2006 COMMISSION 20 YEARS LATER: MICHAEL PAREKŌWHAI’S COSMO MCMURTRY RETURNS

Picture this: it’s 2006 and you’re in the Royal Exhibition Building, looking up at a looming, inflatable bunny. Two decades ago, a gigantic inflatable bunny took pride of place in the middle of Melbourne Art Fair. This looming, adorable piece was created by acclaimed New Zealand sculptor Michael Parekōwhai, who was commissioned by us at the Melbourne Art Foundation and National Gallery of Victoria to shape a piece for the 2006 Fair. Now, 20 years after that initial showing, Cosmo McMurtry has made a return. We’ve brought him out of storage for another moment of glory. 

“Wow. 20 years. It seems like yesterday. It’s good work. It endures and has a quality that maintains and holds currency….Cosmo reminds me of the friendly Disney or mischievous Beatrix Potter creations. But our eight-metre wee bunny raises its own questions around a particular time in our collective past, the fallout of colonisation and the reframing of national symbols as trash or treasure … or both.”
-Michael Parekōwhai on the return of Cosmo.

Michael Parekōwhai’s Cosmo McMurtry is caught in the headlights or perhaps he’s looking down the barrel of a shotgun. Either way, he’s running scared. He seems to be the underdog, but don’t be fooled by his cute exterior.

Rabbits are perennially popular as cartoon characters (Bugs, Roger, Bunnikins etc.) but they are also a highly problematic presence in rural Australia and New Zealand where escalating populations have made them a noxious pest. They’re a monumental problem for local fauna and flora. The title of this sculpture is based upon New Zealand actor Jim Cosmo, best known for his portrayal of the archetypal ‘man of the land’. Cosmo McMurtry stands for the individual and the masses, hero and villain, hunter and hunted. It’s hard to know whether he’s a good guy or not.

Cosmo McMurtry was funded by the Melbourne Art Foundation and former Board members, Christopher Hodges, Leo Christie OAM, Richard Frolich, Jan Minchin, Martin Beaver and Roslyn Oxley, the Myer Foundation, the National Gallery of Victoria and Michael Lett.

Established in 2006, the Melbourne Art Foundation Commission program provides living artists with an opportunity to realise a large-scale work for unveiling at Melbourne Art Fair, which is later gifted to a prominent institution. 

Previous partners in the program have included Govett Brester Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre, AGWA, ACMI, HOTA Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, NGV, QAGOMA, the University of Queensland Art Museum, MCA, Art Gallery of South Australia, National Gallery of Australia; and artists Dawn Ng, Yona Lee, Julie Rrap, Kaylene Whiskey, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Ronnie van Hout, Michael Parekōwhai, David Griggs, Peter Hennessey, Jon Campbell, Ian Burns, and Mikala Dwyer.

2026 Richard Parker Award Announced

READ | Fiona Hall on Honey Bee Cooperation, Using Repurposed Materials and Barbarians at the Gate

Fiona Hall is an established Australian artist who works across a variety of media, often employing forms of museological display in her work. Major surveys of Hall’s work have been held by public institutions across Australia and New Zealand, and she has exhibited extensively internationally. Hall represented Australia at the 2015 Venice Biennale with her installation Wrong Way Time.

Fiona Hall’s major series, Barbarians at the Gate (2010) arrives as part of Melbourne Art Fair’s BEYOND sector through a smaller curation of works that explore the political interface between nature and culture, and the  complex relationships between ecology and economy.

This work questions humanity’s impact on the planet and contemplate the precarious future of its species.

Fair Director Melissa Loughnan and the artist caught up to chat about her BEYOND presentation at Melbourne Art Fair. Fiona is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney). 

Barbarians at the Gate, an installation of beehives painted in the camouflage of various nations’ military, was first conceived for the Biennale of Sydney in 2010 and housed in Sydney’s botanical gardens. How do you think the series will translate in an art fair context?

I suspect the installation will work equally well in an interior location. Conceived of in 2010, it was a response to the 2nd Gulf War in Iraq, a prolonged conflict which drew in several nations, including Australia. Sadly, more than fifteen years later the region remains a hugely conflicted and contested place. It’s very hard to envision any resolution or lasting peace.

Fiona Hall, Barbarians At The Gate, 2010. Photo by David Suyasa. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

Symbols of imperial power adorn the tops of these beehives – the Brandenburg Gate, the Arc de Triomphe, Westminster, the Pentagon, the Parthenon, the Pantheon, etc. – which once housed the threatened native Sugarbag bee species. What are you commenting on through this juxtaposition?

The work comprises beehives, painted in the military camouflage patterns of nations who participated in the conflict; the hives are also plinths for architectural structures emblematic of each country. The use of beehives is an important conceptual  element of the installation. Honey bee colonies have long been regarded as exemplars of harmony and social cohesion; their ability to act  cooperatively (which is a genetically programmed survival strategy) Is seemingly unattainable for us.

Fiona Hall, Barbarians At The Gate, 2010. Photo by David Suyasa. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

Can you expand on the physical process of creating these works? How does your engagement with organic materials shape the conceptual and sensory experience of your installations?

Quite often my work utilises repurposed materials, which become an integral part of the work’s conceptual intent. We live in a world full of stuff: the connections I attempt to make between an idea and its materiality somehow arise from a perceived schism between our material and natural worlds and a growing sense of political and environmental foreboding. 

Fiona Hall, Barbarians At The Gate, 2010. Photo by David Suyasa. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

Thinking about your practice more broadly: can you elaborate on the significance of museological display methods, such as the emulation of taxidermy and use of vitrines and architectural models, within your practice?

I’ve long been fascinated by the display of museum collections, most particularly the use of cabinets to showcase specimens and artifacts, accumulated fragments from from our fragmented world; each one classified and recontextualised and secure behind glass – and as removed from its previous existence as an insect trapped in amber. Museums are wunderkammers which entice us to explore and consider the wonder and power and ingenuity and mystery of the world beyond, even while we are steadily, relentlessly, eroding and  erasing it.

Fiona Hall, Barbarians At The Gate, 2010. Photo by David Suyasa. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

The ideas that we’ve been discussing culminate in your 2015 Venice Biennale presentation, Wrong Way Time, which explored three intersecting concerns: global politics, world finances and the environment. How did The Barbarians at the Gate inform this body?

The Barbarians at the Gate has been the forerunner to subsequent works and conceptual directions, and  arose from previous projects. I’ve learned over time that, although I couldn’t say where whatever 

 I’m working on at any given moment might lead – or, if it might not lead anywhere at all – each project with hindsight seems be a kind of signpost to worsk of the future. 

 

Fiona Hall, Barbarians At The Gate, 2010. Photo by David Suyasa. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

Melbourne Art Fair returns 19 – 22 February 2026. 
Click here to secure tickets.

READ | How Gene A’Hern Finds Harmony in his Work

Gene A’Hern’s works are vivid, textural, and resonate with dynamic movement. His practice resonates strongly with the role of spirituality in art, and the power of quiet, process-driven work

A man of few words, he lets the works do most of the talking. At Melbourne Art Fair, Cassandra Bird presents a solo exhibition of work by A’Hern. This new body of work, created specifically for the Fair, will mark a significant evolution in A’hern’s practice, expanding his distinctive visual language through layered mark-making, symbolic abstraction, and a meditative use of colour and space. Find them at Melbourne Art Fair, Booth B3.

What does drawing allow you to access that other processes don’t?

Drawing allows an immediacy in communicating and problem solving. I am also able to flow through impulse and intuition more easily. 

Natural elements consistently appear in your work. Paired with texture, they oscillate between abstraction and clear representation. Are these motifs instinctively brought to the work? How does tactility function in conveying place, emotion, or time?

I incorporate mountain peaks, rain, sky and bushland throughout my work instinctively and from memory. Nature is huge part of my every day life as well as my experience growing up. I am constantly observing and processing the natural environment around me.

I find that texture can amplify a tension and release within a painting, often contributing to harmony which I have previously mentioned is a key component of a finished piece for me.

There’s a strong sense of dynamic movement in your work. How conscious are you of spatial dynamics while working, and how much emerges intuitively?

I am and I’m not at the same time. I am mostly an intuitive painter but sometimes I have more of plan. It is most natural for me to paint with dynamic movement because the physicality and rhythm of painting is the ‘flow state’ for me, and it tends to manifest on the canvas in those spatial dynamics. 

Gene A’Hern in studio. Courtesy the artist and Cassandra Bird Gallery.

You’ve previously spoken about your love for hiking. What are your favourite spots? 

One of my favourite spots is Cradle mountain in Tasmania, but I am lucky to live in the Blue Mountains where there are countless beautiful hikes nearby. 

Do you have any specific rituals or routines to get you in the right headspace for working?

Not really, I just have a coffee.

Are there any mistakes you have made while working that end up adding to a piece in a way you didn’t expect?

There are constantly shifts in colour, tones and form as I paint. ‘Mistakes’ often lead to new discovery, and I have learnt to accept them as being a genuine part of the process.

Melbourne Art Fair returns 19 – 22 February 2026. 
Click here to secure tickets.

What To Eat and Drink at Melbourne Art Fair 2026

Art may be the headline, but the drinks menu is doing its own quiet performance in 2026. 

This year, Melbourne Art Fair leans fully into classic glamour. Think Beverly Hills Polo Lounge energy translated for the Southbank set: polished, confident, unapologetically chic. No gimmicks. No edible smoke. Just very good food and very serious drinks.

HOW TO DRINK CHAMPAGNE, PROPERLY

At the centre of it all: Bollinger (Lady Kath’s  fizz of choice). 

Our official Champagne Partner arrives with Grande (and friends),  poured cold, crisp and exactly as it should be. Whether you begin at the VIP Preview or find yourself orbiting the Champagne Bar, designed in collaboration with MAF ambassador Brahman Perera later in the evening, Bollinger is the through-line of the Fair.

It’s decadent, and it pairs exceptionally well with red dots.

THE MARTINI MOMENT

Melbourne Gin Company claims their territory with a custom-designed Martini Bar, pouring bespoke Melbourne Art Fair Martinis made exclusively for the occasion.

At the core: small-batch, artisan gin from MGC. Distilled with obsessive precision, built on a clean botanical profile that holds its line under ice and doesn’t need to hide behind a garnish.

Olive or twist. Your call. Because nothing pairs with contemporary art quite like clarity — and a martini made with intent.

WINES WITH A BACKBONE

Our official wine partner, Ministry of Clouds, returns for its third year.

Bernice and Julian’s wines are gastronomic in spirit,  precise, and expressive. Elegant whites that carry you through the afternoon and serious reds that hold their own against robust conversation.

These are wines that understand context. Find them at the Ministry of Clouds Wine Bar and Bistro, furnished by Dann Event Hire. 

