Red Salon 2026
18 June – 4 July 2026
Opening Night
Friday 19 June | 6 – 8 pm
Special Events
Artist Panel Talk
Saturday 27 June | 1 – 2 pm
Artists: Vanessa Yige Chen, Jake Baglin, Lynley Traeger
Artist Talk
Saturday 27 June | 2 – 3 pm
Bonnie-Jean Whitlock
Closing Event with Artist Panel Talk
Saturday 4 July | 2 – 3 pm
Artists: Andrea Guasch Rosado, Tracy Potts, Kate Hendry, Ramone Villotet and Richard McCoy
Gallery Hours
Wednesday – Sunday: 10 am – 5 pm
Please note: last day is Saturday 4 July
Curator Statement
Following the success of our inaugural Red Salon in 2025, we are excited to present the second edition, Connection. This exhibition explores reflection and connection in a busy world, celebrating the power of art to help us re-centre, reconnect, and see beyond the chaos. At a time when daily life feels increasingly fast-paced and fragmented, Connection invites audiences to pause and reflect on the relationships that shape our lives.
Red Salon is one of Red Gallery’s key annual curated programs. Presented by invitation, it brings together emerging to established artists, showcasing the richness and diversity of contemporary art practice across a wide range of mediums and perspectives.
Red Salon 2026 features works by Bonnie-Jean Whitlock (Winner, Red Art Prize 2026), Andrea Guasch Rosado, Bella Insch, Branka Uljarevic, Dick Verwey, Ellen Jury, Jake Baglin, Julia Fitz, Kate Hendry, Kylie Jayne, Lynley Traeger, Mark Edgoose, Nicholas Pelekis, Rachel Wyatt, Ramone Villotet, Richard McCoy, Rita Sciacca, Robyn Blaikie, Steven Carson, Steven Xiao, Tracy Potts, Vanessa Yige Chen, and Vittoria Cugno.
Bonnie-Jean Whitlock (Winner, Red Art Prize 2026)
Artist Statement
Bonnie’s dense, surreal paintings bear traces of landscapes found in the isolated parts of Australia where she was raised. Engaging narratives around morality, place, embodiment and corporeality, her practice is deeply rooted in material enquiry and processes of building and layering imagery. She treats the surface more as a textile than a painting, incorporating beading, wax, salt and dyeing techniques in her paintings.
Her solo feature in this year’s Red Salon, Apophenie Junk Pile, emphasises the material and tactile elements of an analogue practice. Combining an installation of unstretched hanging fabric paintings with small intimate pieces.
Artist Biography
Bonnie holds a BFA and MFA (RMIT 2023) where she was awarded the Lowenstein’s art’s management prize. She was recently shortlisted for the Misdumma art award, received an honourable mention at Brunswick Street Gallery’s small works prize, and was awarded the Red Salon prize at Red Gallery’s inaugural art prize.
Andrea Guasch Rosado
Artist Statement
In Rebirth, Andrea draws deeply from her personal story and maternal heritage to explore the intersection born through the duality of life and death. Reflecting on transformation and transcendence, the work views death not as an ending, but as part of an ongoing cycle of renewal, coexistence, and becoming. This perspective extends throughout her evolving multidisciplinary practice, which explores the relationships between the self and the collective, the micro and the macro, and the cyclical patterns that connect them.
Through layered compositions that combine geometry with organic forms, each element exists both individually and as part of a greater whole. Her approach continually shifts in response to new inspiration, reflecting the belief that ideas can emerge through multiple voices and mediums while creating spaces for stillness, self-reflection and curiosity.
Artist Biography
Andrea Guasch Rosado is an emerging Melbourne-based artist whose practice explores themes of memory, identity, and belonging through painting. Currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) at RMIT University (2024–2026), Andrea previously earned a Diploma of Visual Arts from La Trobe College of Art and Design in 2020. Her work reflects a sensitivity to personal narratives and the emotional connections between people and place, creating spaces for reflection and dialogue. Andrea has exhibited in a range of group exhibitions, including Cycles at the RMIT School Exhibition (2025) and Feels Like Summer at Quadrant Gallery, Melbourne (2025–2026). In 2026, she will present her first solo exhibition, Safe Space, at Red Gallery, Melbourne.
