Artists

Augusta Vinall Richardson works with sheet and cast metals in the production of abstract composite sculpture. Each modular element is created individually and has its own integrity and idiosyncratic form but becomes part of a larger, typically box-like assemblage. Her works occupy an aesthetic space adjacent to serious modernist sculpture but retaining a generosity of the handmade.

Her objects – suspended, free-standing and wall-based, in stainless steel, aluminium and bronze – utilise the materials and machinery of industry in their making though convey an experience of making and perception that is substantially more tender.

Augusta Vinall Richardson is represented by The Commercial, Gadigal/Sydney

Caleb Shea’s idiosyncratic take on formalism situates him as a key figure in Australia’s ‘neo-modernist’ movement. Form, colour and phenomenology are central to Shea’s practice, where transcendental geometric abstraction and blunt simplicity meet in a revision of the late-modernist sculptural tradition. Known for his distinctive visual language, Shea’s contemporary approach offers an animated, sophisticated and playful flare to the discourse.  

The single line form is a recurring motif that Shea continues to revisit in playful experimentations that contribute to conversations about sculpture as ‘drawing in space’. A sustained investigation into a select vocabulary of forms has defined Shea’s output in recent years, with current works challenging this language in relationship to human proportions, introducing a new monumentality in scale.

Caleb Shea is represented by LON Gallery, Naarm/Melbourne.

Cate Consandine works across a wide range of formal and discursive mediums including sculpture and spatial practice, film and performance. She works with the body as material for her practice and is particularly interested in the physical expression of psychological states, the relationships between bodies and space, and their contingent emotional registers. Her work seeks to locate experience between stillness and movement, or the place where desire is posited – the edge of movement – and particularly fixes on the liminal body; a body on edge in the landscape.

Cate Consandine is represented by Sarah Scout Presents, Naarm/Melbourne.

Catherine Bell is a multi-disciplinary artist and academic. Her practice-led research explores the role of the artist in the archive and healthcare setting, art on the margins, socially-engaged and relational approaches to art making, feminist and care ethics in collaborative practice, and challenging taboos surrounding death and dying. Bell’s artworks expose personal narratives by up-cycling excess or waste materials to create unique, yet familiar, objects of reverence and contemplation.

Bell uses Florist Oasis foam as a sculptural medium to create Neoclassical monuments, fountains, gravestones, funerary urns and bouquets of flowers to reinforce contrasting themes of decay and preservation, fragility and resilience, ephemerality and permanence. These artistic themes underpin her broader interest in how we memorialise the dead and questions public memorials and the role of artists to think creatively about how we would like to make histories more inclusive.

Catherine Bell is represented by Sutton Gallery, Naarm/Melbourne

Working within painting, drawing and sculpture, Darcey Bella Arnold’s practice is informed by experience and research. Beginning with the personal as a departure point, her work drifts between language, art history and pedagogical theses.

Darcey Bella Arnold is represented by ReadingRoom, Naarm/Melbourne.

Dan Moynihan is a tactile practitioner with an ingrained appreciation for common materials. Working principally in sculpture and spatial installation, his works often begin with a one-liner which expands into witty social critique. Moynihan’s works employ puns and word play, pop cultural cues, cinematic and art historical references, and imagery of the everyday. He is known to construct obsessively detailed reflections of reality that converge the familiar and the uncanny, instilling each scenario with a surreal hyperrealism.

Dan Moynihan is represented by Tolarno Galleries, Naarm/Melbourne.

Working primarily in sculpture, Hugo Blomley’s practice considers the imposition of synthetic systems on existing flows of energy and meaning. His work is constructed to highlight what happens between the two ‘ends’ of a system: the transformation that occurs between input and output and the abstraction it generates. Blomley’s sculptures replicate and critically assess the reduction of complex systems into simplified forms. Within this, the predicament of close examination, contemplation, and the misnomer of understanding and usefulness emerges.

Julia Gorman has been making vibrant sculptures, abstract paintings and wall drawings since the late 1990s. She is renowned for her use of colour and fluidity of line, with a sense of oscillation between two- and three-dimensionality. With a sense of lightness and spontaneity, Gorman's work is rich in colour and detail, with complex, layered elements. She includes numerous references to art history and pop culture in her work, which can be as ephemeral in material as balloons and cardboard, or as permanent as welded steel.

Kathy Temin came to prominence in the 1990s with works that hover between painting and sculpture, art and craft, abstraction and figuration. Her signature choice of medium – synthetic fur – challenges the conventions of both taste and art, and sub­verts the mon­u­men­tal scale of her sculp­tures, to draw allu­sions to soft­ness, child­hood and play. Temin’s sculptures become memorial sites for loss and remembrance for both the personal and the collective. The sensory nature of her tactile practice provides a comforting place for respite and reflection within this narrative.

Kathy Temin is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Naarm/Melbourne, and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Gadigal/Sydney.

Louise Paramor’s playful and exuberant works imbue materials found in our everyday lives with new value. She repurposes found objects and industrial materials such as plastic into three-dimensional forms that invite the viewer to contemplate the built environment and mass consumer society.

Paramor explores the fundamental principles of modernism including form, colour and scale, with the use of loud saccharine colour defining her aesthetic. She is well known for her monumental public art commissions, which combine these formal concerns with a pop-inspired sensibility.