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD BREWERY BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER OVER A PINT

For anyone who might prefer a beer over a flute, Stomping Ground has you covered. 

They hold the staunch belief that beer should be for all walks and suit all tastes, from laid-back drinkers to the adventurous.

THE MENU: ELEVATED CLASSICS

For 2026, the dining at Melbourne Art Fair has been made to feel as considered as the art around it, and considerably easier to digest.

The brief itself was loosely informed by a recent lunch at the Beverly Hils Polo Lounge where Andy ordered a club sandwich of such heroic proportions he was obliged to transport half of it back to the hotel in a hat box, which, as it turns out, is an excellent way to carry a sandwich.

That, essentially, is the spirit here. Prepared by the culinary team at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, the menu draws on seasonal Victorian produce and local suppliers, grounding the offering in place while keeping the tone relaxed.

The menu nods to deli counter comfort and café indulgence: a refined Reuben, fried ravioli with warrigal green pesto, cannoli filled with stracciatella and lifted with Kakadu plum, and fries dusted with pepperberry that demand immediate attention. Even the desserts carry a certain ceremony, with citrus-bright yuzu tarts arriving like small, edible sculptures.

In 2026, we strongly encourage you to stay for lunch at the expanded Ministry of Clouds Wine Bar and Bistro— if only to avoid making important financial decisions on an empty stomach.

Sebastian Goldspink’s Top Picks at MAF 2026

For curator and MAF ambassador, Sebastian Goldspink, Melbourne Art Fair is a chance to reconnect with friends, colleagues and the wider arts community from across the continent and beyond. It’s a snapshot of contemporary practice and the new and exciting work shaping the field today. 

You can also discover your favourite artists with him at the Fair through his Young Galleries and Practical Pathways tours, designed to spotlight emerging voices and offer behind-the-scenes insight. 

We asked him to share a few of his highlights ahead of the Fair next week. 

 

ALEX SETON

SULLIVAN & STRUMPF
BOOTH F5

I’m especially excited to see Alex Seton’s new work with Sullivan & Strumpf. Created using Portuguese marble sourced during his recent residency, these works continue Seton’s remarkable command of material and form. Few artists handle stone with such precision and sensitivity. A true master of the medium.

Alex Setton, The Tenderness Series, 2025. Photography By Camilla Santitni

MARK WHALEN

1301SW/STARKWHITE
BOOTH A2

1301SW is showcasing so many great artists at the Fair this year. I’m really looking forward to seeing Mark Whalen’s incredible sculptures juxtaposed with paintings by Simone Griffin, Anselm Reyle and more. Mark is an Australian based in Los Angeles who’s taking on the world.

Mark Whalen, Night lights, 2025. Oil on aluminium, bronze, copper, and glass. 50.80 x 38.10 x 30.50 cm. Courtesy of the artist and 1301SW/STARKWHITE

JARRA KARALINAR STEEL

GAMMIN THREADS
BOOTH C6

I’m looking forward to Jarra Karalinar Steel’s collaboration with Gammin Threads as part of the Victorian First Peoples presentation. They will be showcasing their iilk collection – Gammin Threads never misses on presence. 

A must-see in the CONVERSATIONS Program, Jack Wilkie-Jans will speak with Jarra on her unique and distinctive multi-disciplinary practice, and the ways Boonwurrung culture, Country and histories inform her work. 

Courtesy Gammin Threads. Photo: Emily Seif.

CÉCILE B. EVANS

CHÂTEAU SHATTO
VIDEO

Château Shatto is a gallery from Los Angeles that I follow closely. It’s great to see international galleries at MAF. I’m really looking forward to seeing Reality or Not, the Belgium/American artist Cécile B. Evans video work, exploring the forces that shape reality. 

Cécile B. Evans, Reality or Not (Still), 2023. HD Video, 34 min and 53 sec.

PALAS
BOOTH B1

PALAS is a gallery that consistently delivers, and this year’s presentation is no exception. Bringing together artists including Marco Fusinato, Nick Collerson and Shaun Gladwell, the booth promises a compelling invitation for conversation. 

Nick Collerson, (left)⁣ Deer Moon, 2025⁣⁣⁣, oil on canvas⁣, 137.2 x 152.5 cm⁣⁣. (right)⁣ Together, 2025⁣, oil on canvas⁣, 71.5 x 91.5 cm⁣. Photo: Josh Raymond. Courtesy of the Artist & PALAS, Sydney

AMES YAVUZ
BOOTH A1

At Ames Yavuz I’m thrilled to see an incredible pairing of Caroline Rothwell and the late-great Rosemary Laing. Laing’s vivid photographs are both incredibly beautiful yet somehow unsettling – depicting the the intrusion of human systems into living environments.

Rosemary Laing, Groundspeed (Rose Petal) #17, 2001, Type C photograph.

STATION
BOOTH H8

Tom Polo’s presentation with Station is a highlight for me. His paintings are unmistakable. They are gestural, luminous, and full of energy. To see his work alongside legend Gareth Sansom and Marian Tubbs makes for a particularly dynamic encounter.

Tom Polo, doubt and departure (blue bodies), acrylic and oil stick on canvas 182 x 138 cm.

Sebastian Goldspink is an independent curator based in Sydney, renowned for his commitment to fostering emerging artistic talent. In 2011, he founded ALASKA Projects—a dynamic exhibition space dedicated to supporting early-career artists, curators, and writers through a diverse program of local, national, and international projects. 

Goldspink has held key professional roles with leading institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Month Sydney, and the National Art School. He also served as Director of regional galleries for both Woollahra and Sutherland Shire Councils. 

A proud Burramattagal man, Goldspink is deeply engaged in shaping the future of Australian art. He sits on the board of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney and Western Sydney Creative at Western Sydney University, championing inclusive and innovative approaches to arts education and practice. 

Melbourne Art Fair, 19 – 22 February 2026 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. 

Tickets on sale now.

Veteran of the Kiln, Vipoo Srivilasa On Creating Works That Radiate Joy

Vipoo Srivilasa has been in the ceramics game for years. Now a veteran of the kiln, the Thai-born Australian artist creates work that radiates joy. 

His major exhibition, re/Joy, is currently touring the country, and is the largest body of work he has ever attempted. He chats with us at Melbourne Art Fair about the ideas behind the exhibition, the patience that ceramics demands, and his new Fortune Teller Deities for Melbourne Art Fair 2026.

Presented by Föenander Galleries, his work will feature alongside fellow artists Lottie Consalvo and Harry McAlpine.  

How did you begin working in ceramics?

My first experience with ceramics was at the College of Fine Arts in Thailand. At the time, I was making fashion accessories such as necklaces and earrings using air-dry clay. The work became very popular, which made me a nice pocket money. That experience led me to choose ceramics as my major subject for both my graduate and master’s degrees. 

I love the touch of clay, it’s very tactile and, I think, quite sexy. I enjoy the transformation of a simple lump of clay into something expressive and full of character. Clay works naturally with my hands; somehow they just seem to know what to do. I’m also drawn to how versatile the material is, and to the excitement of opening a kiln. You never fully know what a piece will look like until it comes out.

Ceramics can be unpredictable in the kiln. Have any accidents or ‘failures’ ended up shaping the final work?

There are always accidents in ceramics. Sometimes they are happy accidents, but most of the time they are not. I try to see these moments as part of the learning process. Each mistake teaches me what not to do next time, so I don’t really think of them as failures. 

That said, it can be difficult to stay positive when time is tight or a work has taken weeks to make. Ceramics demands patience and acceptance. Over time, I’ve learned that these unpredictable moments are part of what gives the medium its life and honesty. 

Vipoo Srivilasa, The Wish Listener, 2026, Glazed earthenware with gold lustre and synthetic polymer paint. 290 x 120 x 90mm. 

Your exhibition, re/JOY, currently touring Australia, incorporates broken pieces from objects of personal significance. Can you expand on a couple of the objects you were donated and the stories behind them?

The objects donated for re/JOY came with very personal stories—items that were broken but still deeply loved. Most were everyday domestic objects that held memories of family, relationships, or particular moments in time. When these objects were broken, they became symbols of loss, change, or transition, but also of care and attachment. 

By embedding these fragments into new ceramic sculptures, I wanted to honour both the object and the story behind it. The works become a way of transforming something damaged into something hopeful, allowing joy to re-emerge through repair, remembrance, and collective participation. But the main idea of re/JOY is to tell stories of migrations that may not be heard in the mainstream.  

Photo courtesy the artist and Föenander Galleries. 

The eighth sculpture draws on your grandmother’s button and your own migration story. Why was it important to include your personal narrative within this broader framework?

Originally, the project involved seven donated objects, but I realised I had time and space to make one more work. I decided to include my own story so I could experience the same emotional process as the participants.

Using my grandmother’s button allowed me to reflect on my own migration and personal history. It felt important to place myself within the project, not as an observer but as someone equally vulnerable. By asking myself the same questions I asked others, I gained a deeper understanding of what participants have experienced.

What’s an object you have, and might not need, but still can’t bring yourself to throw away?

The blue and white porcelain buttons that belonged to my grandmother. They are called Lai Kram, which means “blue and white pattern.” I believe this is why I am so drawn to blue and white ceramics. It has been part of my subconscious for as long as I can remember.

I brought the buttons with me to Australia because they are precious to me. They carry memories of my childhood and remind me of my roots and of my grandmother, who was very stylish. The buttons don’t form a complete set, and although I once tried to turn them into a necklace to wear, it didn’t quite work. Instead, I used them to create a necklace for one of my sculptures.

Ideally, I would love to one day find a complete set and use them as buttons on my shirt.

Do you have any rituals that help you get in the right mindset to work?

I usually go to the studio early in the morning and take my time planning what I want to do. Drinking sencha tea has become an important morning ritual for me. It’s a way of training my brain to recognise that creative work is about to begin. 

By repeating this ritual every day, my body and mind ease naturally into work mode. When I feel blocked or uninspired, I return to tea-making. The more elaborate the process, the better. That’s probably why I’ve collected so many teapots, teacups, and different tea leaves over the years. 

What will you be presenting at Melbourne Art Fair?

I will be presenting a series of ceramic figures titled Fortune Teller Deities. The works are created as quiet companions for everyday life. Each deity is named for a small but meaningful role: helping, listening, protecting, or encouraging, offering support not through prediction, but through presence. 

Rather than foretelling the future, the figures acknowledge common human experiences such as uncertainty, hope, fatigue, longing, courage, and the desire for reassurance…in a very positive and fun way.  

Vipoo Srivilasa, The Hope Keeper, 2026, Glazed earthenware with gold lustre and synthetic polymer paint. 240 x 150 x 90mm. 