Bella Insch
Artist Statement
The works in this collection were made as a response to the concept of Connection, in particular the ongoing fantasy I have been exploring in my ceramics practice, of a utopian space where nature and botanical abundance meets interpersonal realities. I am interested in intimacy, tendrils of human connections, the poetry of loss and belonging, desire and the decorative as a metaphor for seeking solace in a better and potentially more beautiful global environment.
Artist Biography
Bella Insch is an emerging visual artist working primarily in ceramic sculpture whose practice explores themes of longing, nostalgia, queer joy, and deeply personal fantasy-scapes infused with botanical whimsy and a maximalist aesthetic. Drawing on reimagined iconography and symbolism through a camp feminine lens, her work examines interpersonal attachment, intimacy, loss, belonging, and the complexities of queer identity. Growing up on Yuin Country and now living and working in Naarm (Melbourne). She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts, majoring in sculpture and drawing, as well as a Graduate Diploma and Master of Art Therapy. A proud member of the LGBTQIA+ community, Insch has been a finalist in both the Muswellbrook Art Prize and the National Emerging Art Prize, and her work is exhibited and held in private collections nationally and internationally.
Branka Uljarevic
Artist Statement
Branka’s practice is grounded in minimalist object-making and intuitive responses to space and landscape. In this exhibition, she turns to the Australian landscape, its openness, horizontality, and subtle symmetry, as a lens for exploring inner experience. Her work crystallizes from an extended internal process, producing forms that evoke the quiet, flattened spaces of emotion, where absence and presence coexist.
Artist Biography
Branka was born in Kotor, Montenegro, and lived and studied in the Czech Republic before moving to Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture, as well as a Master of Teaching. She is a member of the Association of Artists of Montenegro and the Association of Sculptors Victoria, and currently works as a primary art teacher in Melbourne.
She has participated in several solo and group exhibitions across Europe, including her Master’s degree exhibition in Brno, Czech Republic; a collective exhibition in Prague; a collective exhibition in Berlin, Germany; and solo exhibitions in Podgorica, Montenegro, and Brno, Czech Republic. This exhibition marks her first professional presentation in Australia.
Dick Verwey
Artist Statement
Dick Verwey’s works for Red Salon 2026 explore the exhibition themes of connectivity and reflection through an investigation of boundaries, memory, transformation, and mortality. By blurring the distinction between coloured geometric borders and the forms contained within them, he questions where a frame ends and an image begins, suggesting that all things exist in relationship to one another. Reflection is embedded in his process of revisiting, colouring over, cutting apart, and reassembling drawings created over the past twenty to thirty years, creating layered works that function as visual palimpsests.
Artist Biography
Dick Verwey is a Melbourne-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, drawing, collage, and mixed media. Since the 1980s, he has continually explored new materials and processes, working intensively within each medium to refine and expand his visual language. His career has included oil painting studies through CAE and Monash University, recognition as a two-time finalist in the Faber-Castell Drawing Prize, and exhibitions at Brunswick Street Gallery and Red Gallery. His current practice combines acrylic, ink, gel, and marker pens, creating richly layered works that reflect decades of experimentation and creative evolution.
Ellen Jury
Artist Statement
Ellen Jury’s work offers a reflective exploration of the everyday spaces we inhabit, combining mundane with the surreal to reveal the uncanny that exists within the ordinary. Working from photographs taken in moments of stillness, Jury’s work utilizes banal places that elicit feelings of familiarity as well as an eerie nothingness to depict inescapable feelings of loneliness that are triggered by the emptiness of her surroundings. These works explore the simultaneous beauty and existential dread that accompanies everyday life.
Artist Biography
As a Melbourne based artist practicing painting, Ellen Jury’s work and her environment are very closely related. Her connection with the places she grew up in and the experiences and memories associated proved Jury with the genesis of her work. Having studied painting at the Victorian College of the Arts, completing a Bachelor of Visual Art in 2025, Jury has continued her artistic practice, working from a studio space in Coburg. Since concluding her studies her work has been shown in numerous group shows across Melbourne. This is Jury’s second time exhibiting with Red Gallery, following a curated group show titled “Cocoon” earlier in the year. Over the last year her practice has evolved to involve large scale paintings inspired by uniquely Australian architecture and the emotional resonance of these spaces.
