camilla’s move into jewellery began quite by chance and from the first piece crafted she hasn’t looked back. Camilla is a passionate advocate for all that is beautiful in the world.

Martina Copley is an artist, curator, educator and writer working across different modalities of practice. An apprehension of contingent orders, the work doesn’t have a set form. Sound, idea, object and modality are collated to set up a structural space for something to exist, a space in which the work moves towards an opening and at the same time asks questions about itself.

Martina has exhibited with Bus Projects, RMIT Project Space, Seventh, WestSpace, City & Docklands Libraries, Melbourne Festival and Liquid Architecture. Collaborating with other artists and writers Martina has published work with the Expanded Writers Collective, Runway Journal, no more poetry and Bloomsbury Academic. Martina is Artistic Director Chair at Blindside Art Space. and lectures at RMIT University, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and LaTrobe College of Art + Design, Melbourne.

Her doctoral research project at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2019, The movement of the aside considered the transposition of the rhetorical figure of the aside as a poetic strategy in art.

Recent exhibition projects and publications include H–Love Letters and Other Correspondences, 2024; RePost, Mailbox Art Space, 2024; Protected: Archipelagos of grief: crises partially digested, Expanded Writers Collective, Sydney Review of Books, 2023; these pages, dear friend, Bookworks #4, George Paton Gallery, Melbourne; Chorality, A to Z of Creative Writing Methods, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022; The General Public, 99% 2022; Writing the Virus, Expanded Writers Collective, Runway Journal #45 Asemic 2022; Lowline, Love Outdoors, Moreland City Council, 2022; these pages, NO NO NO MAG Issue 2, no more poetry, 2022; Strange Alchemies [Heavy Breathing], with Bridie Lunney and James Carey, RMIT Project Space, 2022; Offering: A Fragmentary Index, with Josephine Mead, Liquid Architecture live Mono-poly, 2022; Pant and doorbell thump is wants wants, with Lou Hubbard, BUS Projects, Melbourne; The other writing, Seventh, Melbourne, 2020; Doubting Writing/Writing Doubt, ACCA + RMIT non-fiction Lab, 2019; No Notes (This is writing), with Francesca Rendle-Short, 2017; Unhidden, Counihan Gallery, Melbourne, 2017; Between these worlds there is no ordinary continuity, Melbourne Festival, 2016; FM[X] What would a feminist methodology sound like? WestSpace, Melbourne, 2015; A Listener’s guide to bowing, Melbourne School of Architecture & Design, 2015; Black Painting, seventh, Melbourne, 2014; New Ancestors, City & Docklands Libraries, Melbourne, 2014; At dawn the image rings a dissonant tune that is inaudible to our ears and cannot be recalled, with Michaela Bruton, BUS Projects, 2014.

Martina works with contemporary artists and creative organisations as an independent curator of contemporary art and gallery manager in public, commercial and artist-run contexts. Selected curatorial projects include; As If Writing, MILK Reads #3, 2022: the humbleness and the cut away, Blindside Mobile 2022; Blindside Solo Residency Series 2020, Melbourne; Blindside Regional Art + Research Residencies, Mooramong, Victoria, 2020; Ego as Echo ii, Makiko Yamamoto, 2020, Blindside Satellite public screens; Works<30s No.46-55 – With Lou Hubbard, Nathan Gray, 2016, Blindside Play, Melbourne; I always read by listening to the text, 2014, Platform, Melbourne; Bridie Lunney: The place where the fire is kept, 2014, Phoenix Foyer Commission, Melbourne; Self Species, 2012, LaTrobe University VAC Gallery, Bendigo & Maroondah Gallery, Victoria; The Five Obstructions, 2011, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA, University of Melbourne; WALK, national touring exhibition, 2009; The Time It Takes, 2009, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale, Victoria.

Martina is a lecturer and tutor at RMIT University and at LaTrobe College of Art + Design in Melbourne. She is an Artistic Director and the gallery coordinator at Blindside Art Space.

Charles O’Loughlin’s practice is concerned with the documentation and inventory of his daily life. Using a process of statistical forecasting O’Loughlin predicts his social movements, interactions and locations into the future, as well as determining the colours, elements and composition of his art works which are communicated through abstract images and sculptural forms.

Amy May Stuart is an artist living in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2012. She has exhibited at Michael Douglas (TCB studios), Brunswick Lake Gallery, Bus Projects, and TCB art inc., as well as house shows around Melbourne

Claire Mooney is an artist and art teacher, currently living and working in Melbourne, Australia.