Looking to the future, are there any new ideas or themes you wish to explore in your work?

I love working with food and with people, and I hope to expand this further in future projects. I’ve already explored food-based works, but I’m also interested in developing projects around drinks. Ceramics can create beautiful vessels for drinks!

I’m particularly interested in the possibility of collaborating with people from other disciplines, such as mixologists. I think that combination could lead to exciting and meaningful outcomes.

Vipoo Srivilasa will be showing at Melbourne Art Fair 2026 with Föenander Galleries, Booth K2

Click here to secure tickets. 
19-22 February at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. 

Rebecca Harding’s Top Picks at MAF 2026

Melbourne Art Fair ambassador, entrepreneur and all-around icon Rebecca Harding has done the hard work for us, pulling together a short list of some must-see moments landing at Melbourne Art Fair next week.

CORBAN CLAUSE WILLIAMS

EMILIA GALATIS  PROJECTS (BOORLOO / PERTH)
BOOTH H6

I’m excited to see Corban Clause Williams’ solo exhibition. I spent some time living in Newman where he was born, and have seen firsthand the beauty of those Pilbara landscapes. Through his incredible works, he shares ancestral stories with a contemporary lens.

Corban Clause Williams, Kaalpa. Photo: Tamisha Williams

SIMON ZORIC

LON GALLERY (NAARM/MELBOURNE)
BOOTH H4

Simon Zoric creates with humour and an element of cheekiness. He playfully pokes at contemporary art, cultural institutions and the weird contradictions of modern life. This is my partner’s favorite kind of art, albeit slightly crude.

Simon Zoric, Contemporary Art, 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 174 x 250cm. Courtesy the artist and LON Gallery.

HEIDI YARDLEY

NICHOLAS THOMPSON GALLERY
BOOTH G7

Each painting by Heidi could be a snapshot from a film or a hazy memory. There’s so much beauty and mystery in every painting which invites us as viewers to imagine the scenario rather than read it explicitly.

Heidi Yardley, Bitter summer in decline (detail), 2024, oil on linen, 65 x 50 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nicholas Thompson Gallery.

NATASHA WALSH

N.SMITH GALLERY
BOOTH A5

I love Natasha Walsh’s works on copper, a material that starts oxidising from the moment she begins. Her paintings visibly age as she works on them. A nice reminder that time doesn’t stop for anyone.

Natasha Walsh, Dreaming of rose scented tea leaves carried to me on a summer breeze, 2025, oil & pigment on copper, 74 x 100 cm. 

VOLHER HAUG STUDIO

All of Volker’s work is incredible. I love that he dances the line of playfulness and practicality. His pieces are sculptural, like objects you notice and live with rather than purely functional lighting.

Volker Haug Studio, Limited Edition glass lamps. Photo: Annika Kafcaloudis.

Rebecca Harding moves fluidly between fashion, beauty, and design. As the founder of LUI, a luxury razor and body care brand made for women, by women, she brings a sculptural eye and a designer’s precision to the rituals of self-care.

Her career has spanned global campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Fendi, and Hugo Boss, brand ambassadorships with Lancôme and Kérastase, and a long-standing partnership with Ralph Lauren. Regularly featured in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Marie Claire, she brings a refined sensibility to everything she touches part entrepreneur, part aesthete.

Melbourne Art Fair, 19 – 22 February 2026 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. 

Tickets on sale now.

Ministry of Clouds: A Life Well Lived, Poured Carefully

For the third year running, Ministry of Clouds returns as Official Wine Sponsor of Melbourne Art Fair, a partnership grounded less in branding and more in belief. In shared values. In curiosity. In the understanding that craft, when taken seriously, becomes culture.

Founded by winemakers Bernice Ong and Julian Forwood, Ministry of Clouds did not emerge from lineage or inheritance, but from instinct. Their path into wine was unconventional, shaped not by generational hand-me-downs but by lived experience and an almost contrarian devotion to taste, thought, and restraint.

Bernice’s early years were spent working alongside a revered importer of Old World wines; France, Italy, the great canonical regions. The Old Masters, as she describes them. Julian’s education unfolded in kitchens rather than vineyards, witnessing first-hand how thoughtful contemporary Australian food could be transformed, elevated by the right wine. What united them was not the business of wine, but the pursuit of it: the endlessly shifting relationship between site, season, grape variety and human touch.

Their philosophy is one of attentiveness. Of small, deliberate interventions. Of nipping here, tucking there, refining rather than imposing. “The best technique,” they say, “is largely invisible.”

Ministry of Clouds, Chase Vineyard, McLaren Vale

That sensibility carries naturally into their support of the arts.

Ministry of Clouds’ manifesto speaks of independence, unpredictability, and “a life well lived” not as a slogan, but as an ongoing practice. For Bernice and Julian, this means resisting the temptation to believe their own press, remaining alert to the difference between success and luck, and carving out a singular voice that is true rather than loud.

It is precisely this commitment to singular voices that draws them to Melbourne Art Fair.

The Fair, like their wines, provides a platform for ideas rooted in place, time, and personal vision. It champions makers who are invested in process as much as outcome, and audiences who are curious rather than passive. For Ministry of Clouds, supporting MAF is an extension of how they engage with the world as patrons, participants, and perpetual students.

Like us, they recognise the parallels between winemaking and contemporary art or design offer an opportunity for dialogue.

Both demand patience and reward repetition. Both are physical and conceptual at once. You work with your hands and your head. You respond to the material in front of you. Recipes don’t apply. Over time, a language emerges, a point of view shaped by seasons, failures, refinements, and return.

It is, as they describe it, the long game.

Their partnership with Melbourne Art Fair began three years ago, coinciding with the Fair’s relaunch and renewed focus on quality-driven, artisanal producers. It felt, instinctively, right. A progressive fair willing to do things differently. A space where smaller, thoughtful voices are not overshadowed, but amplified.

For a winery of Ministry of Clouds’ scale, the collaboration is not about commercial return. It is about contribution. About following what feels aligned. About doing their bit for the greater good.

Ministry of Clouds at Melbourne Art Fair 2025. Photo: Breeana Dunbar.

When asked to distil the spirit of Ministry of Clouds beyond wine, they choose three words: Intentional. Restless. Grateful.

Intentional in how they build, vineyards, wines, relationships. Restless in their curiosity, travel, questioning and refinement. And grateful, always, for the communities, collaborators, places and chance encounters that make their work possible.

At Melbourne Art Fair, their wines are poured not as product, but as accompaniment to conversation, to exchange, to moments of connection. Which, in many ways, is exactly how they were intended.

The Ministry of Clouds Bistro and Bar makes its way to Melbourne Art Fair. Furnished by Dann Event Hire.

Melbourne Art Fair returns 19 – 22 February 2026. 
Secure tickets here. 

Art Guide Australia, Art Ink and Perimeter Books Tell us The Books we Should be Reading

The Bookshop at Melbourne Art Fair 2026 is our chance to pull books out of the corner, literally and conceptually, and give them a space that feels immersive, generous, and alive.

It’s a place to wander, linger, lose track of time while flipping through the pages, and buy a book from one of the artists that may have a work hanging in a booth five metres away.

Located on the fair floor, discover a new read and smell the pages in person, with a curated selection of titles from our partners: the Art Guide Australia Bookstore, VAULT Magazine and Art Ink books, and Perimeter Books.

The Bookshop will be open for the duration of the Fair. Click here for opening hours.

ART GUIDE BOOKSTORE

With recommendations from Jackson McLaren, Art Guide Bookstore Manager

Keeping things together: 50 years of the Women’s Art Register
Published by Melbourne University Press, $60

Established in Naarm in 1975, the Women’s Art Register (WAR) is celebrating 50 years. This artist-run community and living record contains material that represents over five thousand women and gender diverse artists who have lived and worked in Australia. Perusing the pages of this anthology is a bit like looking through an archive – different voices, images, ephemera, records, and conversations – forming a web of connections. With contributions from leading artists, curators, writers, and academics this book is a must for those wanting to explore feminist art history and the unique role the Women’s Art Register plays in the Australian arts scene.

Co-founder of WAR, Lesley Dumbrell, exhibits at Melbourne Art Fair 2026 with Charles Nodrum Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne), Booth A4. She will also join members of WAR in a lively discussion on the new book, Women’s Art Register: Things That Keep Us Together.

Keeeping Things Together
Women’s Art Register, Published by Melbourne University Press
Photo: Sahra Martin, Women’s Art Register 

Hany Armanious
Published by Buxton Contemporary and Henry Moore Institute, $40

You might not be allowed to touch a Hany Armanious sculpture (tempting!) but you can touch this satisfyingly soft-cover book, published alongside the current exhibition Hany Armanious: Stone Soup at Buxton Contemporary. This thoughtfully designed monograph focusses on the last fifteen years of Armanious’s practice with new scholarship from co-curator Laurence Sillars. Using a labour-intensive process of casting with polyurethane resin, Armanious makes near identical replicas of everyday, often discarded or decrepit objects. This publication features a sequence of images that invites serious close looking, and a way of tuning into the world through colour, surface and texture. 

Image courtesy Art Guide Bookstore.

ART INK

With recommendations from Oliver Frank, and the team at Art Ink. 

Windows & Mirrors
Djon Mundine OAM, $70

Windows & Mirrors is the first publication to comprehensively catalogue the influential career of Bandjalung man and cultural leader Djon Mundine OAM. Bringing together key writings from 1999 to 2023 alongside archival imagery and exhibition documentation, the book traces pivotal figures, exhibitions, and movements in the development of contemporary Indigenous art in Australia. Drawing on decades of curatorial and cultural leadership, Mundine’s essays offer both institutional insight and lived experience, making the publication an essential cultural and historical reference.

Image courtesy Art Ink. 

Ghost Smoke
Adam Lee, $75

Ghost Smoke surveys the past decade of Adam Lee’s painting and drawing practice, presenting a richly atmospheric body of work shaped by memory, folklore, and imagination. Through moody landscapes and allegorical scenes rendered on canvas and paper, Lee constructs worlds that sit between the real and the imagined. Characterised by a contemporary take on tenebrism, the publication offers an immersive, painterly exploration of time, transcendence, and the unseen forces that shape human experience.

Image courtesy Art Ink. 

PERIMETER BOOKS

With recommendations from Dan Rule, Director, Perimeter Books. 

Fruiting Bodies
Ying Ang 
Perimeter Editions, $70

A personal favourite from our publishing archive, Ying Ang’s Fruiting Bodies reimagines the mushroom as both a biological form and a feminist metaphor – an emergent, generative force that challenges dominant narratives of fertility and the female body. Photographed while walking through inner-city parks close to the artist’s home in Melbourne, the series examines how the fetishisation of fertility has shaped cultural perceptions of women, nature and reproduction, questioning whether growth and abundance must always serve a reproductive imperative. The book is materially rich, yet somehow humble, much like the work itself.

