Brendan Van Hek is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans from small text-based neons to large-scale site-specific installations. Continually exploring new materials, he mines the possibilities inherent in a broad range of mediums from found objects, neon, glass and mirror to timber and metal. In his work, material qualities are often inverted or denied. His recent focus on pattern continues Van Hek’s ongoing preoccupation with ideas of cultural and social erasure and investigates the means with which control and order can be tested or upset.

Brendan graduated with Honours from Curtin University, Western Australia in 2001 and currently lives and works in Gadigal. He has exhibited widely nationally, including: The National 2021: New Australian Art, Carriageworks, 2021; Superposition of three types, Artspace, 2017; NEW11, ACCA, 2011; TWMA Contemporary 2010, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, 2010; and A Certain Slant of Light, PICA, 2009. He has exhibited internationally in Amour Fou, New Westminster New Media Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; Shifting Geometries, The Australian Embassy, Washington DC and Becoming: Worlds In Flux, C24 Gallery, Chelsea, New York, USA. In 2012 he undertook a residency at ISCP, New York, and was the recipient of a Mid-Career Fellowship from the Department of Culture and the Arts WA, and has been the recipient of numerous grants from the Creative Australia.

Angelina was born in Kalumburu and has lived in Kalumburu all her life. Her mum is famous artist Lily Karadada and her father is Jack Karadada, who was a medicine man and would make artifacts like didgeredoo and spears for hunting.

“My mum used to paint on bark, bush baskets and Numarrga (bush cradle). I learnt two languages from my parents, plus other languages in my life.”

In Karadada’s recent series “Wandjina Emerging”, the artist explores traditional painting mediums of white ochre, both saltwater and freshwater, which she collects herself and natural resin which she collects from the white gum tree. Laborious and strenuous activities, the artist considers the process important in connecting to her ancestors while creating extraordinary Wandjina paintings of luminous pale pink and chalky white with earthy texture.

Not only an excellent painter, Angelina is employed as a Senior Arts Worker at Kira Kiro Artists. She graduated from the ANKA Arts Worker Foundation Training Program and the National Gallery of Australia Wesfarmers Indigenous Leadership Fellowship in 2019. “I want to challenge myself to achieve my best. I think it is important for my whole community to have someone committed to the arts. I love doing art and running the art centre.”

Ilona McGuire is a Noongar and Kungarakan interdisciplinary artist working primarily in printmaking, drawing and installation.

Through use of cultural and western techniques, Ilona creates sacred sanctuaries within western institutional spaces. Her interests and explorations of race relations within the country we call “Australia” often manifests through material juxtaposition that examine the nature of everyday tension through to systemic turmoil.

After her 2021 drone light show, MOOMBAKI with the Fremantle Biennale, Ilona was awarded the Schenberg Art Fellowship for Hatched: National Graduate Show 2022 at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA). Followed by her residency at PICA, she exhibited at Stala Contemporary, the Fremantle Arts Centre and Goolugatup Heathcote with her work now featuring in collections such as Janet Holmes à Court and John Curtin Gallery.

Andrew Nicholls is an Australian/British artist, writer, and curator based in Boorloo/Perth, whose practice engages with the sentimental, camp, and other historically-marginalised aesthetics, and traces the historical recurrence of particular aesthetic motifs. He is especially concerned with periods of cultural transition during which Western civilisation’s stoic aspirations were undone by base desires, fears or compulsions, and with 18^th century and Regency Britain’s fascination with, and paranoia of, other cultures.

While primarily drawing-based, his practice also incorporates ceramics, photography, and expansive site-based curatorial projects. He particularly draws inspiration from heritage sites and museum collections, and has coordinated group and solo residencies at iconic locations including the Spode China Factory, the Freud Museum, London, and the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. Nicholls has exhibited and undertaken residencies across Australia, Southeast Asia, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, including a solo exhibition at The Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2018.

He has recieved two Creative Development Fellowships from the Western Australian Government, and commissioned by several organisations in Australia and the United States, including his $250,000 ceiling mural for the City of Perth Library. Nicholls’ work is represented in collections including Artbank, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, City of Perth, Janet Holmes à Court, and the Kedumba Collection of Australian Drawings.

Amy Perejuan-Capone works between Fremantle, the Perth hills, the Western Australian wheatbelt, and international residencies. With a background in art, design, and aviation, Perejuan-Capone continually returns to objects and the networks of agency held within them and, increasingly, the roles the environment, anxiety, personal history, and optimism play in this system.

Amy graduated with a BA(Fine Art) from Curtin University in 2009 and an Advanced Diploma of Industrial Design from North Metropolitan TAFE in 2014. Her major residencies include the prestigious Shigaraki Ceramic Culture Park, 2019, the Asialink Fremantle – Taipei Artist Village exchange in 2020, and the Upernavik Museum residency, Greenland, in 2017.

Amy’s practice increasingly produces large-scale mix media installations. Her most ambitious include One Word For Snow, a series of ephemeral ‘blizzards’ in Perth CBD in 2017, and Don’t Stare at the Sun/For Too Long wherein she built a full size replica of her dads ultralight plane, exhibited at PS Art Space in 2019. Her latest solo exhibition SKY CAVE took over the atrium of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2021 with a flock of heritage hang gliders, homemade aircraft, fine textiles, and lined the entire gallery in gold mylar foil.

Stewart was born in Scotland in 1949. He arrived in Australia with his parents and two siblings in 1956, settling in Kwinana. His early education focussed on science based subjects and he subsequently worked in an oil industry laboratory. During this time he spent time in the army reserve and studied ceramics at FremantleTAFE eventually abandoning the laboratory for a full time ceramics career in the early eighties. He initially established his studio  in Kwinana and later in serpentine where he built the first of his large wood fired kilns.

Stewart has taught as a sessional lecturer for TAFE, Edith Cowan and Curtin Universities, delivered workshops across WA and offshore and since the early eighties been a tutor at Fremantle Arts Centre.

Stewarts current studio is in palmyra with his woodfired kiln on a property that he and his wife Trish own at York. Environmental concerns drive much of Stewarts practice and he and Trish grow the wood used in the kiln from seedlings. The clay used is blended using local clays so that the work is very much of the place.

Stewart has exhibited regularly within WA, interstate and overseas. His work is contained in private and institutional collections across Australia and overseas.

“My name is Corban Clause Williams. I was born in Newman hospital. Mum, Dad, Nanna and Pop lived in Jigalong before, but they moved into town before I was born. I’m one of seven children. I grew up in Newman- this is my home. I like to travel but I worry about home. When I was younger I went to Newman Primary School and Newman Senior High School.

My Nanna and Pop used to take us out hunting for bush tucker. I’d help them make a fire and tea. Me and Pop would go out to the swamp area between Newman and Kumarina. Nan, Pop, Mum and Dad would tell funny stories about our family and make me laugh.

I work teaching Cultural Awareness with KJ (Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa, ranger organisation) teaching Cultural Awareness, and help the YMCA with youth programs. I work at Martumili too, helping to sell the paintings and get the canvas ready. With Martumili I travelled too. Gold Coast was my first big trip and [I’ve been to] Perth, Adelaide and Sydney. I’m [also] a Martumili artist. I come to Martumili to paint about my Country, where my grandfather walked around and collected food, and visited the same rockholes I do. I paint to keep my culture and stories and share with others. Sometimes I paint with my nanna Jakayu [Biljabu] (dec.). I learn from her a little bit. My skin name is Milangka and Kaalpa (Kalypa, Canning Stock Route Well 23) is my grandfather Country. I was really happy to go see my grandfather’s Country- pukurlpa (happy). When I paint I feel like its home. Doing it on the canvas, feel like I’m standing there back at home.”

