Alan Todd trained as a painter in 1960s London but has worked as much in three dimensions as he has in two with a body of work in steel in the 1980s, and stage set design over a thirty-year period with his own contemporary dance company. Humanity and the human condition have been constant subjects in painting, sculpture and the theatre in particular where he was able to manipulate forms in space and shape them with light. Using film in conjunction with moving dancers and locations such as an airport and a forest provided not just a backdrop but the opportunity to integrate moving choreographed forms into different environments.

This collection of figurative sculptures from the 1980s were maquettes for life-sized works in welded steel. The largest of the finished works was 3.5 metres high and completed in Adelaide for the 1986 Advertiser annual sculpture exhibition. Stylistically they derive from Armitage, Noguchi, Giacometti and Henry Moore [who lived down the road from me in Hertfordshire, England] who all used the human figure to express as much about humanity as individual emotion. These figures are optimistic in their belief that flight is possible even although grounded by the reality of gravity. They saw a brave new world emerging.

Photographer Alex Frayne also has a background in film making. He says the more he searches for simplicity and ‘plain truth’ in photography, the further away simple solutions seem to be: ‘The closer I look, the more mysterious trees seem to be.’

Amber Cronin is an emerging cross-disciplinary artist living and working on Kaurna Land. A recent graduate, her visual arts research is rooted in performative and sculptural gestures that engage the audience through the connection of memory, time and space.

Developed through a vocabulary of processes, forms emerge that reframe everyday actions as sites of ritual activity. Utilising elements of ceramics, textiles, performance, moulding and casting, Cronin’s studio experiments are gathered and displayed in combinations that facilitate meditations on connection and discovery.

The work  investigates networks and systems of meaning through gestures. I am drawn to collecting natural objects, some of these experiments are an attempt to find a home for the quinces, seeds and stones that I feel compelled to collect. Atop folds of clay balancing on their plinths, the cast quinces are cradled safely, held in an indent. Each fold catches the precious fruit in a frozen moment of action. The divot shape influences the negative space below it– the action of one object coming into contact with another. The hollow of the interior, like the shape within the plinths, performs the same possibility of emptiness.

Since graduating from the Adelaide Central School of Art (2008) Horne has exhibited her sculptures frequently in local and interstate galleries including GAG Projects (SA), CACSA (SA), Firstdraft (NSW) and BUS Projects (VIC). Horne has obtained multiple international residency opportunities including Sankriti, India (2013, Helpmann Academy), Gachang, South Korea (2016, Asialink) and Cité internationale des arts, Paris (2018, Art Gallery NSW). Horne has been an award finalist in the Viscopy John Fries Award (2014) and the Churchie Emerging Art prize (2017) and the winner of the 2017 Tatiara Contemporary Art prize.

Anna Horne explores materiality, process and the transience of the physical world through the medium of sculpture. Contradiction and opposition are themes that are particularly central in Horne’s practice, often playfully explored through the juxtaposition of opposing material forces. In the creation of her sculptures, Horne uses commonplace industrial materials such as concrete, plaster and metal to cast replicas of familiar everyday objects such as beach balls, plastic bags and wine sacks. While these everyday objects are chosen for their form and inherent physical qualities, Horne’s rendering of the objects in industrial materials disrupts and challenges preconceived ideas and truths about their physicality and function.

Barbara KRAJEWSKA was born -first time- in Poland and, then, the second time in France, when she discovered, in Paris, French civilisation. She lived in different countries but, feeling profoundly European, she belongs to French culture that she represents with her books and other writings. Artist painter, she exhibited many times in Paris, but also in New York, in London, in Switzerland, in Italy and in Australia. Barbara Krajewska is also an author. After completing her Ph.D. she published internationally four books and a number of articles devoted to French literature, French history, French society and also Napoleon and Dostoyevsky.

Barbara KRAJEWSKA abandoned her initial technique, water painting, to work exclusively with oil on canvas. Initially indifferent to abstract, she has turned to this expression recently, although her favourite subjects are portraits, nudes and landscapes in an attempt to destabilise formal vision of world and people through a personal vision of things and human beings. She is trying to dramatize banal situations or to exaggerate what’s singular in settings that are eternal rather than anecdotal, all seized in a line deliberately minimalist. The purpose is to visualise certain states of mind without the ambition to venture into innovative or trendy approaches with the intention to express spleen or to retain the instant through aesthetical sublimation and the intensity of a suggestion.

Bernadette completed a Bachelor Degree in Visual Arts and Design at Adelaide College of the Arts in 2017, majoring in painting. Since graduating she has continued to develop her oil painting skills in a variety of genres including portraiture, landscape and more recently abstraction.

A finalist in various art prizes, including the Adelaide Parklands Prize (2018) and the Kennedy Art Prize (2018/2019) Bernadette received the Helpmann Academy Emerging Artist Award at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts / SALA portrait Prize in 2019, a highlight of her career. Bernadette has exhibited regularly in both group and solo exhibitions.