Jake Baglin
Artist Statement
Jake Baglin’s painting practice is grounded in direct observation, using drawing and painting from life as a way of paying attention to the world and recording moments of meaning, memory, and sensation. Through landscapes, figures, and portraits, he explores the relationship between perception and experience, treating paintings as “future memories” that preserve fleeting atmospheres and encounters.
Artist Biography
Northcote-based artist Jake Baglin lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne). Following extensive travels throughout south-eastern Australia and Tasmania, he completed a Diploma of Fine Arts at Frankston TAFE in 2013 before earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2018. Baglin has received painting awards during his studies at both TAFE and VCA and has exhibited widely in group exhibitions. His recent solo exhibitions include presentations at 484 Presents in 2021, 2023 and 2025, an artist-run initiative in 2024, and a solo exhibition at Red Gallery in 2025. His work is held in private collections throughout Australia.
Julia Fitz
Artist Statement
Julia Fitz examines the human figure through distortion and abstraction, using intuitive processes to evoke presence, stillness, and mood. Her work reflects on the emotional connections that shape our relationships, with forms emerging through a balance of observation and instinct. Informed by classical training, Fitz moves fluidly between structure and spontaneity, allowing the figure to remain suggestive rather than resolved, creating space for ambiguity and personal interpretation.
Artist Biography
Julia Fitz is a Melbourne-based artist and fashion illustrator whose practice combines expressive drawing with contemporary fashion imagery and visual storytelling. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including the 2025 Red Salon Show and the 2024 Christmas Group Show at Red Gallery, Melbourne, Evolving Expressions with the New York Academy of Art, and the Surf Coast Arts Trail. In 2023, she presented the online solo exhibition Capturing the Essence with FIDA Gallery, UK. Fitz’s illustrations have been published in The Fible 4 (2024) and The Fible–Triptic 3 (2023), both produced by FIDA. Her work has received recognition through the FIDA Awards, where she was shortlisted for the 9th FIDA Awards in 2024 and received a Commended award for Excellence in Fashion Illustration and Art in 2023.
Kate Hendry
Artist Statement
This group of artworks are a response to Hendry’s interest in symbols that direct us in all aspects of our lives. Hendry has borrowed from and abstracted commonly used symbols: punctuation, corrections and editing shorthand, musical symbols and wayfinding signage, to create new works that echo the ways symbols break up our visual space and direct our eyes and actions. The drawings are reminiscent of templates and patterns but on closing viewing the detailed mark making and layered colour work is revealed. The sculptures trace connections back to the drawings but strip out the form leaving directional lines and play with shape, colour and spacing.
Artist Biography
Kate Hendry is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice spans drawing, sculpture, and abstract relief works, using meticulous hand-crafted processes in wire, coloured pencil, and graphite to explore line, form, rhythm, and perception through influences drawn from architecture, landscape, and music.
Hendry has exhibited extensively throughout Australia, presenting numerous solo exhibitions including Fermata (Five Walls, 2024), Plan Work (Smith + Gertrude, 2023), Luminations (Five Walls, 2022), and From Pattern and Plan (Box Gallery, 2020). Earlier solo presentations include exhibitions with Anita Traverso Gallery, Gear Box Gallery, and Geelong Regional Art Gallery. Her work has also featured in significant group exhibitions such as Reduction and Red Salon at Red Gallery (2025), Abstraction at Five Walls (2023), and the Biennial of Light and Colour at West End Art Space (2021–2022). Hendry’s work is held in public and private collections in Australia and internationally.
Kylie Jayne
Artist Statement
Exploring themes of pattern and chaos, expansion and contraction, Kylie Jayne’s work reflects on the vulnerability and beauty of being human, finding connection and quiet companionship within the natural world. Her practice begins with walking, using photography to document the landscapes she encounters and create visual maps for her drawings. Guided by the shapes, lines, and rhythms she observes, she is drawn to pattern, repetition, and the subtle moments when order shifts into transformation. Her work unfolds intuitively, allowing each mark to lead to the next. The drawing process is both meditative and deeply physical, creating a dialogue between the external world and her internal landscape.