In her work she explores abstraction and landscape, using iterative processes to break down and interweave organic and geometric structures. Over the course of her practice she has investigated how the formal language of abstraction and pattern can be used to draw references to landscape, technology, text and textiles, coding and craft.

Her recent paintings evolve through a collage-like process of cutting, layering and erasing, alternately building up then scraping and sanding back fragments of imagery over and over again. Through this process, tensions arise between forms, liminal edges and broken repetition, allowing ruptures and slippages to undermine any persistent geometry.

Clare Rae is an artist working in Naarm, on the lands of the eastern Kulin Nations also known as Melbourne, Australia. In her photographic practice Clare explores ideas of performance and gesture to interrogate and subvert dominant modes of representation. Her work is informed by feminist theory, and presents an alternate and often awkward experience of subjectivity and the female body, usually the artists’ own.

Recent projects have engaged with site specificity, involving works that are captured and displayed within the same environment. A central interest within her practice is the exploration of performance documentation, specifically how the camera can act as a collaborator, rather than mute witness, to the performer.

Known for her engagement with domestic and institutional spaces, recently Clare’s work has been captured and exhibited in locations such as the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University, the Abbotsford Convent, Sutton Project Space and the Substation, Melbourne.

In 2020 Clare began a PhD at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She completed a Master of Arts by research in 2014 at Monash University, and received first class Honours in Fine Art in 2009 at RMIT University. Her work is held in public and private collections nationally, including Artbank, The National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University, RMIT University.

Clare is a founding member of LAST Collective.

Sean M Whelan is a popular poet on the Melbourne spoken word scene. He has authored two books - 'Love is the New Hate' and 'Tattooing the Surface of the Moon'. In 2018 he began a weekly creative writing themed podcast called More Than A Whelan. In 2019 he joined forces with some musician friends to form the Crystal Veins Band, a psychedelic composition of poetry and garage music sounds. They made their debut at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival with their ‘Sad is Rad’ show to rave reviews.

David Thomas has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally since 1980. His work explores the contemplative function of painting, photo painting and installation in the contemporary world, in particular how new iterations of the monochrome tradition can address the perception of time and space, complexity, knowing and feeling. His work is held in public collections in Australia including the National Gallery of Victoria, Australian National Gallery, Heide Museum of Modern Art, RMIT University, and Auckland Art Gallery and in international private collections. He holds a PhD from RMIT University where he is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Art. He occasionally curates and writes on contemporary Eastern and Western art. He is represented by Tristian Koenig Gallery, Melbourne, Minus Space, New York, USA and 2810, Bonn, Germany.

Andrew TetzlaffAndy Tetzlaff is an artist and curator who is currently pursing a practice-led PhD at RMIT University. His practice looks at ways in which intangible phenomena–such as pressure, gravity and light–can both mark and be revealed through material. Using photomedia-based methods alongside simple objects his work draws out and manifests small complexities of our environment: moments when light is blunt or sharp, or when stones relate their geological speed and fluidity. Andrew is also the coordinator of RMIT:ART:INTERSECT — six creative projects that together form a dynamic program of exhibitions, art residencies, creative laboratories, talks and events. These projects consider and use contemporary art as a means of intersecting with and enriching the University community, as well as the broader local and global ones.

Diego RamirezDiego Ramírez is a Mexican/Australian artist working with digital media, including video, light boxes and prints. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico he relocated to Melbourne, Australia in 2008.

Alexandra Nemaric lives and works, on the lands of the Wurundjeri people and the Bunurong / BoonWurrung people of the Kulin Nation. Nemaric graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2015 (Drawing and Print Media). Nemaric has been awarded the Stuart Black Memorial Scholarship 2014, the VCASA Gender and Sexual Equality Award 2015 and was a recipient of the NGV Women’s association awards 2015. Nemaric recently returned from a residency in the South of Spain. Exhibitions include, ‘Passions’ at Sutton Project Space, ‘Can’t look, can’t look away’ curated by Amelia Winata at the Counihan Gallery, ‘Be the Person your Dog thinks you are’ LON Gallery, ‘Drowning in a bird bath’ with Ben Jones at TANS martial. Alexandra Nemaric utilizes the mediums of drawing, sculpture, photography and video to explore poetry and longing in her work.