Image courtesy Perimeter Books. 

Sit, site, chair, cherry
Aleix Plademunt
Spector Books, Leipzig, $129

Sit, site, chair, cherry is a phonebook-scaled archive of photographs that breaks down a site rich in the history of design and architecture – the Vitra Campus in Switzerland, home to the famed Vitra furniture design company – into a sea of fine-grain details, textures, and gestures. The campus – which comprises buildings designed by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, and Alvaro Siza – is rendered so as to become a fabric of contained but connected moments and surfaces. A remarkable object and series – content and form working in perfect step.

Image courtesy Perimeter Books. 

Melbourne Art Fair returns, 19 – 22 February 2026.
Secure tickets now.

READ | Emma Buswell on Market Scares, embracing slowness, and her new tapestry for MAF

Emma Buswell knows her way around a knitting machine, a pair of knitting needles, and just about every textile-based art format in between. From formative years spent hand-knitting to later adopting a second-hand knitting machine, her practice is defined by a commitment to slowness (perhaps masochistically so), maintaining sustained attention on her tapestries long after the process stops being enjoyable and becomes physically taxing.

Often beginning as jokes or moments of frustration, the ideas behind Buswell’s work are painstakingly researched and stitched with layers of meaning, moving between grand mythological narratives and, more recently, reflections on what it means to live a good life within the constraints of late-stage capitalism.

Read on as Buswell reflects on her path into textile practice, her recent exhibition with Sydenham International, and the work she will present at AVA’s booth at Melbourne Art Fair 2026.

How did you first find your way into textile art? What drew you to the medium?

I’ve always been interested in making things. As a kid I used to sew small bears and characters out of scraps of felt and spent lots of time knitting very ugly scarves; later it became making clothes, drawing, painting. Like a lot of people, I drifted away from those impulses when I went to university and became heavily interested in theory, history and the sociology of art.

A few years after graduating, I worked on a project that involved a lot of rushed hand knitting and realised there had to be a faster way to produce knitted fabric. That led me to finding out about knitting machines. I bought my first one from an eBay listing in the US and it arrived several weeks later, rusty, caked in old plastic, and mostly incomprehensible. I tried it once, hated it, and put it away for six months. I’ve spent the last five years slowly teaching myself how to use it properly.

That slow, stubborn process ended up being really formative, and alongside my arts working practice made me reconsider my relationship to time, labour, value, and care.

Chook bag, Coles bag, money bags. These elements of everyday capitalism inject a sense of humour in your work while simultaneously subverting capitalism through their making. Can you expand on how capital essentially becomes a character in your work, especially in your recent exhibition with Sydenham International?

Funny story, the first idea for the work from the Sydney show came about from some experiences I had visiting an art fair for the first time in Taiwan at the beginning of last year. I saw someone walking around with a customised Christian Dior tapestry tote bag that they’d had designed to say Grocery Bag on the side. It was one of the most hilarious and simultaneously grotesque demonstrations of casual wealth I’d ever seen. Later that week, I bought some stuffed toys for my niece as a souvenir. One of them was a Shawn the Sheep toy and as it peered up at me from the dark void of the otherwise empty shopping bag, I got this idea for a series of soft sculptures that could behave as some kind of Muppet come nightmare fuel, come warning sign.

Thinking about capital as this kind of animated character, became a useful device for me. Capital dominates our lives in very intimate and irritating ways. I think about money not as an abstraction, but in practical units, how many weeks of rent something might cover, how much time a task consumes relative to its supposed value. For instance, the money bag which is called Bump in the Night in the Sydenham Show took over four months to create, and is entirely encrusted in small glass beads which have been hand embroidered onto the surface. Of all the works in the exhibition that one took the longest to produce.

Collectively, the works in that exhibition are all part of a series called Market Scares, which continued a fascination with the various powers and systems that dominate our lives, from the menial to the existential. What does it mean to live or attempt to live a good life within the constrains of late-stage capitalism? Using familiar forms like shopping bags or money bags lets me borrow the visual language of everyday commerce, but remake it through slow, labour-intensive techniques that are completely at odds with what those objects usually represent.

Emma Buswell, Market Scare, installation view, Sydenham International, 2025.

Emma Buswell, Market Scare, installation view, Sydenham International, 2025.

How does the physical process of making inform the conceptual side of your practice? With your larger tapestries especially, the time required for planning and weaving feels deliberately counter to capitalist rhythms.

I was talking to a friend about this recently actually. We both initially make work from big gestural vague kind of lines, and then over subsequent weeks and sometimes months meticulously refine those initial marks into this other kind of thing. The making and the thinking are inseparable for me. It all comes back to labour and time, the physical limits of the machine, the repetition, the errors; all of that feeds back into the ideas. Large tapestries require an enormous amount of planning and an even larger amount of time to execute, and that slowness isn’t accidental.

I will generally spend a lot of time thinking about a topic or idea and then lots of visual research takes place, going back through archives, phone notes, scrap bits of text I’ve recorded and then produce a digital image, or a cartoon that forms the basis for the work. That image is then charted into a graph, sometimes 10000 stitches by 1000 rows of work and divided up into lengths that are knitted on the machine. Everything is knitted in reverse as you’re always working from the back of a piece and then finally all the individual threads are woven in, the panels are stitched together, and the piece is wet blocked. I kind of enjoy the joke in spending months of time meticulously translating the immediacy of a rough digital sketch into something that resembles tapestry. Often the first time I will see how a work has turned out is the same moment the audience will as they are too big to stretch or show upright in my own studio. So it’s pretty nervy, and I can get quite anxious about how they will turn out.

Sometimes these pieces will take months to work on, depending on the complexity of the image, and I work long hours when I can into the rhythm of it. It’s quite meditative but also physically taxing. Often, I’ll find myself not noticing that six hours have past, and I might have knitted 50 rows of one panel that requires 800 rows haha. Working at that pace forces a kind of sustained attention that’s increasingly rare in other parts of my life. In that sense, the process for me has become a quiet refusal of capitalist rhythms, not in a particularly grand or heroic way, but through accumulation, patience, and staying with something long after it stops being enjoyable.

Emma Buswell, Laertes and Lethargy, 2023, courtesy of the artist and AVA. 

When creating a new body of work, where do you usually start? With a concept, a moment in history, or something else?

It can be different every time, but usually works develop out of frustration. They kind of become an exorcism of sorts; of the things which haunt me, be that financial, political or everyday annoyances. Half the time they start off as jokes. I’ll write down initial ideas and then do research into the circumstances that may have came about to cause that issue. The notes section on my phone is diabolical, and sometimes I’ll only revisit a thought months later. Generally what results is a kind of big soup that meanders around an idea or a sensibility.

Over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly interested in storytelling, and in mythology both ancient and contemporary, in how grand narratives might show up in mundane forms. Starting from the everyday allows me to move between humour and critique without becoming overly didactic, but at the same time it also provides a kind of springboard for sharing ideas, a kind of grounding. Found images and references get collaged, overlaid with text, and then reinterpreted through stitch, letting the material do some of the thinking and work for me.

Your works often come off the wall, whether it’s a sprawling tapestry across the floor, or wearable pieces. One of your recent works, An Outfit for Everyday Wear, plays with the idea of monuments. Can you expand on exploring this idea and how it initially came to you?

That work was part of an exhibition called Monument curated by Dionne Hooyberg for the Bunbury Regional Art Gallery. It was an exhibition that invited artists to consider their own understanding of what a monument is and what it could be.

Much of my earlier work was made as things that could be worn outside of a gallery context and this kind of thinking around textile work in public space informed An Outfit for Everyday Wear. I kept coming back to the idea that monuments are almost always about power or death; old men on horses, military figures, grand abstract forms that tell us what’s meant to be remembered. They lock certain values in place and quietly suggest who or what matters enough to be monumentalised.

An Outfit for Everyday Wear started as a way of questioning that logic. Rather than monumentalising power or conquest, I wanted to think about what it might mean to monumentalise the living; specifically, the worker, the exhausted, the ordinary person carrying the weight of daily life. At the moment, that effort can feel endless, even Sisyphean, and yet it’s rarely marked or acknowledged.

Emma Buswell, An Outfit for Everyday Wear, 2025. Courtesy the artist and AVA.

I wanted to create a sort of uniform to articulate that effort, and for this work, it takes the form of a knitted tracksuit, laid flat and lying in state. It draws from the language of statues, plinths, and memorials, but translates those forms into something soft, domestic, and wearable. A garment associated with comfort and leisure becomes an artefact of quiet resistance.

I’m particularly interested in how labour, especially women’s handcraft, is rarely understood as monumental, despite its endurance and repetition. Knitting in this work and in my wider practice becomes both a form of care and a political gesture, a way to think through exhaustion, productivity, and worth. The work asks what might happen if we honoured the everyday instead of the exceptional, and whether small acts of making could stand as monuments to persistence within late-stage capitalism.

What will you be showing at Melbourne Art Fair?* 

 *I secretly hope it includes a scathing critique on the commercial nature and general havoc of art fairs, but I digress, probably shouldn’t write that as someone who works directly for the fair. BRB while I run and scream into my pillow about how to sell more tickets.  

Hahahaha. I’ve been thinking about this work as a disgusting cocktail or unwanted canape that blends 1990’s Microsoft Encarta (thinking the included PC game), a dreaded relative’s tour of Europe through photos on their iPad and the notes section of my phone where all my most mundane and maniacal thoughts are archived. The work takes the form of a knitted tapestry that composites together several images drawn from historical sources, the imagination and art history. At the moment I’ve been thinking about ideas around the spectacle, and also about how the working life of our current society was imagined or envisaged by previous societies and how we may have fallen short of many of those early pseudo utopian ideals. While we may not yet have our flying cars, our jobs are getting taken by the robots. What might it mean to create art, to witness it, in an age where images can be prompted into being. It’s all another big soup really.

Melbourne Art Fair returns 19 – 22 February 2026. 
Click here to secure tickets.

One Artist, Full Focus: Ten Unmissable Solo Shows Coming to Melbourne Art Fair 2026

With three weeks to go until Melbourne Art Fair 2026, we turn our attention to a selection of solo presentations set to unfold within the halls of the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

This February, more than 150 artists from over 60 galleries and Indigenous art centres will present work at the Fair. Among them, a considered number of galleries have chosen the discipline of the solo booth, foregrounding a single practice and allowing space for ideas to unfold with clarity and intent. These presentations offer concentrated insight into the ideas, materials and methods shaping contemporary art today.

Here, we highlight ten solo shows not to be missed at the Fair next month.