Booth is a disabled artist living in Fremantle, WA. His recent work uses participation and large sculptural forms to create experiential works that challenge the able bodied to navigate a world that is uncomfortable by design. His constructed experiences poke fun at the assumptions many people have surrounding disability and yet they also leave lasting impressions that engender a deeper response from the audience.

He was a resident at Fremantle Arts Centre (2019), Testing Grounds, Melbourne (VIC) (2019), PICA (2017) and North Metropolitan TAFE (2017).

He’s exhibited at the Joondalup Prize (WA) 2019, Firstdraft (NSW) 2019, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (NSW) 2020 and PICA (WA) 2020, The Joondalup Invitation art Prize (WA) 2021, Art Gallery of Western Australia (WA) 2021 and the Fremantle Biennale (WA) 2021.

He was selected for NextWave 2020 (NextWave X artist), PICA Salon 2020, FinePrint Journal (SA) 2020 and Proximity Festival (NAT) 2020 Booth is working on shows for PICA (WA) 2022, Goolugatup/Heathcoate (WA) 2022, Seventh Galleries (VIC) 2022, and The University of Tasmania (TAS) 2023.

Jacky Cheng was born in Malaysia of Chinese heritage and currently resides in Yawuru Country, Broome, WA. Jacky Cheng weaves narratives and materials drawn from her familial and cultural experiences, and maps these to the esoteric and social constructs of her physical environment and its collective surroundings. Deeply rooted in her own bi-cultural experience, a focus of her work her is an emergence of identity and awareness through cultural activities, nostalgia and intergenerational relationships. Her predominant choice of medium reflects an intense relationship within her practice through methodologies and manipulation of papers and fibres.

Her recent accolades include the national prize 46th Fremantle Art Centre Print Award (2023), The John Stringer Prize (2022), Best Bespoke Design, VIC (2023); finalists in multiple national art awards including National Works on Paper, VIC (2024, 2022) and 67th Blake Prize, NSW (2022). She attended residencies in Japan, Finland, Spain and Australia and was one of the selected artists in Regional Assembly 2023/24 (Regional Arts Australia) connecting with other cultural practitioners working in regional and remote geographies across Australia, Asia and the Pacific. Her work has been acquired by public institutions and in private collections. Jacky is one of the lead artists in the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial 2024 at Fremantle Art Centre.

As an art educator, facilitator and arts worker, Jacky works with various organisations delivering skill-based training and mentorship. Her award-winning teaching accolades was recognised at the state and national Vocational Education Training (VET) sector bestowed by the Australia Training Awards (2013) and a finalist for the Curtin University Teaching Excellence Award by Awards Australia (2015).

Images courtesy of the artist, photographer Bo Wong and photographer Brett Canet-Gibson.

Guy Louden is an Australian artist and curator living in Walyalup Fremantle and born in Toronto. He has founded and managed experimental galleries and curated major (and minor) exhibitions. His artwork has been exhibited in Australian cities, regions, and online.

Louden was educated at University of Sydney, University of Manchester, and University of Western Australia. He has postgraduate qualifications in History of Art and in Art Curating.

Louden joined Perth artist-run gallery Moana in 2014, in 2016 co-founded experimental gallery Success, and in 2020 co-founded Private Island gallery. During this time he curated independent exhibitions, including for the Perth Festival.

He began by making art in 2017 and has since exhibited widely including at Firstdraft, Bus Projects, Sawtooth, and Fremantle Arts Centre. In 2020 he was exhibited at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane as part of the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize.

Louden has worked as an arts worker including as install technician, curator, and administrator.

Katie West is an artist and Yindjibarndi woman based in Noongar Ballardong country, working in installation, textiles and social practice. The process and notion of naturally dyeing fabric underpin her practice –the rhythm of walking, gathering, bundling, boiling up water and infusing materials with plant matter. Using found and naturally dyed textiles, video, and sound, Katie creates installations, textile pieces, and happenings that invite attention to the ways we weave our stories, places, histories, and futures.

Katie studied visual art at Edith Cowan University (2009) and Sociology at Murdoch University (2013). In 2017 Katie completed a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, graduating as the recipient of the Dominik Mersch Gallery Award and the Falls Creek Resort Indigenous Award. Katie has presented solo exhibitions at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Tarra Warra Museum of Art, Healesville and West Space, Melbourne for Next Wave Festival 2016, and participated in group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne and Shimmer, Rotterdam.

Holly Yoshida (b.1992) is a painter based in Boorloo/ Perth.

The empty room is a recurring motif in Yoshida’s work, the absences and neutrality invite a speculative and voyeuristic gaze, in which we might construct or impose narrative. Through an engagement with the process of painting, she aims to depict the private and invisible by de-familiarising the everyday.

Yoshida graduated from Edith Cowan University with a Bachelor of Contemporary Art in 2014 and is represented by Moore Contemporary. Her work is held in private and public collections including The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Wesfarmers and Artbank.

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Holly is represented by Moore Contemporary.

Amanda Bell is an emerging Badimia and Yued artist living and working on Noongar Boodja in Busselton. She began making about 5 years ago as a result of being a stay-at-home carer for her elderly mother. This time in her life was quite isolating and art was an avenue for her to experience and explore the world around her as well as her culture and finding a voice through creativity. Her artistic practice has since developed and she has had some success with the intention of honouring her people, and communicating how she feels about many contemporary issues affecting Aboriginal people today. She has explored many different processes of artistic practice but has been especially drawn towards sculpture, installation art and more recently portrait painting.

Her work has been exhibited at the Bunbury Regional Art Gallery (BRAG), ArtGeo in Busselton and The Fremantle Arts Centre. Recently her large scale neon work From our mouth, lips, throat and belly was acquired by the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Fremantle Arts Centre and Marcus Canning.

2021 has also seen Amanda mentored to curate her first exhibition at BRAG, for the exhibition Noongar Country and she is currently working on a Mental Health Arts Exhibition that will be held in October 2021.

Daniel Kristjansson is a multi-disciplinary artist, teacher and former swimming pool maintenance guy now living in Midland, Western Australia.

His art is a suburban perspective on the tantalising pull of natural chaos and complexity. Through photography and sculpture he creates abstracted objects or spaces that demand exploration, built from source material gathered in areas of conflict between human terraformation and the beautiful rot of natural growth.

Daniel’s photographic work Voidland was featured in PICA’s Hatched exhibition in 2020.

Ross Potter is a Kamilaroi man, who was born and raised in Brisbane.

Potter made his move to Western Australian in 2007, working in the steel industry and creating art in his spare time.

With a passion for storytelling and a love for working in pencil, he decided to focus on his art more seriously and began creating works for his first solo exhibition in 2011. Potter’s passion for the arts continued to grow as his practice developed, leading him to pursue his artistic career full time in 2013.

Since then he has exhibited across WA in both solo and group exhibitions and is currently a Resident Artist at The Fremantle Arts Centre.

Ross Potter has been described as a “highly skilled draftsman” and with the use of graphite on paper, he dedicates his time to capturing the details in things that we connect with on a daily basis.

Lea Taylor is a Perth born Aboriginal Artist who’s cultural connections are to the Wadandi Menang clan groups of the South West of Western Australia.

Lea is pushing boundaries and honouring a traditional Aboriginal craft in her contemporary weaving and mixed media exploration. With a gentle but strong confidence Lea has learnt the traditional techniques of cultural weaving. From this platform she has respectfully moved into the fine art realm of exploration in both cultural story and artistic discovery.

Lea’s work comes from a firm cultural base, a strong connection to country and story through the use of bones, feathers, wood, natural dyes and fibres; defining a new whilst incorporating old story in her forms. Lea takes us on a journey reminiscent of the past with her exploration of decorative, spirituality important and practical objects.

Lea’s work has been likened to Master Weaves, Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson through her skill, range of exploration and playful improvisations.