Narelle Desmond’s installation practice explores the relationship between the man-made objects that surround us and the hidden agency they hold. Her work delves into the ways humans create, examining the power embedded in everyday things. With an interest in how objects shape, and can be shaped, Desmond’s work considers social, historical, political or material dimensions. Influenced by the design process as a lens for understanding the world, her installations reveal the complex entanglements between human intention, and the unseen dynamics of power that reside within objects.

Narelle Desmond is represented by The Renshaws, Meanjin/Brisbane.

Nathan Beard is a multidisciplinary artist who draws from his Australian-Thai heritage to unpack the porous nature of culture and memory. Beard playfully interrogates ideas of authenticity and the complex influences of colonial archives, pop culture, and collective memory in forming western characterisations of ‘Thainess’.

His work often pokes fun at pre-existing notions of taste and value, interweaving elements that may be considered ‘exotic’ or kitsch from one perspective, and mundane and every-day from another. By untangling his nuanced relationship to a culture which he is simultaneously connected to and distanced from, Beard’s work offers a unique and personal articulation of the slippery range of influences that shape diasporic identity.

Nathan Beard is represented by FUTURES, Naarm/Melbourne, and sweet pea, Borloo/Perth

Noriko Nakamura is a Japanese-born artist who uses stone carving to make sculptures and installations that draw on ideas of Japanese Shinto animism and ritualistic practices. Using traditional hand-carving techniques, Nakamura transforms limestone from an inanimate and heavy material into playful forms suggestive of movement and lightness. She is interested in this transformative process and how the manipulation of materials is used to imbue a material or object with significance, changing its meaning and our relationship to it. Her recent work explores shifts in the subjectivity of the maternal body and suggests the womb as fullness of complexity.

Rob McLeish is known for his idiosyncratic works which often combine rigorous formalism with discordant gestures. His practice spans sculpture, installation, printmaking and drawing. With exceptional skills as a technical producer, McLeish engages in highly complex material experimentation across a wide range of mediums. Central to his practice is an engagement with reoccurring themes of utility, excess, desire, decay, corporeality and iconoclasm.

Rob McLeish is represented by Neon Parc, Naarm/Melbourne

Ronnie van Hout is a multimedia artist whose aesthetic reflects an ongoing engagement with the uncanny. Having honed a distinctive style referred to as ‘existential absurdism’, van Hout’s sculptural installations, videos and text works evoke constructed worlds that are simultaneously humorous, unsettling, and nostalgic.

The artist often treats their own body as subject and object, using moulds and resin to create various doppelgangers that play with ideas of the self, while avoiding self-portraiture or narcissism. Many of van Hout’s works explore a fascination with the figure of the ‘outsider’, interrogating the psychology of uneven power relationships while setting up situations in which the audience’s gaze is returned.

Ronnie van Hout is represented by STATION, Naarm/Melbourne and Darren Knight Gallery, Gadigal/Sydney.

Sean Meilak’s practice spans sculpture, installation, painting, drawing and art in the public realm. He is interested in the relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit. Meilak’s work layers personal and collective histories, referencing a wide range of aesthetic movements from classical architecture to modernist design. Drawing from domestic, public and constructed environments, he builds a language of abstract and architectural forms, creating connections across time and space to create new narratives and intersections that also allow viewers to project their own experiences when encountered.

Sean Meilak is represented by Niagara Galleries, Naarm/Melbourne.

Embracing labour-intensive techniques, Steven Bellosguardo creates hybrid biomorphic forms and constructed assemblages that explore themes such as labour, counterculture, and the Anthropocene. By intertwining historical narratives with personal reflections, Bellosguardo's work examines the complexity of shared subjective experiences.

Central to his studio practice is an awareness of the body, failure and time. With a background in construction and stonemasonry, Bellosguardo has adopted various processes and techniques, including forming, sculpting, casting and assemblage, with materials as diverse as metal, plaster, paint bronze, aluminium and silicone.

Terry Williams’ career reflects a diverse exploration of materials and techniques. He is best known for his soft sculpture, which is defined by a deft and obsessive interpretation of figures, animals and objects – both real and imagined. His tactile, pillow-like works, constructed with found materials, feature exaggerated, conspicuous stitching and are intensely physical and bulging in their form. Williams does not consciously work within common traditions of art but instead adopts an immersive and idiosyncratic process, ruminating on and storing ideas until they manifest into complex and multi-faceted creations.

Terry Williams is an Arts Project Australia studio artist.

Yhonnie Scarce was born in Woomera, South Australia, and belongs to the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples. Her interdisciplinary practice works to address historical events and government policies that disrupted Aboriginal life, and the ongoing effects of colonisation on Aboriginal people. Hand-blown objects that evoke the human form or reference bush foods such as yams, bush plums, and bananas often appear in her work, attesting to the abundant and sustaining nature of the land, as well as to the significance of Indigenous ecological knowledge and connection to Country. Family history is central to Scarce’s work, drawing on the strength of her ancestors, she offers herself as a conduit, sharing their significant stories from the past.

Yhonnie Scarce is represented by THIS IS NO FANTASY, Naarm/Melbourne.