Anna Horne explores materiality, process and the transience of the physical world through the medium of sculpture. Contradiction and opposition are themes that are particularly central in Horne’s practice, often playfully explored through the juxtaposition of opposing material forces. In the creation of her sculptures, Horne uses commonplace industrial materials such as concrete, plaster and metal to cast replicas of familiar everyday objects such as beach balls, plastic bags and wine sacks. While these everyday objects are chosen for their form and inherent physical qualities, Horne’s rendering of the objects in industrial materials disrupts and challenges preconceived ideas and truths about their physicality and function.

Brenton Hill is an Adelaide Hills based artist.

He attended The South Australian School of Art, Central School of Art and TAFE SA.

For over 35 years his art practice worked in tandem with being a graphic designer.

How to bring together marks into a meaningful image is what challenges and intrigues him…

To draw to the surface the inner picture of the soul so the eye may see.

To feel a forgotten memory.

Art is not always about pretty things

It’s about who we are

What happened to us

How our lives are affected

And how we can be healed

(Adapted from Elizabeth Broun)

Have we been created to belong, to be in a place where we can love and be loved? 

A place to call Home.

To be safe, nurtured and where we can be ourselves.

Is Home a place of shelter, a birth place, where we grew up or where we give up our final breath?

This sense of Home may not be the same for everyone – for some it can be a place of pain, sadness, trauma or regret.

Memory is such a fragile archive.

This poignant body of work hopefully will lead you into a place that you call home, a place where you are now or a place where you have been – and a place of an eternal Home to come.

Do we need to leave a home to go HOME

Charlotte Tatton is an Adelaide based artist, predominantly working with oil paint. Her work explores the intersection between design, nostalgia, and the transformative power of decoration. Tatton employs collage techniques to create compositions that play with spatiality and movement. Since completing her Bachelor of Visual Art at Adelaide Central School of Art in 202, she has exhibited at galleries across Adelaide and interstate, including FELTspace, Adelaide Town Hall, Endspace Gallery and The Long Gallery (TAS). Tatton has received recognition as the RHG prize winner at the Gallery M contemporary art prize in 2022 and is currently preparing for her first solo show at Gallery M in October.

Inspired by second-hand 1960s house and garden magazines and craft books, the collaged compositions within my work delve into notions of space, scale, and form. By juxtaposing realistic renderings with flat, graphic magazine diagrams, perceptions are challenged, giving rise to intriguing and fragmented spaces. Rhythmic patterns, bold colors, and distinctive forms capture the intriguing allure of mid-century aesthetics, inviting contemplation of the lasting impression of design from that era and celebrates its unchanging style that continues to captivate.

Chris has exhibited often in group and solo exhibitions, alongside her work as a social sciences academic, specialising in gender and sexuality studies. Art has offered her another direction. Chris’ approach reflects her childhood in remote Australia, connections between human beings and the natural world, social inequality, and an ongoing concern with emotional intensity.

Elisabeth Wojciak is an Adelaide based artist who works in the mediums of painting and drawing. She has a Bachelor of Visual Arts and Applied Design from the Adelaide College of the Arts. Since her studies, she has received several awards including the MinterEllison Lawyers Rising Star Award, Academic Achievement Award and the Art Stretchers Award for Highest Achievement in Painting. She has also been selected to exhibit in the Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize, represented ACArts Adelaide at PICA in Perth. Her work is now included in several national and international private collections.

In my work I strive to convey feelings of intimacy, longings and ambiguities of things unspoken, forgotten. I continue my attraction in themes of the female form, (self-) perception, and the connection between figurative and abstract /expressionist painting. My creative process is largely intuitive and through referencing to the figure I allow the painting to lead me and respond to the marks on the canvas. I use colour and expressive brushstrokes to develop language concerned with mood and content.

Firat Neziroglu was born in Izmir. He was invited to Oslo under the auspices of the Royal Norway Embassy and to Thailand for the birthday celebrations of the Queen of Thailand, where he  wove a special cloth for her. He was elected as the brand ambassador to the Thai Kingdom. It became the cover of Christie’s, one of the most important auction houses in the world. He presented his ready-to-wear collection on the runway of New York Fashion Week.

As a new venture in Turkey he is using weaving as part of live performance accompanied by music on stage. He realises his dreams on stage with ModernDansLAB a classical ballet and contemporary dance ensemble.

… And still; unravelled, academician, thinker, dancer, and a weaver, while weaving all of these to each other…

Firat Neziroglu presents his weaving works using his traditional tapestry technique through a special and specific interpretation which he was developed with a modern approach. 

His works reflect aspects of his daily life related through real life stories.  Neziroglu not only use colours, tones and forms but also various traditional Anatolian weaving techniques and local fibres.  He developed a new weaving technique which is accepted in the world of contemporary art. His work is included in university lectures around the world and has been the subject of a  master’s thesis.

Always a maker, Genevieve de Jong graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts and Design, jewellery major, in 2014. For the last 6 years she has enjoyed working within the arts / ethical manufacturing jewellery industry while building up her arts practice. 

Genevieve explores the interplay between jewellery and its wearer through the intimacy of jewellery making. Known to use a variety of materials more recently precious gem stones and metals have become an important aspect of her work.

Genevieve creates beautiful, handmade, one off  sculptural pieces. Her ideas are often a response to themes of memory and imagery,  or simply from the old treasures she finds while stomping around in the bush.

History has proven that “events” sear in our minds and then we forge ahead. 