Lea has exhibited in several group exhibitions and presented her first solo exhibition in 2020 at the Kent Street Gallery. She was awarded the Perth NAIDOC Award Artist of the Year 2020 Runner-up and was the overall winner at the inaugural Art of Wellbeing Exhibition in 2018.

Clare McFarlane was born in the small country town of Kojonup, but has lived on Perth since 1990. Clare completed a Masters and an Honours Degree in Fine Art from Curtin University, where she also completed a Graduate Diploma in Cultural Heritage.

Clare has been exhibiting for over twenty years having held many solo exhibitions in Perth and Melbourne and participated in multiple group shows. She has also completed a number of public art works and murals for various agencies including the State Government, Form, the City of Perth and the City of Subiaco.

Her work can be found in numerous collections including the Cruthers Collection at UWA, Janet Holmes à Court Collection, Edith Cowan University Collection, Curtin University, Artbank, City of Perth, City of Bayswater, City of Wanneroo, Perth Children’s Hospital, as well as many private collections.

Theo Costantino is a queer non-binary artist based on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja / Perth, and Executive Director of ART ON THE MOVE. Their practice includes drawing, sculpture, video, photography, written works and performance. They have exhibited and undertaken residency projects within Australia, Europe, the UK and USA both in a solo capacity and collaboratively. Broadly, Theo’s work investigates the representation and memorialisation of the past: the use and abuse of history, the continuing influence of the past on the present, and the ways in which repressed or forgotten material can resurface in daily experience.

Theo holds a PhD from Curtin University and degrees in Fine Art and Literary Studies. Their work is held in collections including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, The Cruthers Collection, Murdoch University and John Curtin Gallery.

Theo writes fiction in a range of forms; their short story ‘Meniscus’ was published in Global Dystopias by The Boston Review, edited by Junot Díaz in 2017. Their critical writing includes the book chapter & Ruination and Recollection: Plumbing the Colonial Archive’ in Visual Arts Practice and Affect: Place, Materiality, and Embodied Knowing, edited by Ann Schilo for Rowman & Littlefield in 2016.

Merrick Belyea is an established Australian artist whose work focuses on a curiously human appetite for destruction. Environmental concerns are central to recent paintings that refer to a potential for devastation and offer a portent to future mechanical scarification of the landscape. Paring back the veneer of previously prepared paint layers revealing the detritus of process and the fragility of surface.

Merrick graduated from Claremont School of Art in 1989. Holding his first solo exhibition in 1994 he has since maintained a regular exhibition program including the Sydney, Melbourne and Singapore art fairs. In 2001 Merrick was invited to exhibit at the Australian Embassy in the Philippines. He was included in the Australian Art Collector ‘Australia’s Most Collectable Artists’ list in 2004 and 2006.

Merrick has contributed to a number of boards and committees in the not-for-profit arts sector, most recently chair and founding member of the Art Collective WA.

Merrick’s work is held by a number of public and private collections including Artbank, Janet Holmes á Court Collection, Wesfarmers, Bankwest, St John of God Health Care, Royal Perth Hospital, The University of Western Australia, Edith Cowan University, City of Perth and City of Fremantle. Merrick Belyea is represented by Art Collective WA, Perth.

Photos courtesy of the artist and The Art Collective WA.

Curtis Taylor is a Martu artist whose practice spans sculptural installation, painting and film. His work investigates narratives around identity, language and cultural frameworks through the lens of ritual, performance and traditional cultural practices. In his film work he creates confronting virtual realities that shift the paradigm of film noir. Ishmael Marika is a Yolngu filmmaker, director and producer. He is currently the Creative Director of the Mulka Project at Yirrkala, and seeks to promote the cultural, visual and performative practices of Yolngu artists through documentaries and other forms of film media.

Mark Tweedie is a West Australian figurative artist whose work is characterised by themes of family, memory and ageing. He is particularly interested in exploring formative childhood years and lineage. Examining the treasured family photo album, Tweedie magnifies and recontextualises old photographs to construct emotive and haunting narratives.

He has exhibited nationally and been a finalist in prominent art prizes including the Blake Prize (2018),the ​Kilgour Prize (2014, 2017, 2018), and was highly commended at the Sunshine Coast Art Prize (2019).

Susan Roux is a South African born West Australian artist. Her work is a critique on and response to cultural and social change regarding gender and body politics.

The work often takes specific historical events as her point of departure, conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means.

The vulnerability of the human body as experienced in specifically the female body yield theme, mark, and visual language. Touch educe the body as tactile territory while mark and stitch make its boundaries.

Photos courtesy of the artist and The Art Collective WA.

A senior Miriwoong artist and cultural custodian, Peggy Griffiths – Madij maintains both the ephemeral and the unchanging connections of Country. Through her arts practice she responds to her environment and her place within it. Her elegant yet powerful imagery documents the custodianship handed to her by her mother and grandfather.

Born in 1950 on her Country then Newry Station east of Kununurra, Griffiths grew up learning from her cultural leaders while working as a housemaid on the station. She experienced many of the tragedies affecting Kimberley Aboriginal people as a result of police and welfare. With deep green eyes revealing her mixed ancestry she narrowly escaped her own capture by being cleverly hidden by her mother.

At sixteen Peggy married her promised husband, Mr A.Griffiths and began working alongside him at Waringarri Aboriginal Arts in 1985, carving and painting boab nuts and artefacts. She progressed to ochre painting on canvas and working with limited edition prints.

She is the first Indigenous artist to win the prestigious Fremantle Print Award in 1995. Today she is a highly respected elder and artist and was granted a Department of Culture and the Arts Fellowship to pursue her new interest in ceramics in 2018. More recently an installation of her work including ochre painting, ceramics and animation was exhibited as part of the Art Gallery of South Australia’s TARNANTHI 2019.

Fiona Gavino with her Australian, Filipino, and Maori heritage, has been described as an intercultural artist working the traditional into the contemporary. There is an undeniable crafted aesthetic in her work and through the artist’s attentive conceptual ideas, intercultural dialogues she has eloquently placed her practice within sculpture and installation.

Gavino graduated from Charles Darwin University with a BA Visual Arts in 2006 and was a practising artist there for 12 years. Her work features in Hot Springs; the Northern Territory & Contemporary Australian Artists (Macmillan Art Publishing). In 2007 she relocated to Western Australia and currently lives and works in Fremantle. In 2014 Gavino was a recipient of an Asialink Residency to the Philippines researching post-colonial discourse in contemporary Filipino art and rattan furniture making. In 2015 she was invited to return to exhibit at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines with her solo show, In-between-spaces.

For the past three years she has been working with the Yindjibarndi women in Roebourne collaborating with them to create sculpture, baskets and reviving their traditional practice of string and net making. In 2018 she undertook a residency in Madrid working with an inner-city community in the throws of gentrification to produce a site-specific installation and body of prints.

For the last two years she has worked with Japanese ‘Wara’ artists in York (WA) creating large scale sculptures of endangered Australian animals from wheat straw.

Image courtesy of the artist: Fiona Gavino installation view John Stringer Art Prize, John Curtin Gallery Air and Water, 2020 cane, mild steel, variable dimensions (L) & Earth and Fire, 2020 recycled strapping, plywood 2.2m H x 3.6 m W.

Eva Fernandez was born in Toronto, Canada and lives and works in Perth, Western Australia. Fernandez is currently undertaking a Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Arts) at Edith Cowan University. She has been a practicing artist for over two decades, working across photography and various other mediums.

Fernandez’s practice is concerned with the exploration and negotiation of the space which she inhabits in context to its complex history and cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism. As an immigrant, Fernandez’s art is deeply informed by dislocation from her parental culture as a consequence of the Spanish Civil War. Her current research examines her pluralistic identity in context to contemporary issues of global displacement, specifically Spanish Diaspora in the 20th century.