Eleanor Louise Butt is a contemporary Melbourne based artist. Her process-based paintings utilise colour, texture, line and form; charging surfaces with gestural energy. Her work adopts the potentialities of paint to create visual dialogues where action, experience, perception and memory are interwoven and folded back into one another.

Antonia Sellbach is a Melbourne-based artist. Her work explores abstraction in relation to thought, language and serial decision-making. Often modular in nature, Sellbach's work creates partitions and parts, sets and versions, work made to be configured and reconfigured.

Benjamin SextonBenjamin Prabowo Sexton works predominantly with photography, placing an emphasis on the postproduction values of the medium. Sexton utilises his photographic archive to alter images through experimental darkroom processes, such as masking and misregistration to form new compositions. His works are typically monochromatic, unique state, silver gelatin prints that combine collage, photography and drawing techniques to step outside the traditional conventions of photographic practice.

Benjamin Prabowo Sexton (né Lichtenstein) is an Indonesian-born, Melbourne-based artist. Recent solo exhibitions include Touch, Daine Singer (2019), Keen, c3 (2018), Bound For Glory, a collaboration with Oscar Perry, The Honeymoon Suite (2017), Living In Oblivion, Anna Pappas Gallery (2015), Flower, Fort Delta (2015), Crescent, Neospace (2014), I Know You Will Be Happy Here, Utopian Slumps (2013) and Death Adder, Chapter House Lane (2013). Group exhibitions include The National, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021), Index, Centre for Contemporary Photography (2020), Illusions and Allusions, Missing Persons (2018), Group Show: Second Iteration, a collaborative exhibition with Arts Project Australia, Arts Project Australia (2016), The Bends, PhotoAccess (2016), The Alchemists: Rediscovering Photography in the Age of the Jpeg, Australian Centre for Photography (2015) and Mental, Muddguts Gallery New York (2014), Sexton has also participated in the Melbourne Art Fair.

Sexton was a finalist for the 2013 Bowness Prize, and was recipient of the 2006 Kodak Salon Excellence in Photomedia award at the Centre for Contemporary Photography. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Photography) from the Victorian College of the Arts.

Gabriel Tongue Nilsen’s practice investigates the act of looking. Interested in adding to the discussion on photographic art, he explores high and low-end imagery using his extensive archive of analogue and digital images. By responding to photographic history, and resisting the urge to move away from a traditional documentary style of photography, Nilsen is interested in finding new rules and formats to arrange a photographic series. Nilsen’s current focus is on books and magazines.

Jan Murray completed her postgraduate qualifications at the VCA and RMIT University. Since 1981 she has shown regularly in both solo and group exhibitions in public museums, commercial galleries and artist run initiatives. Her work has been included in national and international surveys of contemporary art in Australia, Germany, France, Italy and the USA, and is widely represented in significant Australian public collections as well as the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. She has received an Australia Council Project Grant and her Australia Council Residencies include Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Via Farini, Milan the British School at Rome. Recent residencies include Phasmid Studios, Berlin in 2016-17. She is represented by Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne.

Sean LowryDr Sean Lowry is a Melbourne-based visual artist, writer, curator and musician. He holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the University of Sydney and is currently Head of Critical and Theoretical Studies in Art at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Lowry’s conceptually driven artistic practice employs strategies of concealment, subliminal quotation, erasure, remediation and intermedial expansion to explore the outermost limits of the world of a work of art. He has exhibited and performed extensively both nationally and internationally, and his writing appears in numerous journals and edited volumes. He is also Founder and Executive Director of global blind peer reviewed exhibition program Project Anywhere—which is currently supported as part of a partnership between the Centre of Visual Art (University of Melbourne) and Parsons Fine Art (Parsons School of Design, The New School). Lowry is also one half (with Ilmar Taimre) of the radically intermedial artistic curatorial initiative The Ghosts of Nothing.

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.

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.

Kate Rohde completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2001. Since then she has become known for her intensely colourful jewellery and sculptural object based practice, nowadays working predominately with resin and hand casting techniques.

Recent exhibitions include Luminous Realms, a solo survey of her work since 2006 at Craft, Magic Object; the 2016 Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, 21st Century Heide at Heide Museum of Modern Art, and Obsessed: Compelled to make, at the Australian Design Centre. In 2015 she was a finalist in the Rigg Design Prize at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Other projects include collaborating with Sydney fashion house Romance was Born on their 2010/11 S/S collections Renaissance Dinosaur and 2011 A/W Fruits and Flowers. Her work is held in the collections of several institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia and Bendigo Art Gallery.