James Little
Nasha Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney), Booth G4

James Little’s last exhibition at Nasha Gallery, DRINK BLEACH comprised a suite of new works – embedded and wall-mounted sculptures, framed pictures, wall-mounted steel sculptures and a single large wall print. The installation beckoned the viewer toward a fragmented narrative that traces the symptoms of moral fantasies within masculinity. The work considers what fulfills a narrative of fact, and what fulfills a narrative of fantasy, and how each affects masculinity’s self-interpretation of what it is to be masculine. At Melbourne Art Fair, James continues this investigation, exploring how the internet and pop culture inform young men’s understanding of being masculine.

James Little, DRINK BLEACH, installation view, 2025. Photo: Sarah Kukathas. Courtesy Nasha Gallery.

Julie Fragar
The Renshaws’ (Meanjin/Brisbane), Booth J3

The Renshaws’ presents One & The Many, a new series by Julie Fragar.

Contemporary social life asks us to recognise others as individuals with distinct needs and inner lives, whilst simultaneously navigating the demands of larger groups that carry their own histories, expectations and pressures. No matter how empathetic or connected we might feel, we operate from within our own bodies, bound to a singular point of perception/vantage point from which all understanding begins. We become aware of their own position in relation to these images and to Fragar’s subjects, neither fully inside the group nor safely outside it, but hovering somewhere in between.

Consumed as a body of work, One & The Many registers a familiar paradox. Each of us stands at the centre of our own lived universe, even as we move within a larger choreography that we are constantly navigating, shaping, and being shaped by. In this way, Fragar’s paintings do not so much resolve the tension between the collective and the self as they sustain it. Her images remain open and unsettled, alive to our own vantage point and to the shifting, often uncomfortable realities of being with others.

Julie Fragar, Feedback, 2026, Oil on canvas, 1800h x 1350w mm. Courtesy the artist and The Renshaws’.

 

Rive Roshan
Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert (Gadigal Country/Sydney), Booth I1

Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert presents The Sky We Share, an immersive solo installation by Amsterdam-based artist duo Rive Roshan. The presentation will debut 10 new works that expand on the acclaimed artists’ ongoing exploration of “ordinary miracles” — the unexpected, extraordinary moments that exist in the day-to-day — alongside a selection of carefully curated earlier works.

Over the past decade, Rive Roshan has garnered an international following thanks to works that combine ethereal aesthetics, poetic narratives, and technical innovation. Their pieces play with form, colour, light, and reflection to mimic and abstract their environments, with the intention of evoking a sense of curiosity and or wonder in onlookers. Within The Sky We Share, the pair debut a new series of intricate glass works titled Windows, inspired by moments they observed and photographed from their Amsterdam home and studio when water met sky — the water distorting the colour and movement of the light and then reinterpreted as glass marquetry panels. Each piece records a specific moment and location, time-stamped in its title, yet continues to transform with the changing light and perspective of its new context. The works are composed using a new, unique glass marquetry technique that combines varying glass types and textures into a single work.

Rive Roshan Artist Portrait. Golnar Roshan and Ruben de la Rive Box, solo Exhibition 2024, Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert. Photo: Simon Hewson Fatografi. Image courtesy the artists and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert.

Ruth O’Leary
Mary Cherry Contemporary (Naarm/Melbourne), Booth C5

Extending her solo exhibition Hidden Mothers at Mary Cherry Contemporary, Ruth O’Leary presents new work that shifts focus from the maternal body to the politics of looking. Using an analogue photo booth as stage, O’Leary creates portraits where her face — obscured by painted textiles and costumes — becomes deliberately unrecognisable. Where Hidden Mothers centred the torso as site of maternal labor, these photographs interrogate the role of woman as muse within art history, using the body as mannequin to try on different ideas about visibility, desire, and power. 

The work explores the gaze from all positions: subject, object, and viewer. O’Leary asks what becomes challenging to look at, and why. In transforming herself into anonymous figures, she refuses the traditional dynamic of woman-as-muse while simultaneously examining the seductive pull of that very position. 

Alongside the photographs, O’Leary presents a new series of Fuck Paintings, text-based works that continue her practice of using language to provoke and interrogate. These paintings embody the tension between refusal and acceptance, addressing the complexity of inhabiting identities that art history has traditionally constrained. 

Image courtesy the artist and Mary Cherry Contemporary.

Lesley Dumbrell
Charles Nodrum Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne), Booth A4

Charles Nodrum Gallery presents Paintings and Drawings 1960s – 2010s from the legendary Lesley Dumbrell.

Dumbrell has been refining her geometric abstract painting technique for over forty years, and today she is regarded as one of Australia’s most respected artists in the field – as her recent Art Gallery of New South Wales retrospective, titled THRUM (20 Jul-13 Oct 2024), and the critical responses it attracted demonstrate. She came to prominence in the 1970s with her large-scale optical paintings and through her involvement in the women’s art movement, including as a founding member of the Women’s Art Register (WAR) and participating in the influential collective who founded and published the interdisciplinary magazine Lip, A Feminist Arts Journal (1976-1984) – the first of its kind in Australia. In 1990 Dumbrell moved to Thailand, and has since maintained two home studios, one in Bangkok and one in Euroa in central Victoria.

Dumbrell’s richly-coloured, intensely-lined paintings are essays in colour, geometry and optical perception, as well as being an evocation of her surroundings; whether it be the tropical flora and bustling streets of Bangkok or the rolling hills and vast skies of the Strathbogie Ranges, the work is about environment and atmosphere.

Lesley Dumbrell, Study for Fan Tan I, 1984, watercolour on paper, 66.5 x 103cm, signed, titled and dated below image in pencil, exhibited: Colour and Transparency: The Watercolours of Lesley Dumbrell, Robert Jacks and Victor Majzner, National Gallery of Victoria, 22 February – 27 April, 1986, no. 11 (label verso). Photo: Gavin Hansford. Courtesy the artist and Charles Nodrum Gallery.

Elizabeth Newman
Neon Parc (Naarm/Melbourne), Booth J2

Neon Parc’s presentation brings together a focused selection of key recent and historical works that trace significant trajectories within Newman’s practice, spanning the years of her career. The show includes several works that have not previously been exhibited, offering new points of entry into the artist’s sustained formal and conceptual concerns.

This solo exhibition follows Neon Parc’s last exhibition of 2025, and celebration of Newman’s influence and friendships, I 🖤 Lizzy.

Elizabeth Newman exhibited art throughout Australia and overseas since the 1980s. A painter by training, she expanded her practice over the years to include wall works, objects, text-based works and writing. Her innovative and experimental work has been of significant influence upon her contemporaries and, further, on younger generations of artists who regard her practice as exemplary.

Elizabeth Newman, Untitled, 2022, Oil and collage on linen, 135 x 95 cm. Courtesy Neon Parc.

Rana Begum
Galerie Christian Lethert (Cologne, Germany), Booth C1

“Begum’s work rarely rests on overtly personal narratives, and its formally restrained aesthetic might appear reminiscent, at first glance, of Western art movements such as Op-Art, Minimalism and Hard-edge painting. Nonetheless, her output is profoundly and palpably informed by her upbringing between Bangladesh and the UK – chided by her mother for spending too long sitting outside, staring into space, watching for changes in the light.”
– Christine Takengny, Senior Curator at the Contemporary Art Society, Cologne.

Galerie Christian Lethert makes their debut at Melbourne Art Fair with a selection of works by London-based artist Rana Begum. Her practice constitutes an ongoing exploration of color, light, and form, and the dynamic relationships between them. The presentation features an installation that dissolves the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture through the transformation of an everyday object: a spray-painted fishing net. This organic, flowing installation is counterbalanced by paintings and relief works that emphasize geometric precision.

Rana Begum, No. 1286 S Fold, 2023, lacquer on mild steel, 72.5 x 53.5 x 19 cm. Photo: Ann Christine Freuwörth. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Christian Lethert.

Arthur (Jalyirri) Dixon
Niagara Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne), Booth H1

Mudburra artist Arthur (Jalyirri) Dixon (b. 1994) grew up in the remote Northern Territory community of Marlinja, near Elliott, around 700 km from both Alice Springs and Darwin. He grew up in a creative family, using music for storytelling and a vehicle for keeping Mudburra, one of the world’s oldest languages, alive. Both his father Ray Dimakarri Dixon and sister Eleanor Dixon are accomplished singer/songwriters.

Dixon employs gestural mark-making in variously-scaled, evocative abstract paintings. Generally painted off-stretcher, his work features both subtle tonal shifts and contrasting pigments, as well as textural elements from leaving areas of canvas raw. He uses the Mudburra word ngurramarla to describe his work, a term which refers to ancestral connection and the channelling of creativity through this connection. It is a term which reflects the heightened state of Arthur’s expressive act of painting and, in turn, his underlying inspiration to connect with and care for Country. Dixon’s paintings are mostly untitled and highly intuitive rather than literal in their expression of ngurramarla. The first two paintings of Arthur Dixon’s to be publicly exhibited, as part of the 2023 Desert Mob exhibition in Alice Springs were given the title Ngurramarlawas, an indication of the artist’s emerging status and remarkable freedom and confidence as a painter.

Arthur (Jalyirri) Dixon, Untitled (AD24018), 2024, acrylic on canvas, 195.5 x 256.5cm (24623). Courtesy the artist and Niagara Galleries.

 

Don Cameron (Gadigal Country/Sydney)
FUTUREOBJEKT, Booth E13

At Melbourne Art Fair’s inaugural collectible design salon, Don Cameron will showcase a considered mix of rare vintage collectible design pieces together with new works of his own including a series of lamps and nesting seating concepts.

Graduating with 1st Class Honours from Central St Martins, Don Cameron’s career began as a director of music videos—creating era-defining works for British recording artists Pet Shop Boys, Garbage and Blur. Cameron’s videos engaged architecture, objects and furniture to compose compelling visual narratives.

In 2008 Cameron began to explore the disciplines of design and interior architecture. His auteur approach to film crossed mediums to find concrete form in the built environment. Arriving at a unique language that approached the comprehensive design of interiors with a film vocabulary—endowing spaces with a strong visceral, emotional and scenographic quality. Cameron’s interiors involve everything from the concept and arrangement of the space to the design of custom furniture and fittings—directing artisans and specialist workshops to realise his original vision.

In 2020, Cameron presented Communion with Gallery Sally Dan–Cuthbert which comprised a photomedia series depicting concrete architecture designed for protection, memory and salvation, researched and encountered over a twenty year period. In 2022, his exhibition titled Translations saw Cameron translate these atmospheres from the photographic to the functional, creating a range of furnishings that take inspiration from the forms and atmospheres of the works he lensed.