Fernandez’s practice includes construction of complex installations of symbolically laden objects, creating contemporary still-life’s and portraits, referencing art and history, in order to subtly critique ideologies of the past and present. Drawing on fragmented histories, her work embodies the traces, voices and memories from the past that are blended and embedded in art and history to unearth narratives in order to evoke fragments of a shattered, emotional and forgotten past.

Fernandez has had several solo exhibitions and been invited to exhibit her work nationally and internationally. Her work is represented in numerous institutional and private collections.

Rebecca Dagnall was born in Australia in 1972. As an artist Rebecca’s medium of choice is photography. Her work has been a series of explorations into notions of suburbia and culture, the bush as psychological space, the Australian gothic and the ongoing investigation into peoples’ relationships with their immediate surroundings.

Rebecca’s work has been exhibited widely in Australia and more recently internationally. Exhibitions include solos shows at the Australian Centre for Photography, Monash Gallery of Art, Queensland Centre for Photography and Foto Freo Festival in Australia. Rebecca has been involved in many group shows including; The Lake curated by Malcolm Smith at the Australian Centre for Photography (2009), Transient States curated by Sally Quin at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery (2009), in 2010 her work was part of Imagining the Everyday a group exhibition of Australian photographers curated by Alasdair Foster at the Pingyao International Photography festival in China and Testing Ground in 2013 which is touring nationally from Salamanca Art Centre curated by Julie Gough. Rebecca has shown work at the Lodz photographic festival Poland in 2011 and in France at Gallery Huit.

Rebecca has been a repeat finalist in some prestigious awards such as the William Bowness Photographic Award, the Josephine Ulrich and Win Shubert Photographic award and a semi finalist in the Moran Photographic Award. Rebecca received a Judges commendation award in the City of Joondalup Invitation Art Award 2012 and in 2014 won first prize of $10,000 in the Victoria Park Art Award. Rebecca has work in many public collections including the Art Gallery of Western Australia collection and in private collections. Rebecca is currently represented by Turner Galleries in Perth.

In the pictured body of work the idea of spectrality opens up the worlds between the things we can see and the things that we hide. Ghosts are travellers in time, moving through both temporal and spatial borders that separate the past from the present - inviting us to see, through their hauntings, Australia’s colonial deeds of injustice both past and present. The images in this series reveal the ghost. They are a contemporary understanding of an Australian cultural condition that needs to recognise the haunting and speak with its’ ghosts.

Install view with Pioneer Pool, 2015, Archival pigment print, 100 x 150cm. Impenetrable bush, 2016, archival pigment print, 77 x 150cm. Stairway, 2019, Archival pigment print, 80 x 120cm. Mountain memory, 2019, Archival pigment print, 80 x 120cm. Between worlds, 2019, Archival pigment print, 100 x 150cm. Down by the river, 2014, Archival pigment print, 67 x 100cm. Bird, 2019, Archival pigment print, 27 x 40cm. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Content courtesy of the artist's website.

The Lighthouse series was inspired by the mentality of complacency surrounding climate change.  On an individual level, these works represent instant gratification and comfort creating a wilful ignorance, while also metaphorically reflecting the global scale issue.  The figures being blasted in the face with sunlight became a motif to signify a warning, which is met with apathy or avoidance by the human element.   The sunlight pouring inside from an unseen window creates distance between what’s happening outside with the comfort and sense of security, provided by the house.

Holly O’Meehan’s art practice explores the effects of colonial agricultural techniques on the natural environment with in the Great Southern and South West Regions of Western Australia through a range of sculptural based outcomes. Strongly influenced by growing up on her families cropping farm on land belonging to the Goreng people of the Nyoongar nation, she incorporates hand made clay and ceramic objects with found organic material and relevant discarded items, in order to develop speculative dystopic landscapes that question the higher-achy between humans and the environment. Her experimental practice results in the sculptures having a whimsical, creature-like presence; their playful and defensive structures seem to repel and beguile in equal measure. By appropriating natural forms in an attempt to highlight the beauty of the hidden and unassuming, and purposely making with slow, repetitive movements in a way that honours the time it takes the environment both recover and flourish, O’Meehan’s practice focuses on collective hope that one day the natural environment will be able to overcome its greatest competitor; humans.

Holly O’Meehan has developed her creative approach throughout the course of a double Bachelor in Fine Arts and Art & Design at Curtin University (2014), an intensive Ceramic Skill Set Post Graduate course at North Metropolitan TAFE (2020), and a mentorship program organised through ArtSource WA, in late 2020. She has exhibited in a number of group exhibitions such as Animaze at the Fremantle Arts Centre in 2018, Ceramic - Bronze - Stone in New Delhi India, & Sculpture@Bathers in 2022. She has also created significant solo exhibitions Elusive Tactility at Paper Mountain in 2018, & Defence/Defiance at Heathcote Gallery in 2021, as well as been selected for prizes such as the 2019 John Stringer Prize & the Joondalup Invitation Art Prize in 2022. In 2017 O’Meehan was selected for a major residency with Art Ichol in India, & more recently the highly competitive funded residency at The Farm Margaret River in 2021, also resulting in a solo exhibition Hidden and Unassuming. She was invited to participate in the 2023 Bunbury Biennale, & more recently showing her newest solo exhibition at the Belco Arts Centre in Canberra in late 2024 as well as three group exhibitions as part of the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial in Perth and Bangkok.

All images are courtesy of the artist.

Bjoern Rainer-Adamson is a German-born, West Australian Artist.

Rainer-Adamson spent his formative years in rural Bavaria, a region renowned as a world leader in the auto and aircraft manufacturing industry. This bedrock appreciation for fine engineering led to an interest in developing works that subvert existing technologies to their most absurd and abstracted ends. Rainer-Adamson interrogates in a global context our desire as a species to innovate, where the correlation between accelerated growth and technological advancement obscures the slipping of control to the hands of machines.

Through the methodical deconstruction of nostalgic analogue components; record players, mechanical calculators; Rainer-Adamson assembles kinetic sculptures built to take on a life of their own.

Winner of the  John Stringer Prize 2019 at the John Curtin Gallery in Perth. Selected by Perth Collectors Club.

In 2018 he was selected for the HERE & NOW exhibition at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery curated by Anna Louise Richardson;  a contemporary engagement with the iconoclastic legacy of Marcel Duchamp.

In 2018 he was also awarded a commission for the public artwork `IMACHINATION` granted by the new School of Early Learning in North Perth.

2019 John Stringer Prize finalist Ngamaru Bidu. Martu artist and elder Ngamaru creates paintings informed by and reflecting the everyday life, culture and attitudes of the Martu people. The Martu people are the Aboriginal owners and custodians of a vast area across the Great Sandy, Little Sandy and Gibson Deserts in Western Australia.

Ngamaru was born at Martilirri (Well 22 on the Canning Stock Route), the eldest of four siblings circa 1949. As a child, Ngamaru walked around with her family, moving from water source to water source dependent on the seasonal rain cycles.

Whilst walking Country, two Martu people and some whitefellas came in a Toyota motorcar, tracking and chasing the family. Though they managed to stay ahead of their pursuers for a long period, they were finally caught by the whitefellas at Parnngurr Rockhole, and from here taken to Jigalong Mission. She met her husband at Strelley Community and later moved to Warralong, Punmu and finally Parnngurr, where she lives now. Ngamaru has four children and three grandchildren.

Artwork: Ngamaru Bidu, ‘Nyurnma’, 2019, acryclic on canvas, 75.5 – 123cm.

