EchoLocation: Remnants of memory (RMIT x Blindside 'Pathways' program)
Ange Jeffrey , Chloe Vella , Darcy Williams , Eugenie Gullifer-Laurie , Gray Qiruo Ma , Guinevere Isla , Harley Hefford , Mingyu Yan , Nishini Koththigoda , Pupae Punyashthiti , Qianyue Joyce Zheng , Ró Sín , Sabita Gyawali , Wenjun Wu , Yuqing Amory Li , Zoe Sinclair , Bella Liao , Jennifer Collis
3–27 Jun 2026
Step into the winding cavern. EchoLocation grasps and repositions murmurs of the past that ring in our ears. It is the thread that connects us, binding our works together into a collective narrative. Through intensive mapping of our individual creative practices, memory emerged as our common tether.
Immutable or ephemeral, these memories bridge personal and environmental contexts, exploring the cultural echoes that resonate through nature, the land, the home, and the body. These reverberations transform Blindside into a living chamber; voices gather in the shopfront where experience becomes nostalgia, and the back gallery collapses domestic rooms into worlds where objects fold histories. Childhood antics spill into the courtyard, archaic images intertwine with the stairwell, and upstairs rooms resonate with visceral truths. This is a place of an unfolding journey; a story in motion.
EchoLocation brings together a plethora of art forms that examine how memory redefines our connection to the mind, body, and environment. Drawings, photography, metal works and sculptural pieces shape the dialogue. Through its collaborative spirit, this project holds what moves us, what we make, and what has shaped us. The accompanying zine captures this resonance, gathering images and words directly from our collective hands and hearts. It serves as a physical archive of the exhibition's atmosphere; Keep it,share it, return to it.
To realise EchoLocation, we worked as a non-hierarchical collective built on shared responsibilities and professional agency. This collaboration dissolves traditional boundaries between administrator and creator—treating curation, marketing, and installation as an expanded creative practice where tasks shift fluidly.
It was made with our memories, for you.
This project is presented by Blindside and RMIT University as part of 'Pathways' – an artist-led program for the RMIT School of Arts Masters program, including Master of Fine Art, Photography, Art in Public Space and Arts Management. Pathways program offers a cross-disciplinary experience at a professional level.This program is facilitated by Nikki Lam, artist-curator, based in Narrm.
Artists
Ange Jeffery
Chloe Vella
Darcy Williams
Eugenie Gullifer-Laurie
Gray Qiruo Ma
Guinevere Isla
Harley Hefford
Mingyu Yan
Nishini Koththigoda
Pupae Punyashthiti
Qianyue Joyce Zheng
Rósín
Sabita Gyawali
Wenjun Wu
Yuqing Amory Li
Zoe Sinclair
Producers/Curators
Joan Kuo
Chloe Vella
Guinevere Randall
Pupae Punyashthiti
Publication
Pupae Punyashthiti
Bella Liao
Gray Qiruo Ma
Qianyue Joyce Zheng
Marketing
Guinevere Randall
Eugenie Gullifer-Laurie
Gray Qiruo Ma
Jennifer Collis
Joan Kuo
Nishini Koththigoda
Pupae Punyashthiti
Qianyue Joyce Zheng
Wenjun Wu
Writers
Chloe Vella
Jennifer Collis
Leila Simpson
Leave the present and step into memory. A melting pot of collaboration, EchoLocation draws visitors into a journey of unfolding narratives—each anchored by a lurking murmur or residual trace of the past. Enter the echo chamber, where our collective memories meet your own.
This project is presented by Blindside and RMIT University as part of Pathways – an artist-led program for the RMIT School of Arts Masters program, including Master of Fine Art, Photography, Art in Public Space and Arts Management. Pathways program offers a cross-disciplinary experience at a professional level. This program is facilitated by Nikki Lam, artist-curator, based in Narrm.
Ange Jeffrey is a Wiradjuri mixed-media marramaldhaany (maker) living and working on Gulidjan Country, Southwest Victoria. Their work negotiates cultural knowledge, storying and relationality, affirming the vitality of cultural practicing and honouring buyaa (law) and ancestral knowledge. Organic forms and tactile surfaces invite audiences to consider their own mind/body relationship to Country and the layered narratives held within materials.
Chloe Vella (She/Her) is a Naarm-based multi-media artist who works with fleshly contortions of the body, sitting at the intersection of physiology and the self. Visualising the frustrations of existing within violent and capitalist institutions, she employs gestural and raw mark-making to explore the tensions between mind, body, and built environment.
Darcy Williams (They/Them) creates contemporary paintings that draw on disparate personal, historical and contemporary images, figures and phenomena. This process of making and research offers revisions to the cannon of western civilisation and challenges lineages of power and control.
Eugenie Gullifer-Laurie (They/She) (Gigi) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne with a focus on bodily phenomena. Their practice explores hidden corporeal experiences, revealing what is usually concealed by flesh or by censorship and erasure: the internal workings of the body, the abject and private aspects of being a human, and the reality of living with invisible and underrepresented conditions.
Gray Qiruo Ma (She/They) is a Chinese-born artist living and working in Naarm. Utilising black-and-white photography, her practice explores social structures, identity, and queer subjectivity. Her recent work examines the relationship between image and material, using techniques such as burning to transform photography from a two-dimensional medium into spatial presence.
Guinevere Isla (She/Her) is a multidisciplinary artist (b. Blue Mountains on Darug and Gundungurra Country), practising on Woiworung and Boonwurrung Country in Naarm. Her materially driven installation work explores the intersection of visual art, dance, and music. Investigating the fluid nature of memory and multiplicitous reality, she questions the coexistence of stories with internal re-enactment.