Don Cameron, Bloc Lamp 02, from Translations, 2022. Courtesy Don Cameron.

Tom Fereday (Gadigal Country/Sydney)
FUTUREOBJEKT, Booth E2

Fascinated by the tension that lies between natural materials and contemporary design and manufacture, Tom Fereday develops unique designs originating from an intrinsic inquiry into the role of objects today. Built on the principle of honest design, Tom Fereday’s work celebrates the materials and manufacture behind furniture and objects, guiding considered and thoughtful design outcomes that explore the notion of quiet innovation.

As part of FUTUREOBJEKT, Tom Fereday will present a cluster of sculptural stone plinth lights alongside his ‘Cast’ speaker, clad in marine-grade aluminium and designed in collaboration with Tasmanian audio design duo Pitt & Giblin.

Tom Fereday, installation view. Photo: Fritz Buziek. Courtesy Tom Fereday.

Melbourne Art Fair returns 19 – 22 February 2026.
Click here to secure tickets. 

READ | Duo OKO OLO Are Our Favourite Design Foragers

With roots in interiors, furniture, and fashion design, Genevieve Hromas and Juliet Ramsey began formally collaborating as OKO OLO in 2020 (maybe we can guess why). The duo leans into re-use, material experimentation, and limiting waste. Using timber, metal, stone, mirror, ceramics, fabric, paper and found objects, they produce tight, considered collections that speak to the curiosity and breadth of their practice.

One half of the duo, Juliet Ramsey, spoke with Andy Kelly, Director of Collectible Design at Melbourne Art Fair, about OKO OLO’s invaluable friendship (stretching all the way to preschool), the strangest piece they’ve made that could be a sci-fi prop, and more.

AK: You turn normal materials into objects with real presence. What’s the most unglamorous material you’re currently obsessed with (or flirting with) that you’re trying to elevate into something people will pretend they “immediately understood”?

JR: We feel like this is just a current everyday thing for us – it’s almost a problem. Genevieve recently pulled out an old, BRIGHT yellow paper shopping bag and asked whether it would be too weird to use this as the shade on a new version of our plank lamp. We both love stuff that’s fallen in the sea and been jumbled around like old tumbled bricks, concrete. The process takes off all the edges and softens the shapes, leaving the harder parts of the aggregate protruding. Genevieve actually found a rock that has been tumbled in a river and looked exactly like a loaf of bread. We were away with friends – she proceeded to put the rock on the chopping board with bread knife to trick each person as they came in for breakfast. She was giggling like crazy every time. I’m currently in love with the protective backing paper that came on an acrylic light-box we had made. You’re meant to peel it off before use. But I just can’t. It’s covered in the company’s very 90s logo. I just want to keep it and put it on my wall. My brain has been ticking over, ‘Would anyone else in the world understand. Would Genevieve understand?’

Said backing paper. Image courtesy OKO OLO. 

AK: Your work sits in that sweet spot between functional and “I don’t fully trust it.” What’s a piece you’ve made that looks like it might be a prop from a very tasteful sci-fi film… but is actually just meant to live in someone’s home?

JR: The Luffa No.1 Composition for sure. Genevieve’s brain goes to crazier places than mine. One of the many reasons why I love her so much. She decided to get a big bunch of huge luffas and pull them together with a ratchet strap (usually used to hold down truck cargo). Then we smashed up a bit of reclaimed marble and put it on-top. We teamed it up with River Rock No.2 (One Drink Table) for our Found and Formed Collection, together they felt like an alternative R2-D2 and C-3PO. Of course no one bought it – I think it was just a bit too weird. We gifted it to our artist friend Isabella Pluta. She was obsessed with it.

  OKO OLO, Luffa No.1 Raw Composition & River Rock No.2 One Drink, 2022, Luffa cylindrica, raffia, ratchet strap, calcutta marble. H 430 x 330 x 230mm, polished stainless steel, rock, ratchet strap H 660 x 80 x 160mm. Courtesy OKO OLO.

AK: Many thanks Isabella. You work as a duo, which is already brave. What’s the most absurdly minor thing you’ve ever disagreed on in the studio, like a shade of off-white, a curve, a millimetre, and did it nearly end the friendship?

JR: We’ve been friends since preschool, so it’s been a long road together. That history gives us a huge amount of creative safety — we’re thick-skinned, we trust each other, and we’re comfortable rolling with decisions even when one of us is passionate and the other is a bit unsure. Early on, we made a pact that our friendship would always come first, which means neither of us is allowed to be too precious. We’re happy to knock an idea on the head if one of us isn’t into it, and happy to resurrect a rejected idea years later. Mostly, we act as each other’s measuring stick — it’s that back-and-forth that brings out our fave pieces. We do get into a bit of argy-bargy sometimes…I’m making us sound so happy. Now I’m worried we’re going to jinx ourselves…

AK: What’s your most embarrassing design habit? Like… do you hoard “good bits of timber,” keep jars of screws you’ll never use, or insist you can “feel” when something is 3mm off?

JR: Ummm yes to variations all of the above — Yikes! We can’t stop picking up weird bits of debris wherever we go. Then just leaving them around the house, which mostly makes for tripping over a lot, and for ‘don’t touch that! It’s important!’ being thrown around a lot.

Genevieve and Juliet in old family photos.

AK: What object do you think is wildly overdesigned in everyday life? And if you were forced to redesign it your way, what would you strip out… or make weirder?

JR: A lot of things feel really over-designed these days, but our actual day-to-day life isn’t like that at all and honestly, we don’t look at nearly as much contemporary design as we probably should. What I CAN say is: I met a lovely architect recently and he was kindly loving on our One Drink Table. Then, he showed me a photo on his phone of a version he’d knocked up himself out of off-cut timber. Super simply banged together — it was so great! I loved it. Highly functional, a bit rough, a bit genius! For an instant it made me just want to throw ours out the window (temporary sensation). We often design and make very quickly (because we have to), and then when it gets made again, the second or third time, we come back to it and reconsider, tweak, and redesign. We want things to be thoughtful and properly considered, but there’s also a big place in both our hearts for happenstance and just rolling with intuition.

OKO OLO, River Rock No.2 (One Drink Table). Courtesy OKO OLO.

AK: You make things that feel calm, but also slightly uncanny (in a good way). What’s a “beautiful mistake” you’ve made something that started as a disaster and ended up becoming the best part?

JR: The above question feels like it perfectly describes many moments we’ve had, from breaking parts of unfinished pieces or realising that the maker has misread the drawing / instructions and the object has come back slightly altered (but we love it). Recently, I put a newly and beautifully hand crafted top of a side table down on a junky old stool that was about to be thrown out and Genevieve says, “I love that combination”. Now, we’re about to glue it together — it’s going to be an actual OKO OLO piece!

If you had to explain OKO OLO to someone at a family BBQ who thinks ‘design’ is just cushions, what’s the one sentence you’d say… and what’s the sentence you’d want to say but absolutely shouldn’t?

JR: The blank stare we get when we try to explain what we do with OKO OLO is pretty priceless, followed by an even blanker one when we run out of words and just end up showing our Instagram. I think this type of situation has now happened SO many times that the energy to explain has run out of me… We love making our work, the enjoyment is a lot of what drives us. So, these days a shrug is all we can muster.

OKO OLO will present work at FUTUREOBJEKT, sharing Booth E19 with Naarm-based designer, Charlie White.
FUTUREOBJEKT debuts at Melbourne Art Fair, 19 – 22 February 2026. Tickets on sale now.

READ | Brenda L. Croft on Honouring Barangaroo’s Legacy, Inverting Tintypes Through Agency and more

Dr. Brenda L Croft is an esteemed multidisciplinary artist of Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra heritage from the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory, and of Anglo-Australian/Chinese/German/Irish/Scottish descent. A selection of works of her photographic series, Naabámi (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me), will be presented at Melbourne Art Fair 2026, as part of BEYOND. The work pays tribute to Barangaroo, the Cammeraygal woman known for her unwavering stance as an unceded sovereign First Nations woman during early Australian colonisation. 

Speaking with Fair Director and BEYOND curator, Melissa Loughnan, Brenda reflects on her commitment to carry forward Barangaroo’s legacy, and on the ways her work foregrounds the strength, agency and presence of the First Nations women depicted in her photographs.

How were the women and girls in your Naabámi (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me) series selected? Do you have a personal relationship with any of them?

Many of the women I have known for decades and others were first-time participants. Subjects were selected as embodiments of Barangaroo’s determination and our connection to her and other First Nations women: great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, grand-daughters, cousins, friends. This body of work reflects these long-standing relationships and I hope that the respect and trust I feel for my subjects is reflected in the work and continues to help represent Australian First Nations communities and individuals from a culturally appropriate standpoint.

Brenda L. Croft, Julie (Dhulanyagan clan, Yorta Yorta/Wiradjuri/Wurundjeri Peoples), 2024 from Naabámi (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me), 143 x 112cm, inkjet print (from original tintype, wet plate collodion process) on archival paper. Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne).

You have previously spoken about documenting the process behind this series through interviews with the participants. At what point did you do this and how did it inform the final works?

Photoshoots were staged across sometimes week-long periods with the invaluable assistance of Prue Hazelgrove in 2019, 2021 & 2023 in the studios of the Australian National University School of Art and Design and in 2022 at Carriageworks, Sydney. First Nations women and girls with cultural affiliations across the continent travelled to these locations to be photographed. We hosted family members across generations and took the time to talk, have a cup of tea and share a meal each day.

“During each session, participants were asked to look inward and consider what Barangaroo had endured during that fraught period of irrevocable change to her homelands and community, and to reflect on the First Nations women each has held close to them throughout their lives – great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, grand-daughters, cousins, friends.”*

Behind the scenes of the photoshoots at Australian National University School of Art and Design, 2019. Left: Brenda L. Croft, Glenda Merritt and Violet Sheridan. Right: Brenda L. Croft and Prue Hazelgrove. Photos Courtesy Brenda L. Croft. 

Have any of your previous works honoured Barangaroo?

I have long worked with members of my patrilineal community to explore personal and by extension, family and community stories. I began this project named after Cammeraygal warrior woman Barangaroo (whose importance as a cultural negotiator has been all but erased) to honour ancestors – my own and those on whose sovereign, unceded lands I am privileged to live and work. Here Barangaroo is embodied and reflected back by the collective gaze – direct, challenging, averted, inward, beyond – of contemporary First Nations women and girls. Past, Present and Future.

First Nations women have long been an inspiration and the subject of my work: relatives, friends, ancestors and contemporaries. Elders in particular have been both muses and collaborators.

I want to draw attention to and carry on Barangaroo’s legacy as a staunch woman who stood her ground under enormous pressure and called out injustices. She was a cultural negotiator at the time of first colonial contact and like her, the participants in Nabaami series are firm in their cultural knowledge. Her name, subsumed by a wealthy precinct and casino in Sydney, needs to be reclaimed.