Photos courtesy of the artist and Martumili taken by Tobias Titz

Elham Haakansson-Eshraghian (Perth, 1996) is a Bahá’í video artist. She explores the Iranian diaspora within the Australian community and uncovers her family’s experience of displacement during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Eshraghian research examines the inter-generational dialogue between the first (those who were displaced) and second generation (children of those displaced) in an attempt to understand her mother’s experience of displacement and escape.

She addresses the emotional impact felt and the need for empathy in response to the current global social and political climate. It is through the affective poetic space of installation art and aesthetic devices of choreographed performance, archival documentation, and symbolic cultural indicators that allow for a greater understanding of the experience of loss and grief that takes hold through states of displacement.

Eshraghian graduated with first-class Honours in Fine Arts from the University of Western Australia, School of Design (2017) and is currently continuing her research at the university. Eshraghian received the Dr. Harold Schenberg Art Fellowship Award during the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art’s Hatched Exhibition (2018) and the Jean Callander Art Prize for her work, Bohrân. Recently, Eshraghian has exhibited in the Lock up Gallery, Newcastle (New South Wales, Australia), the WA Emerging Artists Exhibit in Heathcote Gallery and for the Brilliant; Undercurrent Exhibit, Fremantle Moore’s Gallery.

She has exhibited in Melbourne as part of C3 Contemporary Arts Exhibit, a finalist for the John Stringer Art Award held at John Curtin Art Gallery and was recently awarded an Artist-In-Residence at Frabica, Treviso in Italy, to take place in the coming future.

Jarrad Martyn (b. 1991 Aberdeen) is a Western Australian artist whose practice investigates how we engage with space to gain a greater understanding of it, as well as the broader themes of our reliance on bodies of authority as purveyors of ‘truth’. His practice involves collapsing the distinctions between figuration and expressionism, the real and the imagined and the past and the present to create an open ended set of external and internal meanings through painting, collage and installation.

Since graduating from Curtin University in 2013 with a B.A. in Fine Arts (Honours) Martyn has gone on to win numerous art awards. His painting Removal won third place in the 2014 Linden Postcard Show held at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts in Melbourne. Martyn was invited to create a mural as part of Public 2015.

His work has been acquired by the Curtin University Art Collection, Edith Cowan University Collection, City of Joondalup Collection and other institutions. Martyn was the overall winner of both the City of Joondalup Community Invitation Art Award and the Award for Excellence in 2017. In 2018 his searing work ‘Range’ saw Martyn announced as the winner of the prestigious John Stringer Prize.

All images are courtesy of the artist.

A John Stringer Prize finalist in 2018, Lydia Trethewey (b. 1992) lives and works in Perth, Western Australia. Her practice probes experiences of place, travel and daydream through a number of mediums including printmaking, photography, painting and text.

In 2018 she completed a PhD in fine art at Curtin University, where she currently works as a sessional academic.

Olga Cironis is a multidisciplinary artist who explores the murky undertones and impact that history and memory have on personal and shared identity. She examines the notions of belonging in today’s cultural globalisation — in particular, appropriated histories and accepted attitudes on belonging in the Australian cultural and social landscape. She was a finalist in the 2018 John Stringer Prize.

Within her work are layers of research, collected stories, muted voices and cultural heritage. Olga’s work is psychologically loaded with meaning, provoking and seducing the viewer, navigating them through history and inviting them to question our social and environmental connections. By engaging viewers to become part of her work, Olga questions the meaning of public and private space, gender and social norms that permeate our accepted actions. Her artistic investigations are founded upon her Greek, Czech and Australian heritage. These aspects are used to engage people beyond the familiar.

Cironis holds a Diploma of Education from Edith Cowan University, WA. Her Masters and Bachelors of Visual Arts are from the University of Sydney (SCA). She is represented in numerous prominent collections nationally & internationally.

Tom Freeman is a multidisciplinary, Fremantle-based artist.

Since graduating from Curtin University with a Fine Art degree in 2007, Tom has continued his practice locally and nationally, predominantly in the media of drawing, painting and sculpture.

He has delivered a handful of solo exhibitions, including Formative at Venn Gallery in 2013 and Small Time at Paper Mountain in 2017.

In the catalogue text for Small Time, written by Sheridan Coleman, Tom’s work is described as ‘a thousand tiny experiments in clay, paint and wax’. In the same text, his materials and methods are referred to as ‘just local, and gentle’. This nicely encapsulates Tom and his work.

In 2015, Tom was a finalist in the Bankwest Art Prize. He has exhibited in Western Australia at PICA, Fremantle Arts Centre and Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, as well as many smaller galleries, and has exhibited nationally in Sydney and Brisbane.

Sharyn Egan is a Wadjuk Nyoongar woman, born in the Perth area, who began her practice in 1994 at the age of 37 under the tutelage of Nyoongar artist Sandra Hill.

For Sharyn, weaving is a labour of love and a means of weaving connection amongst people; her art making is approached as a transfer of knowledge and culture.

In 2000, Sharyn’s practice expanded into the realm of public art – as both large-scale painted murals and sculptures. She has since been awarded numerous public commissions and has exhibited frequently in Sculpture by the Sea.

This lead her to enrol in a Diploma of Fine Arts at the Claremont School of Art in Perth and, soon afterwards, she completed an Associate Degree in Contemporary Aboriginal Art at Curtin University, Sharyn works with oil, natural ochres, resins and acrylic paint on canvas, as well as natural fibre woven sculptures.

As a child of the Stolen Generation, Sharyn’s work is informed by this experience and comments upon the associated trauma, emotions and deep sense of loss and displacement amongst Aboriginal people.

In 1999 Sharyn shared first prize with Peter Farmer in the ‘Town of Vincent Bibbulmen Traditional Art Award’ and in 2007 and 2008 she won first prize in the City of Bunbury’s Wolsely Art Award. Her work is housed in a number of public collections.

Clive Collender is a Perth-based artist who works two-days a week from DADAA’s Paper Projects studio in Fremantle.

Clive is a prolific artist: for over the past fifty years, he has produced an extraordinary array of pictures on paper, canvas and board in paint, pencil and pen.

Clive is the son of a geologist whose occupation took the family to many different countries throughout Clive’s childhood, living for some time in both the United Kingdom and South Africa.

Clive’s art draws from his wealth of childhood experiences of travelling to exotic places. As well as this, he is inspired to document contemporary life: visits to the zoo and new towns and cities.

His works are colourful, distinctive, playful, humorous and at times confronting, detailing encyclopaedic cycles of animals and remembered moments from his every day.

Clive has exhibited as part of group exhibition HERE&NOW at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in 2013; From the Outside, Alcaston Gallery in 2014 and Beyond the Western Edge, Goldfields Arts Centre in 2014. He is also a regular participant in the Nulsen’s As We Are exhibitions.

Recently, Clive exhibited over 80 works at the Kunsthal Rotterdam with the Museum of Everything, 2016, and currently has one piece showing as part of the Museum of Everything’s showcase at MONA in Tasmania.

Penny Coss (b. Sydney 1961) is primarily a painter who manipulates the tradition of Abstract Expressionism where staining and soaking of the canvas is permeated with a new interpretation of the Australian landscape. She has an extensive exhibition history with recent solo shows with Art Collective WA at ArtStage Singapore and for Sydney Contemporary.

In her entry for the John Stringer Prize 2017,The elements and motifs in her body of work, Of Their Own Accord relate to phenomena in nature. Gravity accords with things that float like algal blooms, ocean detritus and ash clouds where matter and space is extended through small painted interventions that activate the surface of the wall to be an integral component of the work. Penny Coss’ works, derived from interpretations of the landscape that focus on relationships of exchange between individuals and natural environments, often allude to landscapes that have troubled histories

She has participated in group shows including The Yellow Vest Syndrome, Fremantle Arts Centre (2009 Curator Jasmin Stephens), Epic Narratives PICA, (2015 Curator Leigh Robb) and te tuhi-the mark, Pakuranga Arts Centre, Manukau City Aotearoa NZ.