Artist Biography
Kylie Jayne is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice explores abstraction through drawing, printmaking, and process-driven works informed by the natural world. She completed a Diploma of Art (Textiles) at RMIT University in 2003 and later undertook studies in Gold and Silversmithing at RMIT from 2005 to 2006. In 2024, she received the Abstract Encouragement Award at the Linden Postcard Show at Linden New Art. Her work is currently represented by Storehouse, St Kilda, and was previously represented by Ross Creek Gallery, Smythes Creek (2024–2025). Recent group exhibitions include the Experimental Print Prize at Castlemaine Art Museum, the Emerging Artist Award at fortyfivedowstairs, Fifty Squared Art Prize and Winter Light at Brunswick Street Gallery, A1 Darebin Art Salon at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, and the Linden Postcard Show.
Lynley Traeger
Artist Statement
In the journey of life and connection, the act of saying farewell is profound and often laden with emotions. In my material practice, the act of making stirs this profound contemplation around and each piece is imbued with significance, serving as a vessel for healing my heart.
The imagined act of layering these necklets upon the body is a powerful gesture of farewell- a symbolic tribute to those we love. Each necklet here represents a connection to the physical world and also a release of the bonds formed with those who have departed. A way of letting them know how influential they were in my life and continue to be. This layering becomes a ritual of honoring their presence, acknowledging the void left behind, and celebrating the moments we shared.
Farewell becomes a poignant exploration of love, memory, and the intricate movement between holding on and releasing- an essential part of honouring important beings who have touched our lives. This Farewell is not an end, but a transformation- a movement toward acceptance, remembrance, and ultimately, peace.
Artist Biography
Lynley is a Melbourne-based contemporary jewellery and object artist with more than forty years of experience, designing and handcrafting distinctive, one-of-a-kind works. Her studies in Gold and Silversmithing at RMIT in the 1980s were followed by a Postgraduate Diploma of Arts in Jewellery and Metals at Monash University in 1998 and a Master of Arts by Research at Monash University in 2004, shaping her rigorous approach to design and making. She has maintained a studio in Melbourne’s Nicholas Building for over twenty-five years, firmly establishing her within the city’s creative community. Her work has been widely exhibited, collected, and recognised through awards, and she has also dedicated more than twenty-five years to teaching Jewellery and Object Design at Melbourne Polytechnic, where she has shared her expertise with emerging makers.
Mark Edgoose
Artist Statement
Finding the Right Path is a work that sits at the intersection of tool, ritual and performative gesture. Made from copper, this work has cultivated a mineral accretion of limestone and brucite on its surface, closely mirroring the skeletal composition of natural coral. The grown crust is both a scar and a reef: it evokes the vulnerability of marine ecosystems while hinting at the possibility of new formations emerging from damaged ground. In this sense, the object becomes a site where industrial metal and slow geological growth are held in tension.
The title points to the time we now inhabit, in which we must seek a means of moving forward by reframing knowledge systems of equity and ecology. Within this context, the divining rod is re‑imagined as a tool of orientation: it’s supposed magnetism stands in for the intuitive, affective and relational forms giving direction to help us remain connected- to each other, to place, and to uncertain futures.
Artist Biography
Mark Edgoose is a Naarm/Melbourne-based craftsperson, artist, and academic whose object-based practice operates at the intersection of craft, design, and architecture. His material-driven research is informed by an ongoing interest in the metaphorical potential of objects, combining traditional making techniques with contemporary technologies and processes. Central to his work are the concepts of containment and functional ambiguity, explored through the extension, stacking, assembly, and connection of individual components. Working predominantly with titanium, Edgoose creates linear sculptural forms distinguished by their cool industrial aesthetic and precise construction. His work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally and continues to make a significant contribution to contemporary Australian object-making.
Nicholas Pelekis
Artist Statement
Nicholas Pelekis’ practice considers memory as an unstable and shifting construct, using painting as a way to question past events and their unreliability. Through carefully constructed surfaces and subtle detail, his work invites close looking, encouraging reflection on how personal recollections are formed, altered, and often mistaken. Central to his approach is the idea of connection between memory and perception, truth and invention, and between his own lived experience and that of the viewer opening a space where uncertainty becomes a shared point of engagement.