The age old art of jewellery making creates heirlooms with an emotional attachment. In response Jewellers are always critically thinking and agonising over the most minute of details, creating an intimacy between the maker, the jewellery and the wearer.

The designs of my body of work were inspired by my exchanges over the last year with colourful characters, then exploring the imaginary interplay between the jewellery and the person.  The process of  transferring my observations, misshaping the precious metals with my hands and adding natural gem stones, created strong, beautiful and whimsical jewellery, and I imagine the wearer adoring them.

There was no agonising over the concept and unapologetically I allowed my process to be a positive reaction to my exchanges, refusing to give the “event” any more energy.

This is what I needed to do….to forge ahead.

Georgina Mills is a locally and internationally trained sculptor who has recently returned from five years of study and tutoring at The Florence Academy of Art in Italy. Her practice explores the human condition through the representation of the figure and aspires to capture a transient moment that resonates viscerally with the viewer. Georgina is excited by the new challenge of extending her classical figurative training to incorporate contemporary Australian culture.

Desire for Desires is a figurative representation of a discontentment with life. The heaviness of the pose captures an intangible energy associated with dissatisfaction- a symptom usually experienced as part of a deeper underlying restlessness with self. Unwittingly, this realization can surface once the everyday stimulus of life has been removed, manifesting itself as boredom.

I am a South Australian Sculptor with young kids. I am acutely aware of the need for motorists to be vigilant around schools and areas where children are present. While caution signs assist to inform motorists they can be overlooked amongst other signage. I have designed these childlike sculptures to draw motorists’ attention, at a glance or via peripheral vision, to remind drivers to slow down.

My work as a sculptor has been based on the skills I acquired from my previous occupation as a sheet metal tradesman. I always appreciated the characteristics of metal, particularly its versatility and durability, but as an artist I am able to experiment, explore the boundaries and manipulate metal in a more creative fashion than ever before. The foundation for my art practice has also been enhanced with the completion of a Bachelor of Visual Arts and Applied Design. My practice is divided into three major areas: commissioned works, exhibitions and workshops. While I enjoy the freedom of exhibiting, it is the realm of public art that gives me the greatest satisfaction, allowing my works to be seen by a larger audience and sharing my vision with the whole community. Public pieces created within workshops reinforce this notion even further.

Gus Clutterbuck is an Australian mid-career artist with a diverse mix of skills and achievements. He graduated from AC Arts(2000), exhibited widely nationally and internationally, and recently was a finalist in the 2020 Taiwan Ceramics Biennial. 

His work is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Flinders Medical Centre, Jingdezhen Ceramic University(China),Yingge Ceramic Art Museum(Taiwan) and numerous private collections.

His creative vision is expressed through multiple art forms, including drawing, ceramics, and photography. He works in Adelaide, Jingdezhen(China) and with Aboriginal artists in the East Kimberleys. 

He is represented by MEOU Art Shanghai.

I am a storyteller. I use a distinctive visual language to portray the narratives of my life.

This personal language combines traditional qīng-huā painting techniques and references to Chinese symbology, with my own and my family’s personal experience of life and the Australian landscape.

My work responds strongly to my immersion in the immediate cultural environment, and embodies the essence of cultural exchange through the juxtaposition of Chinese and Australian archetypes.

These works on Jingdezhen porcelain are painted using traditional blue and white techniques in the spirit of the Romantic tradition.

Hayal Incedogan is an artist and academician born in İzmir, a graduate Dokuz Eylül University Fine Arts Department specializing in painting is represented in collections worldwide including the United States, Germany, Finland, Spain, Hungary and the United Arab Emirates and has exhibited internationally as both an invited participant in projects as well as solo artist.

Exhibitions have included ‘The Last 60 Years of Contemporary Turkish Art’  in Osthaus Museum in Germany and an exhibition in Modern Hungarian Gallery in Hungary. Incedogan was cited as among the “40 remarkable artists in ‘Turkish Contemporary Art’ under the age of 40”.

As a multimedia artist developing interdisciplinary projects using painting, photography, light and sound, I utilise memory, particularly personal and social memory.   Recollections and nostalgia are linked to classical and electronic music,  literary texts and botany. “In the Shade of Time” kaleidoscopic photographed plant forms are presented as the continuity and infinity of nature and that sense of the infinite is heard in the repeated forms and phrases of the electronic soundtrack.

In my exhibition “Lilac Wine” I  focused on the theme of love and brought together different works of art from oil paintings, photographs to neon installations and videos in a feminine sensibility, the presence of an emotional ‘climate’ change is unquestionably dominant.

The spineless cactus, named ‘Echeveria’ and a member of the ‘succulent’ family, plays the leading role in this climate as it stands out in this sudden and eerie ‘transition’ climate to which we are exposed through love. This succulent plant blossoms once a year and as it makes concessions to life and death, the pink-yellow and ingratiating flowers gain strength, nourish, cherish and bloom in the tormented semi-light and the wilful drought of love.

Irene Messia is originally from Italy where she undertook her art training. These works consider eudaimonia: a philosophy predating Aristotle, which holds that individuals have a responsibility to recognize and live in accordance with their daimon, or true self.