Penny Coss has been shortlisted for numerous art prizes including the Paddington Art Prize, Sydney, the Bankwest Art Prize, Perth, the Fishers Ghost Art Award, NSW and won The Albany Art Award, Albany. She is represented in numerous public, corporate and private collections including Itami Museum, Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, Macquarie Art Collection, Geraldton Regional Art Gallery and Perth International Airport.

Max Pam (b. Melbourne 1949) is a contemporary Australian photographer. He left Australia at 20, working as a photographer for an astrophysicist. Together, the pair drove a Volkswagen from Calcutta to London. This adventure proved inspirational, and travel has remained a crucial and continuous link to his creative and personal development.

Max Pam’s work takes the viewer on compelling journeys around the globe, recording observations with an often surrealist intensity matching the heightened sensory awareness of foreign travel. The work frequently implies an interior, psychic journey, corresponding with the physical journey of travel.

Although he has been recognised foremost as a photographer of the process of travel, less attention has been given to the structures and techniques of his work. In the up-front photographic aspect of his work he combines an interest in a certain kind of representation – the snapshot and the pseudo-documentary “decisive moment” – with other modes of documentation that can include images of small mementos, drawings and written diaristic accounts. Like Japanese photographer Araki Noboyoshi, Max Pam’s autobiography-through-imagery is excessive, sometimes provocative and often fascinated an abject glamour. Yet in his work there remains, distinguishing his work from much photography in the contemporary art world, a constant sensitivity to the face-to-face encounter.

His books Going East: Twenty Years of Asian and Ramadan In Yemen are included in Phaidon’s History of the Photobook Volume 2in 2006 and Volume 3 in 2013. His prints are in national and private collections in Australia, France, Great Britain, Italy and Japan. Some of the published books on Max Pam’s work include: Max Pam (1999), Ethiopia (1999) and Indian Ocean Journals (2000). But it was the first one Going East: Twenty Years of Asian Photography (1992) that won the most prestigious European book award, French Prix du livre. His book Atlas Monographs (2009) won the International Photo Book Prize at Photoespana in Madrid in 2010. In 2010 he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship to secure a residency at the International Studio Curatorial Programme in New York.

Max Pam’s piece as a finalist for the John Stringer Prize in 2017, is a still life image of a consumable usually including packaging and labeling used to extoll product allure, meaning and potential for pleasure. The PACKSHOT LIFE ensemble originated as a series of black and white photographs that decades later Max Pam hand coloured with oil paint. These old images have been re animated in the process to flex towards magic realist and science fiction readings of a more mundane world. The ensemble is arranged as line of 23 head shots matched to a line of 23 discursive images creating 46 oppositional – be careful what you wish for in the age of consumerism – narratives.

Sarah Elson’s series Lament of the Labellum was one of the finalist entrants for the John Stringer Prize in 2017. In this series, Sarah has removed the labellum from common ornamental orchids. Each petal is individually removed from the plant, cast, formed or forged and strung together. Each one of the works in this series can have up to 95 cast petals. The labellum, also known as the lips, is the medial orchid petal, it is the landing pad for fertilisation; its sole purpose is to attract a pollinator, it is a point of attraction, connection and the continuation of life. By pulling away the individual labellum and spreading it apart the artist is in affect pulling away the potential of each new flower, yet at the same time immortalising it as an enduring although sharp and hard symbol of the flesh.

Sarah Elson was born in South Australia, but has spent most of her life in Western Australia. Following a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction, she has pursued an interest in traditional metalsmithing and its use in contemporary visual arts practice since the 1990s. In 2001 she received a Samstag Scholarship and in 2003 awarded a Master of Fine Art at the Chelsea School of Art and Design.

Sarah’s work examines the nature of preciousness and the preciousness of nature. Transience, ephemerality, sensuality and reciprocity are key words in Sarah’s practice – so too an understanding of community, relationships and the entanglement of life. The act of making for Sarah is a meditation on growth; realised through the fluid potential of a medium often perceived as static. The sensuality in her work, of material and subject matter, draws out a philosophical attitude to being.

Sarah’s work is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Curtin University Art Collection, Edith Cowan University and the Janet Holmes à Court Collection. She is a current sessional academic at Curtin University.

Photos courtesy of the artist. See more The Art Collective.

Dan McCabe is a visual artist based in Walyalup / Fremantle and raised in Meanjin / Brisbane. His practice considers the complexities of globalisation and its impact on people and the natural environment. In his work concept drives the choice of materials and method, and is unique to each series or project — McCabe has produced sculptural installations, video, photography and wall based compositions. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally, and taken part in artist residencies in Finland and India.

In our emerging geopolitical era uncertainty is widespread. Peak oil is hovering in the distance. Our climate and environment are less predictable. Global economies balance between the acceleration of capitalism and its unsustainable and inevitable collapse. Without Rule Of Law is a dystopian fantasy where domestic government and military forces have been temporarily or permanently disbanded resulting in the breakdown of civil society. And people are preparing for it; emotionally, socially and financially invested in it. They are called preppers.

Without Rule Of Law is a semi-abstract landscape composition which appropriates the aesthetics and materials of domestically consumed, military grade, luxury survival equipment. This slick commodification of existential collapse reflects an absurd predicament, where preparing for total breakdown of society, for some, seems more desirable than preventing it. Referencing the grand scale and format of iconic depictions of war throughout art history, a hypothetical and mysterious landscape is presented. Where morality is blurred, alpha individualism is rampant, and primal instincts take over. A delusion, or perhaps, a not so distant future.

Dan McCabe's recent work has focused on contemporary society’s complex and sometimes peculiar relationship with “nature” and the “wilderness”, appropriating the language and aesthetics of outdoor leisure activities, the online circulation of idyllic landscape photography, survivalism, and home/land ownership. In 2018 he will present a new body of work at the Art Gallery of Western Australia as part of the spaced 3: north by southeast exhibition, exploring contemporary spirituality, resource exploitation/tradition and nature as national identity. Developed over several months in central Finland, Dan McCabe spent extensive time in remote forest areas learning various techniques from local hunters, foragers, environmentalists and blacksmiths.

Nathan Beard (b. Perth 1987) is a West Australian-based interdisciplinary artist whose work is primarily engaged with exploring the myriad influences of his Thai-Australian cultural background to navigate the complex ways a sense of heritage and identity is negotiated. His work expands upon universal themes of homecoming, memory, mortality and nostalgia through kitsch visual language such as shrines, photographic research and found objects.

Nathan Beard (b.1987) is Perth-based interdisciplinary artist who works across mediums including photography, video and sculpture. His practice is primarily concerned with the influences of culture, memory and biography, in particular through the prism of his Thai-Australian heritage. Beard’s work often includes intimate and sincere engagements with family to poignantly explore the complex ways a sense of heritage and identity is negotiated.

Beard holds a Bachelor of Arts (Art) with First Class Honours from Curtin University.

In 2021 Nathan undertook the Australia Council residency at ACME Studios, London. In 2017 Beard was selected for the 4A Beijing Studio Program, shortlisted as a finalist for the John Stringer Prize, and Highly Commended as a finalist in the Fremantle Art Centre Print Award.

Erin Coates is a visual artist and creative producer working across film, sculptural installation and drawing. Coates’ practice examines our relationship with and within the spaces we build and inhabit, focusing on the limits of our bodies and physical interaction within given environments. She often sets up extreme physical actions in relation to specific spaces, filming inside of sets she builds and using herself and her friends as the performers. Her use of props, lighting and action draws on the visual language of body horror, science fiction and the abject. The female protagonists are cast as the lone-survivor, re-occupying the role of the ‘last man alive’ or the ‘monstrous creation’. Her work draws on her background as a rock climber and freediver, and her particular interests in female physicality and athleticism. Coates uses this perspective to probe our understandings of fear, horror, strength and survival and to disrupt conventional gendered roles and assumptions.