Artist Biography
Nicholas Pelekis is a Melbourne-based visual artist working across contemporary painting and visual communication, with a focus on memory, perception, and material experimentation. He holds a Master of Design (Contemporary Art) from the University of South Australia (2025), along with qualifications in visual arts, education, and design. His work has been exhibited widely across Australia, including his solo exhibition Memories and Fallacies at Red Gallery (2025) and numerous group shows such as SALA, Brunswick Street Gallery prizes, and Linden New Art’s Postcard Show, with upcoming participation in Red Salon and the Affordable Art Fair Melbourne. He is the recipient of several academic awards, including the Master of Design Award of Excellence (2025) and the University of South Australia Creative Merit Award (2024).
Rachel Wyatt
Artist Statement
Rachel Wyatt defines each chapter of her life by the city she lives in. As an immigrant in Australia, her street-photography-inspired paintings consider the relationship between people and their urban environments from the perspective of an outsider, drawing attention to the quiet connections that shape everyday life. Her snapshots of city life reveal layered stories within fleeting moments, reflecting on place, belonging, and the ways we are shaped by connection to the cities we inhabit.
Artist Biography
Rachel Wyatt is a contemporary painter whose practice draws on street-photography aesthetics to explore place, memory, and belonging through the perspective of an immigrant in Australia. Her exhibition history includes Red Art Prize, winner, Red Gallery, Melbourne, 2026, Dark Arts and Sublime Corpus, Fitzroy Public Gallery, 2025, Class of 2020 and The Art of Isolation, Isolation Art London, 2020, alongside The Post Degree Show Show and Untitled Exhibition, Open Hand Open Space, 2019, Error 404 , University of Reading Fine Art Department, 2019, and A Bit of a Scramble, Rising Sun Arts Centre, 2019. She has been featured in Southwark News, Greenwich Visitor, and FAD Magazine, 2020. She completed a Short Painting Course at Art Academy London, 2015 and an Art and Design A-Level Barrow-In-Furness Sixth Form College, 2013–2015.
Ramone Villotet
Artist Statement
Ramone Villotet’s practice explores visual phenomenology and how images communicate across shifting contexts. Through painting and material experimentation, he examines the mechanics of looking at how recognition becomes interpretation, and how meaning is shaped by the desire to order what we see. Using camouflage, printmaking, collage, and mixed media, he reworks everyday symbols such as arrows, targets, and flowers into layered, unstable systems that resist fixed interpretation. His work highlights how these familiar forms carry social, historical, and cultural associations that shift through repetition and context, emphasising connection between viewer, image, and perception. Ultimately, his practice invites viewers to question the visual systems that structure how we see and understand the world.
Artist Biography
Ramone Villotet is a visual artist whose practice explores visual phenomenology and the shifting ways images communicate across different contexts. Drawing on phenomenological theory, he works with camouflage, printmaking, collage, and mixed-media processes to examine how viewers encounter visual information and construct meaning from everyday symbols. Over more than 35 years, he has collected and reworked familiar icons such as arrows, targets, and flowers, developing a personal visual language that is continuously layered, deconstructed, and reassembled. These recurring motifs disrupt visual order, preventing a single fixed reading and encouraging shifting interpretations shaped by each viewer’s memory, bias, and perception.
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Richard McCoy
Artist Statement
This new series of works explore the doll figure not as a passive childhood object, but as a vessel of memory, projection, and identity. Intimate and quietly unsettling, the dolls inhabit a liminal space between object and surrogate: constructed and coded, yet charged with emotional residue. The works embrace stillness as a form of resistance. Suspended in digital pause, each doll invites reflection caught in a restless, image-saturated world. They have an awkward connection to our past selves, quiet rehearsals through which we first practice love, authority, empathy, and even cruelty. These figures become bridges between past, present and future offering moments of dark reconnection that allow us to glimpse beyond the surrounding chaos.
