Our Issue 13 Launch included an art exhibition at VENTspace, curated by the incomparable Sophie Delaney.
CAIT CRUMPET is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, painting and printmaking. Her work is intimate and self-reflective, using the artistic process to explore the human condition and our emotionally turbulent inner worlds. Themes of love, grief, isolation and identity are often present in her work. With a focus on melancholic colour palettes and stark, personal portrayals of the human body, Crumpet works to shed light on universal and poignant experiences of the self.
CAITY WEBSTER is a visual artist based in Meanjin (Brisbane). Her practice focuses on traditional methods such as graphite drawings, and occasionally works with digital mediums. She explores the intricacies of the human experience, such as identity, mental health and philosophy in her work. She chooses to convey these themes through portraits, as her interest lies in visualizing concepts through the human expression.
Instagram: @caity_arts
Website: https://caitywebster.wixsite.com/mysite
CONNOR ANDREE-EVARTS is a digital based visual artist. His practice is concerning the internet, interfacing and digital identity. By combining digital and physical elements he investigates the individual, societal and emotional effects of the technological superstructure. His experimental process includes the marring of organic objects, reducing natural elements to distorted replications of
themselves. Post-Internet aesthetics are employed by Connor to assess the underlying collective obsession and confusion with our digital counterpart.
DEAN ANSELL is a multidisciplinary artist of Melanesian (Rigorabana, Balawaia, Papua New Guinea), Maltese, and European descent living and practicing in Meanjin. His practice is a material-oriented investigation into concepts of time, place, memory, and transformation; using the body, the earth, and its atmosphere at different points in the works’ creation. Spanning installation, performance, sound, sculpture, and two-dimensional work, Ansell stages natural processes in intimate and poetic site-specific mediations. These creative engagements with his body, the material, and the environment have another function. They are interventions that are physically engaged with to connect to Ansell’s cultural heritage and motherland. By recontextualising Melanesian practices, lores, customs, and language, the artist is attempting to creatively mend the gap between himself and his culture.
DORIS LIGON is a young Meanjin artist born in the Philippines, attending QUT (Queensland University of Technology) studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts Visual Arts. Having relocated to Australia, the artist draws on her broad opportune experiences to produce works that range across a number of disciplines. Currently, focusing on photography, text, and digitally manipulated assemblages of images, she aims to merge ‘high art’ with design, ultimately exploring the multiplicity of layers behind cultural themes. Doris is interested in the future outcomes of her art practice and exploring more diversified, experiential works.
ELIZA ARCHER, She/They. self taught artist, model and designer. currently practicing at Ventspace as an artist resident. Eliza is a multi disciplined artist. specializing in acrylic painting, sterling silver jewellery, cyanotype print making, screen printing, clothing design and constructing wearable art pieces.
EMMA BRUCE is an Australian emerging artist from the Yugambeh region of south east Queensland, her artist practice focuses on the emotional connection to land through the use of archival and memory based artworks. Through the use of painting, photography collage and installation, Bruce instills a sense of connection to the natural world through the use of mixed materials. Due to her participation in the surfing and art community on the Gold Coast she often depicts the coastal environment in a positive light, preserving her experiences in these environments through a variety of contemporary styles hoping to share her love for the natural world through visual art. Her work hopes to discuss the importance of preserving the natural environments she dwells in by reminding the viewer of its beauty and significance to both Australian culture and native fauna and flora.
GRETEL CHAPMAN is an emerging artist based in Meanjin/Brisbane, currently working on completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) at QUT. Mainly working with oil paint along with additional mediums such as wax and clay, she examines many themes in her works such as the doppelganger, dreams, anxiety and trauma.
Though it is always shifting, her work is always an investigation of her subconscious and through this practice she invites the viewers of her work to view her inner world, possibly finding comfort within her vulnerability.
Find more at @gretelchapman.art on Instagram
HAMISH WILSON hails from the Northern Rivers and now resides in Meanjin/Brisbane. His works are primarily figurative oil paintings that feature gestural brushstrokes and in some instances short phrases of text. The aim for his works is to be easily accessible and explore themes of introspection, loneliness, masculinity and relationships.
HOLLY NASH’s current practice draws influence from surrealism and the repressed unconscious in relation to the feminine. Nash critically examines the representation of women in modern surrealist art and investigates the concept of the muse in relation to her own position as a contemporary female artist. Her artworks frequently involve a process of layering media to create gestural and energetic abstracted landscapes.