Coates’ work is shown in both galleries and film festivals and was exhibited in the 2020 Adelaide Biennial: Monster Theatres at the Art Gallery of South Australia. She was included in the significant survey exhibition The National: New Australian Art, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017. In 2018 Coates’ work was shown at the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan. She was the only Australian artist selected for inclusion in Videobrasil – 21st Contemporary Art Biennial | Imagined Communities, São Paulo, Brasil, 2019.

Coates has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Curtin University, Perth and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Jacobus Capone works across new media platforms, namely film and immersive installation. His work is rooted in incredibly poignant and poetic performances, which are often endurance based and revolve around site-specific interaction with natural elements.

Since graduating with Honours in Fine Arts at Edith Cowan University, Perth, in 2007, Jacobus’ artistic output has been prolific. As well as having exhibited extensively in solo and group shows both internationally and nationally, Jacobus has undertaken a long list of international and local residencies. Most recently this includes a prestigious fellowship at Villa Ruffieux in Switzerland, a three-month placement at Hanger in Lisbon, Portugal in early 2016, and a Listhus Residency in Ólafsfirðia, Iceland in 2015.

In 2014 and 2015, Jacobus engaged in a two-part SIM Residency with The Association of Icelandic Visual Artists in Reykjavik. His distinct fascination with the Icelandic landscape has seen him visit recurrently since 2009. A culmination of his long-term connection with the place was realised in a major solo work, Dark Learning, shown at PSAS in Fremantle in November 2015.

Of significant note is the artist’s commission for a new artwork for NEW16, held at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, in early 2016. Jacobus was one of eight Australian practitioners selected for this showcase of leading national contemporary emerging art. He is currently working towards a major solo exhibition at the Perth Institute for Contemporary Art to premier in 2017 as part of the Perth International Arts Festival.

ARTWORK DETAILS:

Altar for Light: Receding, 2016, Framed digital print on Canson fine art paper, plinth 100 cm x 100 cm x 30cm, Edition 1 of 1 + 1 x Artist Proof

Altar for Light: Preceding, 2016, digital print on hahnemuehle paper mounted to copper, mirror, plinth 100 cm x 100 cm x 86 cm
Edition 1 of 1 +1 x Artist Proof

Teelah George’s practice incorporates painting, drawing, printmaking and installation. Drawing on historical records and visual art, George has an ongoing interest in material culture, using found materials, as well as collections and archives as a point of departure in her practice.

Solo exhibitions of her work include Lovers’ ponytails, Orexart, Auckland (2017); Slug Phase, Rubicon ARI, Melbourne (2016); Face Vase and Rag Painting, Bus Projects, Melbourne (2015); Between the objects to be fastened, Seventh Gallery, Melbourne (2015); Daily exercise, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Studio 1, Perth (2014); Use to stop doors from rattling in frames, Venn Gallery, Perth (2014); and Meatworks Mens Qrtrs, OK Gallery, Northbridge, Perth (2013).

Selected group exhibitions include Primavera 2017: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2017); Our Studio Selves, Artspace, Sydney (2017); Methods for Making Eye Contact, Firstdraft, Sydney (2016); Epic Narratives, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts, Perth (2015); Getting Things Done, Fontanelle Gallery, Adelaide (2015); Horizon: Exploring the west coast with The Clipperton Project, Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth (2014); Will to Keep, 107 Projects, Sydney and Archive Space, Sydney (2014); and Thematic Mapping, MOANA Project Space, Perth (2013).

George’s work is held in a number of public collections, including Artbank, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, University of Western Australia Perth; and City of Joondalup Collection, Perth.

Tanya Lee is a female Western Australian artist originally from a remote wheat belt town and now based in Perth. Tanya works across sculpture, performance and drawing. Her practice looks at everyday tasks to create humorous, absurd and even futile narratives that subvert the protocols and politics of every day social environments. Her work has been shown in galleries across Australia including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne. Her recent performance work Landing has toured nationally and been presented at Dark Mofo Hobart, the Festival of Live Art in Melbourne and Bleach* Festival on the Gold Coast.

Tanya’s studies included a year as a visiting scholar at the École Nationale Supérieur d’Art de Dijon (ENSAD) in Dijon, France. Before completing her MA (Fine Art) at Curtin University in 2009.

Ron Nyisztor was born in Fremantle and gained his Bachelor of Arts in Design at W.A.I.T (now Curtin University) in 1979. Ron works with a wide range of materials and subjects and has exhibited regularly since 1989.

An important contributor to the Western Australian art scene, Ron set up and runs Nyisztor Studio, an independent artist run space in Melville.

Ron Nyisztor’s paintings are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Royal Perth Hospital, Princess Margaret Hospital, the Federal Court of Australia, Australian Capital Equity, the Industrial Relations Commission of WA, the City of Fremantle and the Perth Office of National Native Tribunal.

‘Much of Ron’s consistent art practice involves discarded building materials being used as part of the actual work and also as support grounds for paintings. As still-life subjects for paintings, the found objects are incorporated into dynamic compositions. The mundane subject matter used in his work attains compelling intrigue – it communicates a sense of the metaphysical expressed through familiar and extra-ordinary means.

It is part of his modus operandi that he devises titles in advance of the artwork, laying the conceptual groundwork that accompanies each painting, but less a title, more like a script for the artwork to act out.

‘The paintings have a cryptic title that becomes part of the work and offers a metaphysical or psychedelic reading. The titles, devised before the paintings were completed, express the unfamiliarity of an initial encounter, a sense of beyond knowledge or new consciousness. The titles in their typographic design echo a floating sphere, a word image as in concrete poetry. In essence these descriptions imagine key facets of life’s passage and experience.’
Trevor Richards, 2017

Jacob Ogden Smith is a Visual Artist based in Sawyers Valley in the Perth Hills. His practice explores the implications of a modern world upon archaic, slow making cultural processes and art forms and the synergies that exist between various materials, processes and socio- political systems.

Following his completion of Honours in Fine Art in 2010 at Curtin University, Perth, Jacob has exhibited consistently on a national scale, including several solo projects: Pottery Three Ways at Fremantle Art Centre in 2013 and at 55 Sydenham Rd, Marrickville in 2014; Hovea Pottery Ale: Quite a Few Bottles, Some Large Pots and a Video, 2012, at OK Gallery, Northbridge; Purple Rain/Wine O the Times in 2012 at the Museum of Natural Mystery, North Perth; Pottery Practice Project, Craft Victoria, Melbourne, 2012; and HOW WORKS at the Perth Town Hall, Perth, in 2009. He has featured work in numerous group exhibitions such as Getting Things Done, Fontanelle Gallery, Adelaide, in 2015; Here&Now 2012 at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth; and Metallic at Spectrum Project Space, Perth, the latter two both in 2012.

Jacob’s work is included in the collections of The Art Gallery of Western Australia and Shepparton Art Museum in Victoria as well as many private collections.

Artist’s statement about the work:

“I have been interested in DIY culture ever since I left home and started making homebrew, at 50 cents a longneck it was a prudent financial decision. Much of my art has also had an element of practicality or functionality about it. In the past I’ve made work that doubled as furniture and my interest in utility drew me to ceramics. Over the past two years I have moved to the Perth hills, started a market garden and have begun making my own cheese and wine. All this along with my recent nicotine addiction has influenced me heavily. The main body of work I have made for the John Stringer Prize is a series of pots shaped as countries considered as tax havens, in which I am growing tobacco plants. For me growing Tobacco that has a current excise duty of $763 per kilo is the perfect confluence of self- sufficiency, libertarianism and tax evasion.