Jasmine Crisp completed a BVA (honours) at Adelaide Central School in 2017 and has since been granted the 12 month Carclew (2018) and Praxis (2019) artist in residence programs in SA as well as international artist residencies across Iceland (SíM, NES) and Finland (Koli Ryynanen). Crisp’s work is included in the Artbank collection and been awarded for first prize for the CCH Art Prize, Prospect Portrait Prize and YouthScape Art Prize, achieved multiple peoples choice awards and included as finalists in the Ravenswood Art Prize, SALA Advertiser awards, Emma Hack Art Prize and Kennedy Art Prize.

Jasmine Crisp is a painter born and based in Adelaide, South Australia. Her characteristic practice features figures from her lived experiences to form localised genre paintings of the familiar and absurd. Crisps often maximalist scenes are built upon personal narratives, which are crafted in reference to past traditions of portraiture. Long established symbols within painting are presented in harmony with the familiarity of the present to form playful reimagined landscapes of the felt human experience.

Jingwei Bu is a Chinese – Australian emerging artist. Draws on a range of artistic traditions that references both Western and Eastern cultural traditions, her practice focus on investigating time, space, and memory through drawing, painting, installation, performative video and art performance. Her early art training in traditional Chinese charcoal portrait drawing, followed by joining a contemporary art atelier in Germany. Currently, she is a graduating visual art student at Adelaide Central School of Art by the end of the year. Jingwei draws on her experience of cultural displacement and social isolation and a well-trained capacity for observation. Her artwork has been included in numerous group exhibitions in South Australia and overseas. In addition, her intuitive drawing Life Maps series works, which she has been developing since 2016, have been exhibiting in the Mill Adelaide and Women’s and Children’s hospital within their ‘Art in Health’ program.

Jingwei Bu considers art-making as an extension of everyday life. She utilizes a range of modalities and approaches – installation, performance, video, multi-media, and works on paper – to explore time, memory, the impermanence of life, natural and man-made ecosystems and ontology.

Bu draws on life events as an abundant source of creativity.  Big and small actions that make up the insignificant and meaningful moments in life act as triggers for largely spontaneous creative responses. Her practice is attuned to accident, play, and translation: thoughts and feelings are shaped into artistic expression, both object-based and performative.

Bu often incorporates performance in her practice alongside other modalities. Developing her understanding of the body through theatre performance and the Tai Chi, Bu uses movement to extend the duration-based abstract drawing series Life Maps (2016-), works on papers and installations. Addressing time, space and materiality in the context of culture and identity.

Joe Felber lives in Adelaide; he studied architecture in Lucerne. In 2000 he received (MFA in Research) at RMIT in Melbourne. He has lived, worked and exhibited over three continents with individual and group exhibitions since 1970-ties. 

Joe migrated to Australia in 1980 and lived in Sydney until 1989, where he returned to Zurich and worked and exhibited mainly in Switzerland, Germany, Cologne, Frankfurt Hamburg. Since 1991 in New York with Lennon Weinberg Inc. Since 1990, he lived for five years in Cologne as a peripatetic nomad: his art practice a ‘performance’ of physical and discursive displacement. He was invited as an artist in residence in the international art programme Costello Rivara, Torino in Italy, where he was introduced to the origin of the Arte Povera collection. Since 1992 his practice became interdisciplinary and acquisitive: absorbing, assembling, composing and de-composing…playing and re-playing elements from a vast array of fragments, each a caught glimpse (a musical notation) of a moment, a movement through public/social space (the literal spaces of landscape, architecture and urbanity, and the virtual, or constructed spaces of both written and artistic syntax).

The tree works shown here are a response to the political debate on environmental issues and the reconciliation of the First Nation in Australia. The Diptych of architecture is a revelation on two witnesses planning and Monument. This Top panel is the famous Art Deco building ‘The Plaza’ hotel near Central Park, New York. In all works, the painting process that interests me is the surprise, the accidents, and the beauty of Aesthetics. 

On completing my jewellery apprenticeship with Wendts in Adelaide I went to London to further my career. In London I worked for the contemporary jeweller Andrew Grima making one-off pieces, while studying in the evenings at the Sir John Cass School of Art.  On my return to Australia I started my own practice based on my experiences overseas until being asked to head the first jewellery apprentice course in South Australia. This resulted in a 30-year career in education eventually becoming head of jewellery at the Adelaide College of the Arts. During this time my main emphasis was developing my student’s artistic development with the occasional commission mainly in institutional silverware.

On retirement my practice has broadened to encompass the tradition of silversmiths and jewellers in the creation of Objet D’Art.  For this exhibition I based my pieces on my love and concern for the Australian landscape, the figurative work of the sculpture of Anthony Gormley, Alberto Giacometti and in traditional indigenous art forms especially the skeletal rock art of the Kimberly region.

Awarded Bachelor of Design (Ceramics) from SACAE Underdale, eventually returning to full-time sculpture, on retirement in 1998. Judith recently completed two figurative bronze children for the “Vietnamese Boatpeople Monument” on the riverbank, Kintore Avenue in Adelaide, unveiled January 2021. Other well-known bronzes are” Mary MacKillop and Children” situated outside the St Francis Xavier Cathedral facing Victoria Square, and “George Giffin” is a 2.25m coloured bronze situated between the Cricket Dressing Rooms at the Adelaide Oval. There are numerous bronze saints and busts across Australia, “Poets Corner” In Penola, SA has two bronze poet busts unveiled in 2018-9.