“The naming of Barangaroo Precinct [in 2007] prised open the colonial project of denial and negation, calling up the Cammeraygal woman who inspired the site’s selection for a highly desired part of Sydney’s CBD.”**

Your inversion of tintypes from colonial ethnographic use to contemporary First Nations Peoples use is compelling and significant. What first drew you to this method, and have you used this medium before?

Wet plate collodion processing, a nineteenth-century photographic technique, was a deliberate choice that I have used before. The process highlights everything the subjects have lived through and there are aspects of the finished image that cannot be controlled, including chemical mistakes. It’s not about making people look like something that they’re not. The process imbues all the subjects’ faces with a collective cultural resonance and power, an effect and impact that cannot be captured through film or digital processes.

This process was used in documenting many First Nations peoples in Australia as part of an ethnographic, eugenicist approach. First Nations people were documented as ‘dying races’ and rarely identified by language group and even less likely by name. I have identified each subject by name and community. Unlike the historical representation of individuals in tintypes, my subjects’ agency is acknowledged and highlighted.

Matilda (Ngambri), 2020 was the first of your works to be exhibited from the Naabámi (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me) series, followed by a selection at Sydney Festival 2023, along the Barangaroo Precinct waterfront; as an A/V projection onto Old Government House, Parramatta Park; and at the Museum of Sydney in 2023; then at the Australian Embassy in Washington DC, US from NAIDOC week 2024 to 7 February 2025; and most recently in ON COUNTRY: Photography from Australia in Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, France, 2025.
How did the reception of diverse iterations of this series differ across national and international borders?

Matilda I (Ngambri), 2020 was the first work from the series to be shown – it was shortlisted for the National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2020. From the moment the image appeared on the tintype developing tray I knew I would scan and enlarge it – it captures Dr Auntie Matilda House’s strength of character. Matilda is a powerhouse who has dedicated her life to the pursuit of social justice for Indigenous people. The image felt powerful and this was very well received at the National Portrait Gallery, where it was first exhibited.

Each iteration of the Naabámi (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me) has been quite different – not just the context within which the images were installed, but the manner of installation. The Barangaroo Precinct waterfront works were installed on sandstone blocks, cast-offs from colonial buildings, originally hewn from traditional lands. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales they were pinned unframed to the walls. Images were selected according to the relevance of the Country in which they were exhibited. Images have been projected and printed on both paper and metal.

This context was obviously quite different in France and the USA.

Matilda (Ngambri), 2020, Brenda L Croft, Prue Hazelgrove (wet plate collodion process technical assistant) and Richard Crampton (printer), from the series Naabami (Thou shall/will see): I am/we are Barangaroo, dye sublimation print on aluminium from tintype on paper, edition 4/5 + 3 APs. Image: 119.7 cm x 90.9 cm, sheet: 140.3 cm x 99.9 cm, frame: 153.0 cm x 113.0 cm depth 4.2 cm.

What significance does scale play in your work?

This series is printed larger than life. The impact of each print reflects the strength of character of the women and girls in this series and their gaze is hard to ignore. This is in direct contrast to the archival material that I have drawn from in the past where images of Indigenous people were symbolically possessed, presented without names or context.

How does navigating your artistic and curatorial practices shape your perspective on art making?

I can’t imagine one without the other. I like to juggle multiple tasks and have always refused to let one part of my creative expression take precedence over another, working as an academic, artist, author, curator, educator and researcher.

You were a founding member of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in 1987, how did this influence the early stages of your career, and its subsequent evolution?

Not only did Boomalli offer a grounding point for my early career, but lifelong connections. I was able to work with change-making innovators, provocateurs and liberators and we were able to provide a platform for urban Aboriginal artists who had been wilfully overlooked. I have long sought to represent the underrepresented, through art and through curatorial work, representing Indigenous people and their environs as a reflection of my own experience of exclusion and invisibility. Boomalli was made up of a supportive group of likeminded individuals who I consider close friends and family.

Croft’s work is presented by Niagara Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne).

Melbourne Art Fair, 19 – 22 February 2026 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Secure tickets now. 

*1 In Nabaami (though shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me), exhibition catalogue, Quentin Bryce Gallery, Washington, DC, USA, 2024, p. 92, from Art Monthly Australasia, Issue 338, 2024.
**2 In ‘Barangaroo, Cammeraygal Sovereign Woman’, Nabaami (though shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me), exhibition catalogue, Quentin Bryce Gallery, Washington, DC, USA, 2024, pp. i-iv, p. iii.

Melbourne Art Fair Announces Program Highlights including CONVERSATIONS

The countdown to Melbourne Art Fair 2026 is officially on. The Program is live, most of the spreadsheet tabs are closed, and we’ve collectively exhaled.

Now in our 19th edition, the Fair takes over the MCEC with over 60 leading galleries, Indigenous-owned art centres and design studios under one (very large) roof. There will be bold installations, sculpture, experimental video, and a lively CONVERSATIONS program unfolding inside an inflatable Bubble – no stage, no podium, but strong opinions are encouraged.

Across the Fair, more than 200 artists and designers will present new and recent work, making this our largest and most energetic edition in recent history. Beyond the booths, there’s plenty to get stuck into: hands-on creative workshops, performance, guided tours, bookshops and a well-earned pause at the Bistro and Bar with a glass of Ministry of Clouds in hand.

Click here to discover the full program.

Discover Program and Exhibition highlights below:

VIDEO 2026 is programmed this year by French curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, bringing together works by artists Neïl Beloufa (Mendes Wood DM), Meriem Bennani (Lodovico Corsini), Mohamed Bourouissa (PALAS), Cécile B Evans (ChâteauShatto) and David Noonan (Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery). Lamarche-Vadel is a French independent curator. From 2019 to 2025 she was the director and chief curator of the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, where she has curated shows by Martine Syms, Neil Beloufa, Issy Wood, Cyprien Gaillard (also at Palais de Tokyo), Martin Margiela, Marguerite Humeau and Jean-Marie Appriou, and a forthcoming exhibition by Diego Marcon (2026).

Over twenty galleries in their first seven years of operation will be participating in the fair, including returning galleries Nasha (Gadigal Country/Sydney), Animal House Fine Arts (Naarm/Melbourne), Haydens (Naarm/Melbourne) and Void_Melbourne (Naarm/Melbourne), as well as debut galleries Mary Cherry Contemporary (Naarm/Melbourne), Grace (Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland), LAILA (Gadigal Country/Sydney) and PALAS (Gadigal Country/Sydney). MAF’s young galleries are dotted throughout the fair, exhibiting on equal terms with their more established peers, and will bring fresh talent to the fair with some exciting emerging artists.

Arts Project Australia (Naarm/Melbourne) returns to MAF with a lively series of artist-led workshops, taking place in the heart of the fair and supported by a City of Melbourne annual arts grant. Encouraging participation of all ages and artistic abilities, join APA artists Amani Tia for an intimate portrait painting workshop; Joanne Nethercote will run a tiny cat embroidery class, inviting participants to bring in photos of their cats to capture; and finally an immersive still life drawing session invites audiences to capture Chris Mason’s iconic SSBBW sculptures.

A significant addition to this year’s program, MAF will debut FUTUREOBJEKT, a 600-square-metre salon dedicated to collectible design, showcasing over 20 of Australia’s most compelling voices in contemporary design, architecture, and crafted objects. A fair-within-a-fair, framed by a tightly curated DESIGN CONVERSATIONS program, FUTUREOBJEKT will further cement Melbourne’s position as a creative force in the region.

“2026 will bring a dynamic program and incredible representation of young galleries – a handful of whom are making their MAF debut, intermixed with fair veterans and pioneers to Australia’s art scene. Once again we’re delighted to be platforming the William Mora Indigenous Art Centre Program and the crucial role they play in supporting First Peoples’-owned art centres. ‘The Bubble’ will be home this year to our CONVERSATIONS series, which is sure to provide some probing discussion and an extended program with the addition of DESIGN CONVERSATIONS as part of FUTUREOBJEKT. I’m incredibly proud to be at the helm of MAF for its 19th edition, which continues to prove itself as an authoritative voice on contemporary Australian art, and now design,” said Melissa Loughnan, Fair Director, Melbourne Art Fair.

Gallery Highlights

20 Years of Australia’s Leading Galleries / Notable Anniversaries

2026 marks a series of significant milestones for leading Australian gallerists, many of whom are celebrating 20 years at the forefront of the national art industry. Among them, Sophie Gannon Gallery Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne) is exhibiting accessible, small-scale paintings from young emerging artist Elynor Smithwick, and also celebrating 20 years is Neon Parc (Naarm/Melbourne), which will present a solo exhibition from artist Elizabeth Newman, exploring recent and historic works. In addition, The Women’s Art Register celebrates its 50-year-anniversary. Founding member and acclaimed artist Lesley Dumbrell will hold a solo exhibition with Charles Nodrum Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne), and participate in a CONVERSATIONS discussion on art, archives, and feminism.

Celebrating Debut and Returning Exhibitors

MAF will see the return of established gallerists and pioneers to Australia’s art scene Martin Browne Contemporary (Naarm/Melbourne), Sophie Gannon Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne), Justin Miller Art (Gadigal Country/Sydney), Nicholas Thompson Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne), Charles Nodrum Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne), Niagara Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne), and Brisbane-based Jan Murphy Gallery (Meanjin/Brisbane). Sitting adjacent to the fair’s longest standing booths are a handful of new wave galleries making their MAF debut including PALAS (Gadigal Country/Sydney), S_y_d_n_e_y_S_y_d_n_e_y_ (Gadigal Country/Sydney), and Grace (Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland), representing a new generation of leadership within Australia’s cultural landscape.

Works Not to Miss

Justin Miller Art (Gadigal Country/Sydney) will curate an exhibition of significant works by Brett Whiteley and Sidney Nolan, including a rarely seen painting by Nolan ‘Lovers, Luna Park’ (1941), long hung in the bedroom of Sunday Reed at Melbourne’s beloved Heide Museum of Modern Art. Martin Browne Contemporary (Naarm/Melbourne) is showing the latest work from Tokyo-based interdisciplinary art collective teamLab ‘Darkness Becomes Existence, an Eternal Sea’. Known for their boundary-pushing immersive experiences, their latest work similarly blurs the lines between art, technology, the viewer, and the physical space. Another work not to miss, S_y_d_n_e_y_S_y_d_n_e_y_ (Gadigal Country/Sydney) will be presenting a work on paper from late American artist Donald Judd, widely considered as one of the most important artists of the 1960s and postwar period for his pivotal role in Minimalism and sculpture.