“I recently watched the film Wall Street in which the main character Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) likes to smoke Cuban cigars, more specifically Cohibas. I’m not sure if it’s just a coincidence but Rene Rivkin also smoked Cohibas and (Spoiler Alert) they were also both jailed for insider trading.

“In 2014 the Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and then Treasurer Joe Hockey were filmed smoking cigars outside the Treasury building 4 days before announcing what was considered a rather austere budget. These prints are part of a larger series that documents many a politician’s penchant for cigars.”

Dr. Vanessa Russ is a Ngarinyin /Gija woman from the Kimberley.

She graduated in 2009 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the College of Fine Arts (Art + Design) UNSW before returning to Western Australian to pursue a PhD in Fine Arts from UWA 2013.

Dr Russ was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 2014, in which she investigated the affects of national identity in mainstream art
museums on Indigenous populations, travelling across the United States of America, Hong Kong and Singapore.

As an artist, her work has been featured in the Third Space and the Revealed: Emerging Aboriginal Artists from Western Australia exhibitions in Perth. At the end of 2015 she held her first solo exhibition Memory and Trace at Seva Frangos Gallery in Subiaco.

Dr Vanessa Russ was appointed by the University of Western Australia as Associate Director of the Berndt Museum in 2016. A UWA graduate born and raised in the Kimberley, Dr Russ heads up one of the most important research collections on Australian Aboriginal art and culture in the world.

Dr Russ is the first Aboriginal director of the Berndt Museum in its 40-year history. She is a Researcher at The University of Western Australia.

In 2018 Dr Russ was appointed to the Board of the Art Gallery of WA.

Lisa was a young woman living in Fitzroy Crossing in the West Kimberley area of Western Australia. Her language group is Wangkajungka and she had lived all of her life in Fitzroy Crossing.

With mesmerising effect, Lisa illustrated her love of country through her rhythmic, abstracted paintings, recalling the stories she had been told by her elders, more specifically by her mother Jukuja Dolly Snell (Dolly had raised Lisa since she was an infant, ever since Lisa’s biological mother, and Dolly’s sister, passed away). Not uncommonly for people of her generation, Lisa had never been to the country she has inherited from her ancestors. Her works then, are a tapestry of anecdotally acquired knowledge, and an empirical experience referencing the humidity and expanse of the Kimberley.

Lisa’s work has been shown locally and nationally in group and solo exhibitions.

Michele Theunissen was born in South Africa and moved to Australia as an adult in 1981. She completed a Master of Visual Art in 1995 at Curtin University and her first solo show was at Galerie Düsseldorf in 1998 where she remained as an exhibiting artist until joining Goddard de Fiddes Gallery in 2002. Michele maintains a consistent art practice across a variety of media, including sculpture, photography, film and painting.

Michele shifts between interests within the different chosen media, with film being a vehicle most suited to political commentary or experimentation with projections in spaces. An early interest in skin has been used as a motif both in painting, expressing the way that the elements of nature write on our bodies, and in film, to narrate stories of race, of family and our attachment to place.

The exploration of skin and surface lead her paintings to a more abstract approach, driven by an interest in the pulses and invisible forces that underpin form. Paradoxically, it is through the use of material substances, the physical stuff of matter on a surface, that the paintings exist. In this binary relationship between pigment and a subject matter that is elusive and indefinable, something comes to exist albeit ambiguous: something felt rather than known. During the making there is an attempt to push thought aside and let intuition creep in to guide the process, being present to the relationship between its own materiality and herself. ‘I am because you are’ produces a third thing. This notion can be extended to the relationship between the works and how they impact each other, between the artist and others, and ultimately between the work and the viewer.

Michele’s film work has shown in all the main institutions in Perth, including PICA and Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, and in Sydney at Performance Space and Artspace.

Her works are held by several public and private collections, including Artbank, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Kerry Stokes Collection, Bankwest, Burswood Collection, Curtin University, The Holmes à Court Collection, The University of Western Australia, King Edward Memorial Hospital, Princess Margaret Hospital, Mundaring Shire Art Collection, Royal Perth Hospital, St John of God Health Care and Wesfarmers.

A finalist of the John Stringer Prize in 2015, Jac Ball is a PhD candidate at Curtin University, and has been professionally exhibiting for ten years. Significant group shows include Looking but not seeing at the Benalla Art Gallery in 2018, HERE&NOW17 at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery UWA, New Matter: Recent forms of Photography at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2016, Invisible Genres at John Curtin Gallery in 2016, Transcendental at Galerie Pavolva in Berlin in 2014, Dusk to Dark at the Queensland Centre for Photography and the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery in 2014, the prestigious Primavera exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney in 2013, and Remix at the Art Gallery of WA in 2011.

Their artworks can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery of WA, University of WA, Murdoch University, Wesfamers, Kerry Stokes Collection, North Metro TAFE and Artbank.

Finalist in 2015, Tarryn Gill is a Western Australian based multidisciplinary artist who works across sculpture, photography, video, drawing, theatre set and costume design and performance. Through her solo and collaborative practices, she has exhibited works and undertaken residency projects across Australia, in Argentina, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Psychoanalytic ideas have long played a role in Gill’s work and she is interested in exploring the liminal space between the conscious and unconscious, personal and the collective, the contemporary and ancient. Her aesthetics and materials are heavily informed by her background in competitive calisthenics and dance from the age of 5 to 25. Her art making processes now mine this source material to assert the value of the feminine and personal against the masculine model of genius that has defined much of art history.

Tarryn is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert.

Brad Rimmer is a photographer who works on long-term projects of portraiture, landscape and social documentation. He seeks to uncover the human within, often alienating everyday environs.Working within the fine line of art and documentary photography, Brad uses his artistic practice to probe at the essence of rural Australia and the emotional impact of the natural landscape upon individual psyches.

His book series – 'Silence', 'Nature Boy' and 'Nowhere Near' – are set in the Western Australian Wheatbelt where he grew up, and are personal visual narratives derived from the cultural idiosyncrasies of place, identity, belonging and memory.

Continuing to explore the link between people and their environment, Brad spent 10 years documenting China, through the series 'How Now Mao' - inquisitive documentation of the ongoing cultural transition in the world’s fastest growing economy and the fragments of traditions and modest ambitions left in its wake.

Brad's work has been shown in numerous international solo exhibitions, including the Perth International Arts Festival, the Pingyao and the Lianzhou International Photo Festivals in China, the Brighton Photo Biennial in the United Kingdom, Kaunas Photo in Lithuania, Photoforum PasquArt in Switzerland.In 2009 Brad was awarded a Mid Career Fellowship from the Western Australian Department of Culture and the Arts in order to publish 'Silence: the West Australian Wheatbelt', which was regarded by state gallery curator Robert Cook as 'one of the most important bodies of images about Western Australia made to date', with all 30 works in the series acquired by the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Brad's works are also held in numerous national and corporate collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Wesfarmers, Artbank, St John of God Health Care and Murdoch University.

Brad is a member of Art Collective WA.

Alistair Rowe is a sculptor who has worked predominantly with the medium of glass and the ideas of fluidity and balance. In the prize-winning piece, We Look For Ourselves In Each Other, bronze glass panels, black walnut and eva blocks are brought together and form a warm array of tonal variations.

The glass cuboids are delicately balanced on top of timber stands and timber and glass plinths – the fasteners, timber joinery and support mechanisms that hold the works together are all on display.

“By directing light onto the works a complex series of reflections, shadows and refractions are cast, creating an animated dialogue between materials, works, the area surrounding the works and gallery patrons,” Rowe told The West Australian following his award of the JSP for 2015.