From figurative sculpture in large bronzes to realistic rendering of the figure in clay, the colour becomes a foil in the narrative ambiguity in work. The clay sculptures are hollow built, coloured, and fired with a phycological complexity, rarely looking directly at the viewer and are often lost in thought. The figure of “Marta” won the recent Brighton Jetty Sculptures Indoor Prize in January 2021. It highlights the severe danger of swimming in unfamiliar waters.

Kylie Nichols is a Sculptor and Installation artist based in Adelaide, South Australia. Known for her organic forms and use of multiples, Nichols art practice explores human relationships with the natural world, often drawing parallels with everyday objects. The material process is essential to her art practice with a fascination with the dichotomy of liquid to solid states; casting and mould making are often employed.

Nichols has a Bachelor of Visual Arts and Design and was a recipient of a residency at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China (Helpmann Academy) in 2019. Her work is held in numerous private collections.

My three works explore different aspects of how our worlds changed during this time:

‘Collective Memory’ is a term Historians refer to the way the public remembers an event or a period of time. Covid has touched as all. We are now a part of a generation that will carry a distinct identity forged by a shared experience of a profound event. The words imprinted are what got some of you through (provided during the latter half of 2019).

Peek (at someone or something)

1. to be inside of something and take a look out.  Our windows, or the images on our TV were our limited view of the outside world while we bunkered down in self isolation.

Nostalgia – It’s comforting to have a nostalgic feeling for the past that reminds us who we have been and who we really are.

Educated in Adelaide, Libby has worked as a Secondary Art teacher in both SA and NSW schools. 

As a mixed-media visual artist, she has had studio gallery practices in some of the places she has worked in, including the Blue Mountains (NSW), Lenswood (SA) and Crystal Brook (SA); recently known as ARCADIA.

Libby currently lives in Strathalbyn (SA) and plans to open ARCADIA there in Spring 2023.

She continues to create multi-layered artworks combining fragments of drawing, stitch, painting and collage. As a self-confessed ‘nature-lover’, their content is usually an organically informed expression exploring life observations as visual metaphors, with natural history and the human condition.

Libby’s heartfelt ‘pale reflections’, imbue hope…                                                           

This ‘handmade’ collection captures echoes of a lost Eden Garden home, combined with a yearning for ‘roots’.

‘Home restorations’ of all kinds continue on in the hands of the Gardener of all Shelter, Welcome and Comfort. In the midst, conditions and appearances may be cracked, broken, smashed, polluted, torn peeled, unravelled, stripped, tangled…

There is much ‘branching’, ‘flowering’ and ‘fruiting’; organic ‘Home’ – related metaphors delve right down into the ‘little bits and collections of nature’; the ‘nooks and crannies’. Heart embrace. They also ‘soar’; brought through and out, and gathered up. Held.

At their heart, a reversal of places is suggested; sacrifice of Jesus Christ, One for all, on a tree that was once a Cross… bringing HOME; anywhere on this ‘pale blue dot’, and forever.

Mahir was born in Izmir. He graduated from the Department of Traditional Turkish Arts in Izmir and moved to  Istanbul. Along with his working life, he completed his master’s degree at Marmara University Fine Arts Institute. Mahir continues to work and create in Istanbul with the experience he gained in the textile industry and the different principles he applied in his practice.

In our age, humanity and nature have a contradictory relationship. This contradiction started with the domination of nature by humankind. In my paintings, I am inspired by the forest and the mythological figures it contains, which were first depicted centuries ago. A linking of this inspiration with that of today’s civilization,  allows me to express my feeling in paintings more strongly.

Margie Sheppard is a painter and printmaker who has lived and worked in the Adelaide Hills, her career spanning 35 years. Having spent many years working exclusively as a printmaker, she has now returned to painting. In the recent past

Margie graduated from the South Australian School of Art in Painting in 1973 and taught in the TAFE system early in her career. She has had more than twenty solo exhibitions both in South Australia and interstate. She has also exhibited in New Zealand, Slovenia, Mexico, Korea and the USA and has been selected for a number of important print exhibitions such as the Fremantle Print Award and is also a three times winner of The Whyalla Art Prize Print Award.

The intoxication of new colour/shape combinations in my paintings is a heart-opening catharsis. This exchange of energy inspires my ongoing creative process.

Meliesa Judge & Will Kuiper have been working together for over 25 years during which time they have established themselves amongst the foremost producers of contemporary figurative sculpture in Australia. Mary Ward, for the Loreto Schools in Australia, was Meliesa’s first nationwide commission. It took several years for the artists to bronze cast the entire edition of eight life-sized portraits at Liquid Metal Studios. Subsequent projects have honed her skills in historic interpretive portraiture.

Her most recent sculptures are Catherine MacAuley, Monte Sant Angelo College, North Sydney, 2018; Calvary Chapel artworks for the new Calvary Hospital, Adelaide, March 2020. Meliesa is a Churchill Fellow 2001.