Artist Biography
Melbourne-based artist Richard McCoy holds a Master of Art & Design, Fashion & Textiles and a Bachelor of Art & Design (Honours) from Auckland University of Technology, alongside a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Canterbury. His interdisciplinary practice spans fashion, print design, photography, and digital art, informed by an ongoing interest in identity, perception, and contemporary visual culture. McCoy has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally, including solo exhibitions such as Clickbait, Red Gallery, 2025, Repeat, 2024, Fragment, 2023, Splash, 2022 and Icons, 2021 at Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne, as well as Hybrids Inside You, Salt Gallery, New Zealand, 2016. His group exhibition history includes participation in shows at Red Gallery, Sol Gallery, Brunswick Street Gallery, Incinerator Gallery, and international venues such as TATE Britain, 2014, Yongsan International Art Exhibition in Seoul, 2016, and the Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, 2017.
Rita Sciacca
Artist Statement
Rita’s underlying interest is the construct of the feminine, of gender, of the influence of Mythologies and Symbolism. Rita explores the use of textiles, floral motifs, wall paper designs and the use of embroidery as a way to make reference to perceived and felt values that construct perceptions of the feminine. In this body of work Rita has focused on the labour-intensive aspect of stitching, threading and weaving with wire and copper. She has employed the use of copper to connect with Mythologies and Symbolism inherent in her choice of material.
In many cultures copper was seen as a sacred material, deeply associated with love, beauty and feminine energy, linked to Venus/Aphrodite. Copper is deeply associated with feminine energy and its capacity to oxidise and develop a patina over time signifies the beauty of aging and transformation. Copper is a conduit, it connects energy, a bridging between the physical and the spiritual. The use of copper thread is significant, as “golden thread” symbolises an invisible, divine, or conscious continuity that links all aspects of life, of spiritual connection, a force that connects to the universal whole.
Artist Biography
Rita’s career spans over several decades. She is an Alumni of RMIT Fine Arts Painting with Post Graduate Studies in Sculpture. Rita has worked as an Art Teacher at Secondary School level and maintained a consistent Art Practice, exhibiting both in solo and group exhibitions.
Rita does not define her work through just one medium or style. She is inspired by process, materials, and techniques, exploring ideas until she has exhausted all possibilities in that body of work. Rita is interested in storytelling and exploring processes and materials to communicate ideas that fascinate and engage her curiosity. In installations, printing, sculpture and drawing she has played with process, technique and materials as a way of conveying and giving voice to these themes.
Robyn Blaikie
Artist Statement
Robyn Blaikie is a painter and printmaker living in Coburg. She is drawn to depicting her observations of life around her, personal impressions of moments in time. Transient moments hinting at a hidden narrative, emerging from the transitory changing effects of light on surfaces within the landscape, on figures, on every-day objects. Her work is an expression of her emotional connection to the natural world, her community and family.
Rather than aiming for strict realism, I create personal impressions—works conveying transient moments in time. The textures and tones I choose are influenced by my connection to place and the feeling it evokes. Each work is both an observation and an emotional response—a reflection of life around me and my experiences within it.
Artist Biography
Robyn Blaikie is a Melbourne-based artist and educator with a multidisciplinary background spanning painting, printmaking, and arts education. She completed a Bachelor of Education, Art and Craft with a major in Painting at the Melbourne College of Advanced Education, 1981–1984 and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History at La Trobe University,1976–1979. Her career in arts education and leadership has included roles at RMIT University, where she worked as Program Manager and teacher within the Indigenous Art Unit and across the School of Art and School of Education, 2006–2021, as well as earlier positions at the Northern Territory Open Education Centre and teaching roles in both the Northern Territory and Victoria. Alongside her academic and teaching practice, Blaikie has maintained an active exhibition history, including her solo exhibition Here, There and Everywhere at Red Gallery in 2025. Her work is regularly featured in group exhibitions across Victoria, including at Australian Galleries, Ladder Art Space, Victorian Artists Society, Oak Hill Gallery, and Counihan Gallery, reflecting a sustained engagement with contemporary print and painting practices within Australian art communities.