Kate is represented by Pieces of Eight Gallery, Melbourne.

Jacqui Stockdale lives and works in Melbourne and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1990 and a Graduate Diploma in Video Art at the Hobart Centre for the Arts in 1993. Stockdale is best known for her theatrical portrait photography, figurative paintings and drawings and surreal collage work. Her more recent animated life-size assemblages come with haunting soundscapes and vaudeville performance. Stockdale’s practice engages cultural identity, folklore narratives, masquerade and anthropological complexities.

Stockdale’s recent solo exhibition The Long Shot at Linden New Art, Melbourne was followed by a major survey exhibition,Familija at the Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria in 2016. Notable exhibitions include Todays/Tomorrow, Cape Town, South Africa; Romancing the Skull, Art Gallery of Ballarat, VIC, 2017; The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Magic Object, AGSA, 2016; The National Self-Portrait Prize, UQAM; Alles Masquerade, Museum Villa Rot, Germany, 2014 and Living Rooms, the Louvre, Paris, France, 2012.

In 2012 Stockdale won the Doug Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize and a recipient of the Australia Council Barcelona Studio Residency and Bundanon, NSW, Collections include the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of South Australia; Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the Watermill Foundation Collection, USA.

Lucie McIntosh is an artist, curator and writer with a deep commitment to the independent arts community. She is currently a Director and Program Curator of Blindside, an independent, artist–run space based in the City of Melbourne. Lucie’s exhibition and research based practice explores process of signification and, more specifically, in how the process of signification might be made visible through the content of an artwork. Her practice emphasises the inherently plural and personal nature of meaning—reminding us of, and celebrating, our agency in its creation. Lucie is interested in the many ways that ‘the image’ can be expanded and consumed in political and philosophical contexts. Her practice relies on plurality and intertextuality—each artwork compulsively referencing its many varieties of self, content, history and maker.

Sean Miles is a cute Ngāti Raukawa takatāpui artist, respectfully doing mahi on sacred Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) and Boon Wurrung land in Naarm/Melbourne. They maintain an interdisciplinary and process based practice that centres the correlations between trickster archetypes in ancient mythologies and contemporary queer performativity. They employ simplistic and immediate methods of transformation to shift environments and elevate at-hand objects into ritualistic materials and spaces for performance. They manifest visions that expose the horror of colonial and heteronormative social structures and concurrently fosters space for contemplation, healing and regeneration.

Kiah Pullens' artistic practice uses image archives from diverse sources such as dated Australiana and artistic imagery to community-based institutions’ photographic archives. The sourced images are re-photographed and reprinted as large-scale analogue prints. Moving seamlessly between digital and analogue processes to question what we are seeing and how images are made seduces us to re-see old discarded images in fresh immersive ways.

Honouring traditional photographic techniques and languages, her work interlaces unconscious urges of pleasure, of fervour and anxiety through an automotive and intuitive process. Kiah’s photographic works evolve through a delicate performance in complete darkness. Embodied printing techniques and fluid movements unfold as a darkroom dance. Kiah pushes the boundaries of the photographic medium, where elusive qualities are formed through the complex layering of historical and cultural imagery.

Ross Coulter is a visual artist working on the traditional lands of the Yalukit Willam clan of the Boon Wurrung. He holds a BFA (Hons) and MFA (Research) from the Victoria College of the Arts. Coulter has exhibited widely in a variety of artist-run initiatives and public institutions locally and internationally including a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria and a group exhibition at the Matsudai Nohbutai Arts Centre in Japan. In 2009-2010 Coulter developed and danced with Lucy Guerin Inc.’s production of Untrained,performing at the North Melbourne Meat Markets, the Sydney Opera House and at the Hong Kong Arts Festival.

Coulter has received numerous awards and grants including the George Mora Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria and the Keith and Elizabeth Murdoch Traveling Fellowship for his 10,000 Paper Planes project. In 2013-2014 he undertook the 2 year studio residency program at Gertrude Contemporary. The recent focus of his work has been an exploration of photographic portraiture, performance and community participation. Ross has lectured in visual arts and photography for a several of years at different tertiary institutions including Monash University and Deakin University.

Kiron Robinson is a Melbourne based artist. Utilising a range of material strategies including neon, video, photography and installation, his work investigates the idea of doubt, faith and failure as constructive devices.