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” Simone Weil

Meng Zhang is an emerging artist, born in Inner Mongolia, China, and she started a study journey in Adelaide in 2010. She is an observer and recorder, using different ways to record her daily observations. She is fascinated by registering the unexpected, unintended, and something said by the material. To observe, record, reflect, and consider retrospectively and then to save the unwilling and improvised, to save voice from materials and to save the details of daily life. Meng involves broad-ranging practise in printmaking, photography, video, drawing, sculptural and installation.

The work, Thread, is about my nostalgia. Distance becomes a powerful and significant word during the COVID pandemic.

Physical distance has been emphasized everywhere. The images come from my hometown, Hohhot, and the city I live for about ten years, Adelaide. Searching the familiarity in each image, rediscovering the feelings behind each image and set them beside each other to relook. I then find the connection and stitch them together.

Adelaide based artist, Monika Morgenstern, was born in Germany. Her art is based on phenomenological research she conducts around people and their mystical experiences. She works with light and its effects on glass, digital prints, paintings, lightboxes and as projections.

Nevin Guven is a Turkish artist who lives in Isparta and works as an Assistant Professor at Suleyman Demirel University for 23 years. She completed Bachelor of Painting at Dokuz Eylul University in 1987 and continued her academic studies at Anadolu University completing both Master’s Degree and Phd in 1996. She has had, and contributed to, solo and group exhibitions and symposiums in Turkey, Mexico, Japan, Poland, Macedonia, USA, France, Greece and Bulgaria. 

In these times we live in today, every expression turns into a masquerade; therefore, by losing their credibility, the superficial perception becomes the rising values whereas it is actually “genuineness and authenticity” that humankind look for in their journey of life. The idea of a period of time in which people feel safe, fearless and joyful, is very serenely captivating and amusing. What I want is to create narrative paintings that will make unbearable aspects of life bearable and to enhance my hope by sharing and raising awareness for the conception of a pure and child hearted world.

Olcay Ataseven completed the art education at Hacettepe University, lives in Isparta-Turkey and continues her art adventure there. On the other hand, she has been working as an academician at the Fine Arts Faculty of Suleyman Demirel University, since 2001. Currently, she prefers to embody her narrative style and concepts in visual plastic mediums such as sculpture, painting and drawing. The basic trajectory of her art is the single, plain, minimal forms that seek an answer to the mute but infinitely profound mystery of the monoliths, which carry an intertemporal message to humanity’s impasse of existence. Several of her sculptures of this mode have been installed in public places in some Turkish cities and a number of other works have been included in private collections.

My artistic practice has been gathering expressive direction in which the psychological / spiritual effects of daily life, social and environmental problems, find their counterpart in color and form. The colors and shapes in my works are a reflection of a quest that tries to break through the depressive effect of the grey and black, via the light of yellow, which is a personal representation of the violations of human values and global environmental problems.

Olivia is a jeweller and taxidermy artist.

Her pieces have been described as a ‘modern fusion of taxidermy and jewellery’. She achieves this by moulding and casting precious metals from the bones of deceased animal and birds, creatively combining these pieces with flora, pearls and gemstones. Creating a juxtaposition, forcing people to observe the fragments of death while hopefully seeing the same natural beauty that she does.

 Olivia has participated in multiple group shows and her jewellery is currently stocked in 3 states.

Taxidermy has inspired her to create unique wearable art, wall pieces and beautiful sculptural items. Olivia draws inspiration from the idea that her work may appeal to people who would normally be shocked by the ideas portrayed. She finds purpose in creating lasting objects inspired by nature and remnants left behind.

Everything in life is temporary.  Just as death marks the end of an old life, the decay and decomposition that soon follows will provide material for new life.

At the start of 2020 I was ready to move to London to follow my heart and pursue a career as an artist. However, the universe had other plans. Through the pandemic I found myself, along with many others in a state of mourning and loss and with feelings of despair and no direction. As time passed, just as the death of a creature helps form new life, I began to rebuild mine. Inspiration started to flow, and my artistic practice began to flourish.

These pieces are a reflection of the beauty and new life that has grown and will to continue to develop from the perceived rotting despair of 2020.

Peter Hall is an Adelaide-based visual artist, dividing his time between still photography and film projects. 

In the last five years he has exhibited in Adelaide, Melbourne, and Los Angeles with an exhibition planned for Tokyo in 2024.   In 2022/23 Peter exhibited Pilgrim, a fine art narrative photography exhibition involving a Japanese/Australian cross cultural journey. The exhibition at the Migration Museum of SA attracted 11,000 visitors and it is planned to travel to Japan next year.

He is currently co-producing/co-directing a Sri Lankan/Australian film on immigration and new beginnings in Outback Australia.

Peter Johnson has been working in the arts for 35 years, completing a Bachelor of Design in Ceramics and Glass in 1987. He has worked as an artist in studios at the Jam Factory and was a founding member in 1990 of Jamboree Clay Workshop, located at Welland. In 1997 Peter established Gaff Studio, in Port Adelaide.

From 1997 until 2018 Peter lectured in Ceramics, Design, and Drawing at the TAFE OHalloran Hill campus and was Head of Ceramics at Adelaide College of the Arts (2015- 2018).