Steven Carson
Artist Statement
Steven Carson’s Crush series begins with materials that are usually overlooked: scraps of crumpled paper, glitter-foil and gift-wrap gathered from everyday life. Individually collected and photographed, these fragments are reassembled as digital collages, where torn and cut shapes overlap to become fields of colour and texture. Across these layered images, Carson threads networks of lines, like stitches that pierce and hold flat geometric shapes in place, building an abstract language that moves between the handmade and the screen-made. The works reimagine the modest and disposable as lavish, while keeping the evidence of their origins close to the surface.
In the Crush works, the digital collage is not an endpoint but the source image that is materially reworked through pressure and force. Carson transfers the imagery onto printable vinyl and fixes it to aluminium, then subjects each print to intense physical manipulation, folding, crushing and crumpling until the image becomes a sculptural object. Robust metal meets the malleable skin of the printed vinyl, and the resulting marks, creases and ruptures register as a series of contrary prompts: signs of force, wear and trauma set against the works’ seemingly cheery palettes. This sense of contradiction industrial versus domestic, digital versus tactile, frugal source versus excessive finish, lavish versus traumatic animates the series with a sense of instability and movement. By pushing the print beyond flatness, Carson challenges the notion of the printed image as a passive or purely mechanical reproduction. Each work is resolved through touch and pressure, insisting on the uniqueness of an object tested into three-dimensional form.
Artist Biography
Steven Carson is a visual artist based in Hobart whose interdisciplinary practice spans mixed media installation, sculpture, ceramics, and image-based work. He has exhibited professionally since 1987 and holds a PhD from the University of Tasmania (2016) and a Master of Visual Arts from Queensland College of Art (1997). Carson has also contributed to art education in Australia and abroad, teaching in several university art schools including the University of South Australia and the University of Tasmania, and lecturing at Hunan University of Technology in China in 2018. Early in his career, he worked in exhibition coordination and installation roles with institutions such as the Crafts Council of Queensland, Ipswich Regional Art Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery, and the QUT Art Collection.
His practice has been recognised through awards and residencies including the Whyalla Art Prize (2007), Helpmann Academy Artist in Residence at Sanskriti Kendra in New Delhi (2005), and the Moorilla Prize at the City of Hobart Art Prize (1999). In 2019 he undertook a residency at the Rosamond McCullough Studio, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, supported by a Marie Edwards Travelling Scholarship, leading to solo exhibitions including Vis-à-vis (2020), Unrest (2021), some wear (2023), Maybe its there (2024), and Recent Ceramics (2025). His work is held in major public and private collections including Artbank, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and several regional and state institutions across Australia.
Steven Xiao
Artist Biography
Steven Xiao’s photography is rooted in the belief that a single image can tell a complete and honest story. His practice focuses on capturing the raw, unfiltered emotions of people and the subtle qualities of the environments they inhabit, revealing moments that might otherwise go unnoticed. While each photograph is carefully composed, Xiao remains committed to preserving the spontaneity of life, allowing authenticity and human connection to guide his work. Blending documentary observation with artistic expression, his images seek simplicity, emotional depth, and truth, avoiding unnecessary embellishment in favour of genuine visual storytelling.
With more than a decade of photographic experience, Xiao studied under renowned Taiwanese photography master Juan I-Jong. His work reflects a dedication to observing and documenting the world with sensitivity and clarity, creating photographs that invite viewers to engage with the stories, emotions, and quiet complexities contained within a single frame.
Tracy Potts
Artist Statement
Tracy Potts’ practice is grounded in slow observation, sustained contemplation, and a deep engagement with the sensory richness of her surroundings. Through intricate weavings of thread, shimmering beads, and organic assemblages, she creates works that function as containers of time, holding the residue of attentive looking and reflective making. Inspired by subtle shifts in light, colour, pattern, and form, Potts translates her observations into abstract, organic compositions that evolve through an intuitive and meditative process.
Once upon a time…
one of the deepest connections I have is with my dopamine. Dear god how I love my dopamine and it loves me back with equal ferocity. We are soul mates.
I torture it with resistance until it itchy-scratchys me into submission. Sometimes the tug-of-war lasts for hours or days or weeks… sometimes, years. Together we wrestle between financial logic and nonsensical craving, trying to choose between food and bills and life in general, or things.