Harley Hefford (He/Him) is a Naarm-based artist using assemblage, video, painting and performance to create socially-engaged installations. Exploring subconscious inner landscapes, his work explodes into maximal, colourful worlds through text, interactive elements and raw whimsy. Blending visions of a kinder, playful world with 21st century pressures, the work invites empathy and engulfment in the complexity of others' minds.
Mingyu Yan (She/Her) is a Chinese-born artist from Yunnan, living and working in Naarm. Drawn to participatory and interactive processes, her practice investigates relational aesthetics as a means of artistic production. Rather than resolution, Yan fosters situations where strangers meet, exchange, and co-author work together.
Nishini Koththigoda (She/Her) is an emerging visual artist currently completing a Master of Fine Arts in Melbourne. Her practice explores psychological tension, memory, and vulnerability through charcoal drawing. Influenced by surrealist and psychoanalytic imagery, her work investigates distorted figures and domestic environments to create unsettling atmospheres that challenge perceptions of familiarity and safety.
Pupae Punyashthiti (She/Her) is a Thai graphic designer and illustrator pursuing her Master of Arts in Arts Management at RMIT. Turning scattered thoughts into something calm and considered, her work sits in the space between positivity and the quiet intrusive thoughts that are actually kind of wonderful. Her practice spans zines, posters, postcards, and character design.
Qianyue Joyce Zheng (She/Her) is a Chinese-born, Naarm-based photographer exploring memory, identity, and perception through analogue and digital image-making. Constructing surreal imagery, she traces the quiet residue of human relationships and shared experience. Centring viewers as collaborators, her work navigates the intersection of body, time, and displacement within relational memory.
Ró Sín (She/Her) is a multidisciplinary artist and curator engaged with the art scenes of Eora and Naarm, exhibiting her circuit-bent video decay and experimental print practice across galleries, festival stages and dancefloors. Drawing on Hauntology, the Uncanny and feminist theory, she plays with the tension between the erotic and grotesque, and queer explorations of sexuality and identity.
Sabita Gyawali (She/Her) is a Nepalese visual artist living and working in Naarm. Rooted in her experience of migration, her practice explores memory, belonging, and place. Interested in how memory shifts, fragments, and reconstructs over time, she understands "home" as unfixed, existing only within memory itself.
Wenjun Wu (He/Him) is a photographic artist exploring the relationship between personal experience, social structures, and emotional memory. Working in staged photography, his practice examines the subtle gaps between body, space, desire and memory — transforming everyday environments through lighting, colour and material experimentation. His images create spaces of uncertainty, reflection, and emotional tension.
Yuqing Amory Li (She/Her) is an MFA student specialising in gold and silversmithing. Using jewellery as a narrative medium, she transforms intangible concepts into tangible objects, exploring themes of light and shadow, the universe, and moon phases. Combining unconventional materials with structural experimentation, her work balances rational construction with emotional expression, grounded in a rigorous gemmological background.
Zoe Sinclair (She/Her) Climbing the steel tower, Zoe Sinclair wraps herself around the city's spine, disrupting the language of urban space. Working with metal, she disassembles and reassembles new, non-functional contexts, exploring the tension between object and memory. Based in Naarm, Zoe is a sculptor and emerging curator completing a Master of Arts Management at RMIT, reimagining urban narratives on stolen land.
Bella Liao is a Taiwanese illustrator and graphic designer based in Melbourne/Naarm, currently completing a Master of Arts Management at RMIT University. Working across illustration, photography and visual storytelling, her practice explores poetic connections between humans and nature.
Jennifer Collis is a multi-disciplinary artist from the Mornington Peninsula, specialising in traditional mediums and folk art. An archaeology graduate, she explores early craft techniques and the intersection of utility and aesthetic design. Jennifer is currently completing a Master of Arts Management.
Nikki Lam (RMIT Facilitator) Nikki Lam’s practice explores the complexity of belonging through the exploration of self, memory and space. Working primarily with video, performance, text and installation, she is interested in exploring the translations of hybrid identities, often through studies of rituals, language and representations. Born in Hong Kong (1988), Nikki's work has been shown at Underbelly Arts Festival, SafARI, Firstdraft, BUS Projects, The Ferry Gallery (Bangkok, Thailand), Galleria Marcollini (Forli, Italy), and toured around the world with Over View International Festival of Video Art. Her most recent curatorial projects include Frames of Seeing (2017) at Nite Art, Flygirl by Caroline Garcia (2017), Screen as a Room (2016) at THE SUBSTATION and Channels Festival (2015).
Pupae Punyashthiti (She/Her) is a Thai graphic designer and illustrator pursuing her Master of Arts in Arts Management at RMIT. Turning scattered thoughts into something calm and considered, her work sits in the space between positivity and the quiet intrusive thoughts that are actually kind of wonderful. Her practice spans zines, posters, postcards, and character design.
Chloe Vella (She/Her) is a Naarm-based multi-media artist who works with fleshly contortions of the body, sitting at the intersection of physiology and the self. Visualising the frustrations of existing within violent and capitalist institutions, she employs gestural and raw mark-making to explore the tensions between mind, body, and built environment.
Guinevere Isla (She/Her) is a multidisciplinary artist (b. Blue Mountains on Darug and Gundungurra Country), practising on Woiworung and Boonwurrung Country in Naarm. Her materially driven installation work explores the intersection of visual art, dance, and music. Investigating the fluid nature of memory and multiplicitous reality, she questions the coexistence of stories with internal re-enactment.
Joan Kuo Born in Taiwan, raised in China, Joan Kuo is an emerging curator based in Naarm, Melbourne. Her practice grows organically from subcultural worlds and the communities within them, guided by the belief that art is for everyone, using curiosity as compass, sharing her eyes with you.