Peter’s ceramic work has been recognised and acknowledged by support from the Australia Council Overseas Residency Program, Barcelona,1993/4, and project grants for new work from Arts SA. In 2009 he undertook a Pottery Workshop residency in Jingdezhen, China.with the Helpman Academy.

‘ Within our urban, industrial and natural landscapes we can find not only harshness, but often hidden beauty.  When we take time to wander, to imagine and reflect on the places around us we can discover things to enjoy. This can vary from the ever-changing sky, tall trees, flowers, chimneys, fences, light posts, rocks and crevices, rusty metal, industrial decay and architecture new and old ‘. Peter Johnson

Rosemary Warmington paints from her beautiful Adelaide garden studio. Her contemporary paintings are drenched in colour, influenced by the natural world.  Her most recent significant solo exhibition, Colour Echoes, was at BMG ART in February 2021. With tertiary qualifications in social work and business, Rosemary was a CEO of a not-for-profit organisation for many years, retiring in 2017 to paint more. In 2012 Rosemary was made a Member of the Order of Australia.

“My abstracted paintings are echoes of colours and forms I’ve seen, remembered, or contrived from my travels over time. I paint with saturated colours using mixed media, line work and scratchings into the canvas in an intuitive process towards an unknown outcome.

I want the colours in my paintings to echo within us, awaken that feeling of ‘aliveness’ that can become hidden and forgotten in our daily grind.

My works are, therefore, about experiencing our human condition more deeply, through colour and its impact on us.

Adelaide-based artist Sally Goldsmith engages with traditional jewellery making techniques to create wearable pieces and small objects. Sally, who completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts and Design at Adelaide College of the Arts in 2016, employs a playful approach to silversmithing with observation, investigation and introspection the genesis of each nuanced work.

I love to push against the inherent boundaries and challenges of working with a material that is not easily wrought. Each work is an opportunity to refine the mercurial creative process; imagining, designing, making and solidifying a personal introspection into a tangible offering of self.

It seems that 2020 has raised more questions about life than it answered… How can we best withstand social isolation? Will life ever be “normal” again? How can we make our domestic world more joyful?

This collection of whimsical sculptures entitled Re-Imagining 2020 investigates the comfort and stability that our everyday domestic objects offer us. In reflecting the need for solidity and dependability when external life takes an unanticipated turn, they consider the power of the mind to uncover diverting worlds within our world and footholds to traverse a new reality.

Through traditional jewellery-making practices I have explored the need to divert, escape, entertain, distract, daydream and internally connect with a less chaotic existence.

Samone Turnbull grew up in Arno Bay on Eyre Peninsula but currently resides and works in Adelaide. She studied Printmaking at The South Australian School of Art and graduated with a Fine Arts degree in 1977.

A life involved in the Arts, but principally a narrative style painter, Samone has exhibited regularly, including fifteen solo exhibitions, locally and with galleries in Sydney and Canberra. A finalist in the Fleurieu Peninsula Biennale, Portia Geach Memorial and the Kedumba Drawing awards, she won the Steinhoff Travelling Scholarship in 2002 and the Whyalla Art Prize in 2004. In recent years her art practice has shifted into ceramics.

The idea of Beauty and the Beast suggests the very pull and tug that goes to the heart of creation. As a potter, it is through the transformative nature of clay that this process becomes apparent.  If the Beast is the shapeless slurry, it’s for the artist to take the mud to task, and through it, seek out Beauty. The encouragement needed to coax form out of a lump of clay sometimes results in unexpected catastrophe. This is the nature of the Beast. These terracotta pieces have triumphed against the odds and lay tribute to the inherent Beauty of the red earth.

Sheila Whittam is an Adelaide Hills artist, originally from Britain. She has had a long art career having more than 20 solo exhibitions in SA and Victoria. Sheila has a BA in visual art from ACSA.  As a tutor, she designed a course – which contributed to community well-being. She has been included as a finalist in many major art prizes and won SALA AWARD 2016. Is confidently experimental in her approach to art making – using mixed media – oils cold wax, monotypes, image transfers, and encaustics. Her current work engages in fascinating translucent treasures through multiple layering by using a non-objective abstraction style.

This new series of work has taken me in a direction which opened my perception brought about by the laying down of the material itself.

New directions were concurrent with world events that startled us by its intensity. I engaged with the effects of turmoil by allowing impulsive unruly play in my work.  Disorder tends towards order – this influenced me as I engaged in the basic elements of abstraction towards resolutions.   Surfaces undone, reworked, and remade, (un) intentional irregularities evolved – fundamental to my compositional aesthetics. 

This process took me finally into ordered silence of elementary beauty.

Stella Vänskä is a contemporary jeweller and metalwork artist. She completed the Bachelor of Visual Arts and Design (Jewellery) from ACArts in 2017, and in 2019, she was awarded the Helpmann Academy artist residency at Sanskriti Kendra, New Delhi.

With a background in fashion design, Stella is inspired by patterns found in construction sites, scaffolding and power pylons to create large scale forms that fit around the body.

Stella is interested how our history, culture and surroundings can be interpreted into jewellery and sculptures. She enjoys working with sheet steel as the medium can be readily coloured and shaped into three-dimensional forms.