Food is ok, kinda essential…but not as exciting as things. Inanimate objects - I’ve always had a special place in my heart for things that contain their own unique own wabi sabi style. Other than collecting interesting sticks or grand adventures to garden centres…oh but before I continue, you’d be super impressed by my piles of sticks - if you love sticks. I freakin’ love sticks.
Not all of them, just the perfect ones. V e r y s a t i s f y i n g.
Righty-oh, back on track.
So two ways I quiet my dopamine are
1. Cardboard. As with sticks, not all cardboard makes the grade, there must be the holy trinity of excellence for them to be collected. Trips to the outside world are only exciting because there may be excellent cardboard awaiting me.
2. Opp Shops. They are my preferred way of connecting with the world. Opp Shops are a drug for me. Big drug. Mainline the dopamine. Opp Shops are full of treasures - fabrics threads wools beads haberdashery buttons necklaces bangles paper bowls ohmysubduedsatisfieddopamine.
Once those two components are satisfied I just jolly well go home, reconnect with the most worthy of recipients aka my cats Dolly and Angela, then return to my studio aka “The Stitchery”. Where I stay for hours every day, inventing things and making them.
The End
Vanessa Yige Chen
Artist Statement
Wombs is a series of oil paintings on shaped wood panels that explores femininity, pregnancy, and otherness through hybrid half-human, half-animal infant forms. Each work is painted on a womb-like panel, allowing the structure itself to function as both image and vessel. Suspended within these intimate spaces, the figures appear tender yet strange, vulnerable yet unknowable.
The series reflects on the maternal body as a site of care, labour, and ethical tension, particularly in relation to surrogacy and the ways pregnancy can be externalised or reduced to a function. Here, the infant becomes a figure of radical otherness: at once inside the body and separate from it, familiar yet irreducibly foreign. Animal elements further complicate this boundary, unsettling distinctions between human and nonhuman life. Through textured surfaces and organic forms, Wombs invites reflection on intimacy, embodiment, and the unstable relations that shape subjectivity.
Artist Biography
Vanessa Chen is an emerging contemporary artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her practice is informed by a multicultural perspective and an ongoing investigation into the intersections of gender, memory, and identity. Working between abstraction and figuration, she reimagines the female body as a site of agency, intimacy, and transformation. Her paintings consider how relinquishing interpretive control can open works into spaces of shared meaning, where symbolic materials invite reflection and the viewer becomes an active participant in the construction of interpretation. Through this approach, Chen engages with ideas of authorship, audience agency, and the emotional dimensions of looking.
Chen has exhibited in group exhibitions including Self, RMIT, 2024, Small Works Art Prize Exhibition, Brunswick Street Gallery, 2025, Passage: A Journey of Life, Sol Gallery, 2025, A4 Art Show, RMIT Site Eight Gallery, 2025, Held Briefly, Platform Presents, 2025 and Small Art Things, Wu Art Gallery, 2025–2026.
Vittoria Cugno
Artist Statement
Vittoria Cugno specialises in figurative and representational oil paintings. Her snapshot based paintings depict fleeting, candid and everyday interactions of human connection, expressing a sense of momentariness. Vittoria uses vivid colours and experimental painting techniques to express emotion and the sensations experienced in the captured moment, finding reverence for these brief moments amidst the chaotic noise of our capitalist world.
Artist Biography
Vittoria Cugno is an emerging Italian-Australian artist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. In 2024, she completed a Bachelor of Art (Fine Art) (Honours) Degree at RMIT University, and has since appeared in many art prizes and group shows. Vittoria's creative practice involves taking snapshots of fleeting, candid and everyday interactions of leisure and human connection, and transforming them into figurative and representational oil paintings. Her creative work uses heightened colours and experimental mark making techniques to convey affect and the sensations felt in the captured moment, communicating that these minor moments deserve space and reverence amidst the chaotic noise of our capitalist context. Vittoria's core source of inspiration for her creative practice is her belief that our futures are fickle, and that the way we spend our time and lives is precious. Politically, she rejects the idea that we live to work, or that only moments of productivity should be valued. Vittoria hopes that her paintings will facilitate a shift in the viewer’s perception towards an awareness and appreciation of time, rest and the everyday.
Digital Print on Hahnemühle Archival Rag
48 x 33 x 2 cm