Since 2003 Robinson has exhibited his work widely both nationally and internationally. Two recent solo exhibitions include, We told ourselves we needed separate beds to sleep, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; and Hello. You’ve made it, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne. Robinson has also partaken in a number of residencies including the inbound residency program through Apexart, New York, and from 2005 – 2007 Robinson was a Gertrude Contemporary studio resident.

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.

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.

Raafat Ishak is Head of Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts and a practising visual artist. His practice spans painting, sculpture and installation.

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.

Evie Cahir (b. 1992, Melbourne) lives & paints in West Melbourne.

Shelley Lasica's practice is defined by an enduring interest in the context and situations of presenting choreography. For more than 30 years, she has pushed the confines of dance, choreography and performance. Throughout her career, she has been making solo performances that function as a means and a reason for showing work. This practice provides the basis for generating ensemble works that question the collaborative and interdisciplinary possibilities of choreography.

She regularly collaborates with visual artists, including Tony Clark, Helen Grogan, Anne Marie May, Callum Morton, and Kathy Temin, in order to create dialogues between different modes and means of presentation.

Lasica’s choreographic works have been shown nationally and internationally within both visual art and theatre contexts, including: Melbourne Festival; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Chunky Move, Melbourne; Artspace, Sydney; Centre Nationale de la Danse, Paris; Siobhan Davies Studios, London; Dance Massive, Melbourne; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Murray White Room, Melbourne; and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.

She has been invited to research and develop new work through residencies at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Artspace, Sydney; Lucy Guerin Inc, Melbourne; The Substation, Melbourne; PFERD, Vienna, Austria; and Centre National de la Danse, Pantin, France.

Shelley is a guest teacher of dance and choreography in the Interior Design Program, RMIT University; Monash Art Design and Architecture Faculty, Monash University and at Lucy Guerin Inc.

Bridie Lunney Bridie Lunney develops her works in relation to the site of presentation, engaging the given context, physical conditions, and poetics. Combining practices of architectural interventions, sculpture, and durational performance, Lunney acknowledges the body as a conduit between our psychological selves and the physical world. She has exhibited extensively including at the TarraWarra Biennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Artspace and Performance Space. She has been an artist in residence and exhibited in Chile, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.She is currently a Lecturer in Sculpture at the National Art School, Sydney, and an Advisor to Blindside gallery, Melbourne.

Tori Lill is a Melbourne-based artist working in the realm of photography, video and installation. In 2017, Tori completed her BFA (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts. Her work broadly explores notions of the in-between both physically and psychologically through distancing, (lack of) touch and removal of the self. Through interrogating the relationship of image and self, and image and viewer - Tori seeks to scrutinise the act of contemplation and embodied experience. Tori has previously shown at Blindside as part of the PLAY Program and in 2016 was the recipient of the Bus Projects Award and the NGV Womens Association Award at the VCA Graduate Exhibition.

Kenneth L Suico is a visual artist and photographer living and working in Naarm / Melbourne, Australia. Born in Cebu, Philippines, Suico’s pandisciplinary practice ranges from video, photo, and projection, to sculptural installation, and performance. Suico attended Victorian College of the Arts graduating in 2016, and then completing Honours in 2018.

Brigid Hansen is a Melbourne-based writer, curator and artist with an interest in humour, queer bodies and pop culture. She has contributed to publications as Art+Australia, .un Extended and Island Island and worked with Blindside, True Estate, Campbell Arcade, La Trobe Art Institute and Town Hall Gallery.

Xanthe Dobbie is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation in Naarm, Melbourne. Working across on- and offline modes of making, their practice aims to capture the experience of contemporaneity as reflected through queer and feminist ideologies. Drawing on humour, pop, sex, history and iconography, they develop shrines to a post-truth era. They have exhibited extensively locally and internationally with recent works including live-streamed theatre, interactive media, AR, VR, collage, performance and installation.
Significant exhibitions include Matrix Re-Loaded at RMIT First Site Gallery (2023), Cloud Copy at Lismore Regional Gallery (2023), The Long Now at ACMI (2022), and Don’t Be Evil at UQ Art Museum (2021). Xanthe recently won the Incinerator Art Award for Social Change and in 2023 was Guest Editor for Runway Journal Issue #46 Ghost. They co-founded performance series Queer PowerPoint for which they have performed at major festivals and institutions including MCA, Sydney Opera House, WA Museum, RISING, and Now or Never. Xanthe is currently undertaking a PhD focusing on digital and interactive art at RMIT University as part of the ARC Linkage Archiving Australian Media Art: Towards a Method and National Collection.

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.