ISABELLA WRIGHT’s practice focuses on conceptual concerns of presence and indexical trace that maintain bodily aspects. Her work manifests human remanence, transformation, and liminality physically and spiritually through photographic series and sculptural forms. Wright investigates different ways to capture light as a material and uses the body as a framework for understanding and exploring the liminal.
ISABELLE HEATON’s evocative paintings reference the female nude and the self, exploring abject feminism and the mortal fragility of the body. Her visceral painting technique evokes this bodily intent, with red paint splatters denoting bloody violence. The canvas itself becomes a body undergoing trauma. Heaton cofounded art collective Your Pals to establish a friendly community platforming emerging artists.
J S Marr is a Chilean born & Brisbane raised creative. Finding herself at the intersection of film, photography & writing, she considers people to be amongst some of the most fascinating creatures in this world. She is reclaiming her Latin roots, always finding ways to show the crossroads of her Spanish (Chilean)/English (Australian) worlds in her works.
She enjoys spur-of-the moment walkabouts & small talk with unexpecting strangers. You can find some of her works, stills & past projects on Instagram @jo_sannmarr.
JOSEPHINE NGUYEN is an Australian-Vietnamese artist based in Brisbane who creates digital illustrations, compositions, and 3D models. Her work centres around themes of conservation, ikigai, and bright colours. She finds beauty in the ordinary and clicking around on her laptop to capture the discovery.
KACY TOOMBS is a second year student studying Creative Writing and Visual Arts. She is an avid procrastinator, and you can often find her doodling in the margins of her books during lectures. She is currently trying to find her own style, but is having fun figuring out what that could be.
KELSEY WOODS is an emerging Meanjin based mixed media artist whose current body of work explores themes such as grief, loss, addiction and trauma through a catalogue of digital media, poetry, painting and sculpture.
As an artist, she tries to explore and create concepts that have meanings beyond the aesthetics that appear on the surface and create a reaction from her audience. Recently, this has been in exploring her past experiences with pain, death and grief, and particularly how trauma manifests over time, moulding our perceptions on the world around us.
LOUELLA MICHAEL uses humour and a radical outlook on joy and silliness to investigate her own personal identity and criticise normative patriarchal and capitalist assumptions. Through bright colours, textiles and sloppy-craft, Louella manipulates conventions of installation, sculpture, photography, and video art. In recent works, she investigates power and cuteness in line with her experiences as a woman. Highlighting the parallel between associations and assumptions of weakness and vulnerability in the cute, and similar patriarchal assumptions, Louella uses the cute to critique experiences of, and responses to expressions of feminine anger, assertiveness and skill.
MIKAELA SWAN (or Miktangle) uses inspiration from philosophical teachings, zentangles and nature to create intricate and dreamlike creatures within twisted spaces to invite viewers to explore and appreciate the intelligence of mysterious inner worlds. Her way of thinking is to create art that brings the viewer into her artistic world and has them embody and understand their emotions and discover themselves but to improve and prove a symbiotic relationship between humans and the natural world.
RUBY STEVENS’ practice conceptually examines emotional labour and care, and questions constructions of value, both socially and within art. She regularly uses found, domestic materials and through an interactive and playful, often ironic approach, she considers queer, gendered and neurodiverse stereotypes and concerns. Her focus is polarised by the creation of space for comfort and care, and a conscious examination of the historic expectation for women’s bodies to provide this.
SAMANTHA HOPE’s practice takes form in many different mediums including; film photography, 2D works, sculptures, installations and ceramics. With a conceptual focus at the centre of her practice – the creation of her pieces act as a catharsis to explore grief, loss and a sense of self. There is evidently an infatuation with monochrome palettes throughout her many series’ of photographs. Her photography takes a strong compositional focus on light and shadows, this can also be seen in her other mediums.
SOPHIE DELANEY’s visual art practice explores fetishism, desire and womanhood through an intersectional feminist lens; primarily focussing on mediated performance art. Her work invites the audience to consider how women, throughout history, have been portrayed in art and culture. Delaney confronts the patriarchal regime through self-objectification yet she is protected by the screen; there is no direct ‘male gaze’, she is simply a technologically rendered body that you can either investigate or ignore.
Delaney is also a practicing curator who founded Emergence Collective in 2021 and is very excited for this opportunity to curate over 20 artists for the ScratchThat launch!