Computer screens, like the carved lattice-work stone screens of northern India, allow communication without physical connection. Intricately patterned jaali screens form a barrier between inner and outer worlds, allowing us to see out, without being seen. Geometric motifs encourage inner contemplation through tessellated patterns. Screens form a barrier across a portal, whether a window or the internet.

These works are based on self-reflection and connection to the sacred. They reflect on the duality of life, juxtaposing light and shadow, public and private, the seen and the unseen, self-worship versus the self-absorbed.

Introspection inspires us to contemplate and connect to the divine within.

Stephen has been passionate about art all his life. He graduated with two degrees, one in Education as an Art Teacher and the other in Applied Design. After teaching for several years, Stephen relocated to Adelaide and lectured at Tafe SA, teaching Design Principles and Applied Design software fundamentals. He started an Ad agency as co-director in 1999, where he has focused entirely on his artwork in the past three years.

He had his first Solo Exhibition incorporating one hundred pieces of work and was also a Finalist in the 66th Blake prize this year. Recently, Stephen licensed a loop of animated versions of his artwork to UTV in Melbourne for screening at outdoor events around Australia.

I describe my work as “contemporary surrealism”, but it’s also been described by others as “Australian Baroque”, and this describes some of the pieces very aptly, but the range of exploration is now much broader than when that statement was made. The things that influence my work are personal experiences and curiosity. Most people are fascinated by something, images, and dreams that they can’t explain, and I’m no different.

My subject matter ranges from sensual to curious.  As well… quite a few pieces are underpinned by a straightforward narrative or a play on words, and occasionally, I produce a work questioning our environmental failings, but I like to think that each of the pieces speaks for themselves and allow the observer to interpret the images on their terms.

Swee holds qualifications in Arts from the UNSW and the University Sains Malaysia. She has been an active member of several art societies, including RSASA, Red House of Gallery M, Penang Teachers’ Art Circle and the Penang Art Society.

The disciplines and mediums in the art that Swee is familiar with are varied. Painting, drawing and sketches range from still life and landscape in oils, acrylic, charcoal, mixed media and batik.

Her works often depict local surroundings, from Adelaide’s Rundle Mall, Central Market, wineries, parklands, Penang local coffee shops, heritage buildings, people enjoying what is on offer in the beautiful city, to wherever her thoughts take her, painting on canvas, silk fabric or using tree barks, with an essence of passion to her works.

A memory about my cultural background as a descendant of Nyonya / Peranakans, early Chinese migrants mainly settled in Penang, Malacca, Singapore and Medan.

While mine was from Penang, the sister city of Adelaide, the graceful character of the English ceramic tiles was a strong feature in the Peranakan heritage shophouses and the beautiful handmade beaded slippers, floral motifs, bowls sets used for special occasions or ancestral offerings etc.

Tom Borgas is an Adelaide-based visual artist working from a sculptural foundation across multiple platforms including gallery and project work, public sculpture, festival interventions, performance and education. Borgas’ work has been shown at galleries and venues across Australia. His practice has also been supported through organisations including the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts South Australia, NAVA, Guildhouse and The Helpmann Academy. In 2020 he was awarded the Unitcare Digital Art Award as part of SALA Festival and is a finalist in both the Waterhouse Natural History Prize and Heysen Prize for Landscape.

Developed through an oscillation between digital and analogue processes my work is an investigation of the space between image and object, virtual and physical, maker and viewer.  This suite of works manifests the immaterial colours and structural motifs of computer generated forms as artefacts to be viewed IRL (in real life).

Will Kuiper is best known for the sculpture of Malcolm Blight for Adelaide Oval. Will’s design captured the singular style of Malcolm’s long-kick, but also demanded a complex engineering solution as the entire sculpture is canter-levered back from the single point of contact, as the heel of the striding foot hits the ground.

Will runs a specialist bronze foundry, Liquid Metal Studios, in collaboration with Meliesa Judge. The combination of the sculptors’ modelling and design skills with mastery of the bronze casting methodology, enables a confluence between inspiration and technique. The distinctive possibilities of the process also inform and extend the sculptor’s approach.

Unless the past and the future are made part of the present by both memory and intention, there is, in human terms, no road, and nowhere to go.

Will Adams is an emerging artist and fashion designer from Adelaide, South Australia. He has completed a Bachelor of Contemporary Arts at the University of South Australia in 2020 and is currently completing a Bachelor of Fashion Design with the Whitehouse Institute of Design, Melbourne, Victoria.  He is skilled in working in wearable art, painting, fashion photography, film and art direction. His work explores the facets of drag, queer culture, portraiture and religious imagery. He focuses on using unconventional materials to do his works, repurposing garments and body painting. He wants to combine and blur the lines between fashion and art in new and challenging ways. 

The evil eye is the negative energy used to inflict harm upon others and an emblem to protect against bad vibrations. ‘Evil Eye’ explores many dichotomies, such as the gloom of the pandemic, the rape of the natural environment, and the queer experience. Connecting these ideas together is this feeling of a continual curse and the absence of change and hope. It references Picasso’s Blue Period, Tom of Finland, Ophelia, Narcissus, Venus, and the Virgin Mary. ‘Evil Eye’ is a fashion film experience through the process of deconstruction and reformation.