Must-See Solo Exhibitions

The Renshaws’ (Meanjin/Brisbane) will present a series of abstract paintings from 2025 Archibald Prize winner Julie Fragar, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition at an art fair.

Fragar’s text paintings and image-based works navigate the intersections of family history, portraiture, biography, and the spectrum of human emotions in a process that meticulously layers imagery from various sources. Charles Nodrum Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne) is showcasing a retrospective of Australian abstract artist Lesley Dumbrell, with works spanning her celebrated career from the 1960s to never-seen-before pieces. MAGMA Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne) will present an immersive exhibition by Drez, featuring paintings, wall-based sculptures, and light-driven installations that invite audience participation. Mary Cherry Contemporary (Naarm/Melbourne) is showing young feminist artist Ruth O’Leary whose performative works explore female bodily autonomy; and Sophie Gannon Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne) is exhibiting paintings from young emerging artist Elynor Smithwick.

First Nations Artists to Celebrate

The William Mora Indigenous Art Centre Program supports the participation of Indigenous-owned art centres, funded by the Australian Government through the Indigenous Visual Arts Industry Support (IVAIS) initiative, and generously supported by Morgans Financial Ltd. This program recognises the crucial role art centres play in sustaining First Peoples arts and communities, and in sharing the stories of Indigenous Australians. In 2026, MOA Arts (Mua Lag/Moa Island) will return with a compelling duo show, featuring Paula Savage’s iconic weaving works and prints; and large-format, framed ‘pochoir’ (mono-prints) on paper by Moa Arts founding member and Chairman, Solomon Booth. Jilamara Arts & Craft Association (Milikapiti/Wulirankuwu), Munupi Arts & Crafts Association (Pirlangimpi/Garden Point), and Papunya Tjupi Arts(Warumpi/Papunya) also return to the fair, and for their MAF debuts, Walkatjara Art (Uluru) and Ikuntji Artists (Ikuntji/Haasts Bluff) will add to the lineup of Indigenous-owned art centres. Walkatjara Art will present a suite of twelve recent works by revered elder and songman Reggie Uluru. Each work embodies his deep connection to Country and the ancestral story of Wati Ngintaka – the Perentie Lizard Man. As senior traditional custodian of Uluru, and a key figure in the historic 1985 handback of Anangu lands, Uluru’s authority as a cultural leader is woven into every canvas.

Celebrated Wik-Mungkan elder/artist Janet Koongotema is represented this year by D’LAN GALLERIES (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney, Lenapehoking/New York), with a solo show exhibiting new paintings and three-dimensional fibre works sharing the artist’s authoritative knowledge of Country. Emilia Galatis Projects (Whadjuk boodjar/Perth) will present a solo body of work from rising star Corban Clause Williams. Experienced as an immersive installation, the Martu artist has developed a range of floor coverings to accompany large-scale paintings alongside a series of accessible works on paper that speak to the essence of “Kalpaa”, a major theme in his work. Following sell-out exhibitions in 2024 and 2025, Niagara Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne) is presenting new paintings by emerging Mudburra artist Arthur (Jalyirri) Dixon, in addition to a selection of images from Gurindji | Malngin | Mudburra Peoples, Australian First Nations; Anglo-Australian | Chinese | German | Irish | Scottish artist Brenda L. Croft’s acclaimed large-scale photomedia portrait series ‘Naabámi (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me)’. Nanda/Hobbs (Gadigal Country/Sydney) is exhibiting works from senior Pertama Maduthara Luritja artist Selma Coulthard, whose practice is rooted in the Australian landscape and ancestral storytelling. Tolarno Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne) will present an installation from Tennant Creek Brio.

Chinese Market Representation

Increasing representation of the Asian art market includes Tido Art (Naarm/Melbourne) which recently relocated from China to Melbourne and will present a solo exhibition ‘Red in Silence’, a series of contemporary porcelain and ink works on paper by Chinese-born, Melbourne-based artist Darian Duan. In addition, REDBASE Art (Naam/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney, Yogyakarta, Indonesia) will be showing a solo presentation of senior Chinese artist Shen Shaomin. Known for his experimental and conceptual installations, Shaomin’s Chinese Carp will be on show at MAF, an installation of mechanical carps that illustrate the consequences of human desire and artificiality, evoking concerns and reflections on our ecosystem and technology. Nanda/Hobbs (Gadigal Country/Sydney) will be exhibiting works from Australian/Chinese artist Jun Chen, whose gestural works shaped by Chinese painting traditions capture the shifting energy of the Australian landscape.

FUTUREOBJEKT Highlights

Noteworthy Solo Exhibitions/Pioneers of Australian Design

Seasoned industrial designer Adam Goodrum (Gadigal Country/Sydney) is presenting a new chair and table concept as a continuation from his partnership with Cappellini; Melbourne-based Volker Haug Studio (Naarm/Melbourne) will present a new limited-edition collection of mouth-blown Murano glass lamps produced in Venice; Don Cameron (Gadigal Country/Sydney) will showcase a considered mix of rare vintage collectible design pieces together with new works of his own including a series of lamps and nesting seating concepts; CHRISTOPHER BOOTS (Naarm/Melbourne) will reimagine some of the lighting studio’s most well recognised pieces in new and limited-edition finishes while Adam Cornish (Naarm/Melbourne) will present a new couture collection of mosaic mirrors informed alongside a sculptural rocking chair. Tom Fereday (Gadigal Country/Sydney) will present a cluster of sculptural stone plinth lights alongside his ‘Cast’ speaker, clad in marine-grade aluminium and designed in collaboration with Tasmanian audio design duo Pitt & Giblin.

Independent Australian Designers

Bringing together four of Melbourne’s most compelling female designers, E4 (Naarm/Melbourne) will combine independent studios Cordon Salon, Rosanna Ceravolo, Jordan Fleming and Marta Figueiredo to present a shared booth. Cordon Salon expands on the runaway success of her Garniture lighting collection, Jordan Fleming and Rosanna Ceravolo will present Soft Monument, their recently released architectural lighting

collaboration alongside a selection of solo works from their individual practices, and Marta Figueiredo presents large-format furniture pieces informed by her art practice, marking a return to the domestic scale after several years focused on major public commissions. In another collaborative mode, rising stars Annie Paxton ((Naarm/Melbourne), Vogue Living’s VL50 Product Designer of the Year 2025, Rigg Design Prize 2025 shortlist) and Dalton Stewart ((Naarm/Melbourne), Interior Design Excellence Awards winner, Rigg Design Prize 2025 finalist) will join forces with a shared booth of curated lighting and objects from the designers.

Notable Group Exhibitions

CRAFT Victoria (Naarm/Melbourne) presents a series of works by designers Isabel Avendano-Hazbun, Claire Ellis and Locki Humphrey that explore new and unexpected materials. Returning MAF collaborators OIGÅLL PROJECTS (Naarm/Melbourne) will present new works from a series of local and international designers including Cologne-based Studio Kuhlmann, and Australian talent BMDO, Linda Valentic, Anna Varendorff, Douglas Powell, Brud Studia and Peter D Cole. OKO OLO (Gadigal Country/Sydney, Naarm/Melbourne) will present a curated group exhibition from founders Genevieve Hromas, Juliet Ramsey and lighting designer Charlie White. Agency Projects (Naarm/Melbourne) is presenting a group exhibition directed by First Nations art curator Shonae Hobson, including pieces from Helen Ganalmirriwuy and Roslyn Markapuy, speaking to the importance of intergenerational knowledge transfer within indigenous families and communities.

International Designers

London-based furniture designers Agglomerati will present a solo show in collaboration with Netherlands-based designer Maria Tyakina. Together they will expand on their collection previously shown at Milan Design Week 2025, reimagined in combinations of Australian timbers and stones.

Studio Gardner (Gadigal Country/Sydney) will make its MAF debut with an impressive lineup of international talent including decorative objects from acclaimed American fashion designer Rick Owens, Belgian designer Jumandie Seys, French lighting and furniture designer Pauline Esparon (Architectural Digest’s AD100), and Milan-based multidisciplinary duo Studio Utte (Architectural Digest’s AD100).

Ahead of the opening of TWENTY TWENTY (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney, Boorloo/Perth) later in February, Australian retailer Mobilia will offer a preview of its new collectible design gallery concept through FUTUREOBJEKT. As a first taste, they will present a focused solo exhibition by Paris-based designer and architect Joris Poggioli (Architectural

Digest’s AD100). The presentation centres on Poggioli’s iconic Rose sofa, shown alongside a considered edit of sculptural works and lighting. Drawing on his Italian-French heritage, the works balance French elegance and refinement with an understated Italian eccentricity, offering a glimpse into the curatorial direction of TWENTY TWENTY ahead of its formal opening.

“FUTUREOBJEKT is a bit of a provocation. It’s not trying to define design neatly, it’s about showing where it gets messy, ambitious, and deeply human. It brings together designers, artists, makers and brands who care about process, material and ideas, and brings them into conversation in a way that feels alive, not fixed,” said Andy Kelly, Director, Collectible Design at Melbourne Art Fair.

Partner Highlights

LOEWE

MAF has announced the renewal of its partnership with LOEWE for 2026, marking the second consecutive year the global luxury house will join the Fair as its exclusive fashion partner. As the 19th edition of MAF unfolds in February 2026, the collaboration once again unites Australia’s most iconic art event with the luxury fashion house internationally celebrated for celebrating and elevating contemporary craftsmanship since 1846.

To mark LOEWE’s involvement, two bespoke LOEWE Newsstands will be showcased at the Fair, offering visitors an engaging moment of discovery and storytelling. Each newsstand will present the new MAF Broadsheet, available complimentary for guests to collect at the fair.

Melissa Loughnan, Fair Director, Melbourne Art Fair said “Authentic partnerships are integral to MAF’s success and it’s such a pleasure to collaborate with forward-thinking brands who share our mission for supporting artists, designers and craftspeople. We’re excited to have LOEWE expand our partnership in 2026 and introduce a physical brand presence at MAF this year, demonstrating the growing connection between the worlds of art, fashion and design”.

The House continues to uphold its heritage of traditional craftsmanship while simultaneously redefining new frontiers of creative expression – a vision brought to life through LOEWE’s ongoing commitment to art, design and craftsmanship, realised via specialist collaborations at Salone del Mobile and global platforms such as the internationally acclaimed LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize which will be held in Singapore for the first time later this year.

Events & Programming

2026 CONVERSATIONS presented by Guardian Australia

A platform for critical discourse and the sharing of ideas, CONVERSATIONS, brings together cultural communities and thinkers from across the creative spectrum. The aim: to address the future of art and its relationship to interdisciplinary practices and the contemporary world through a series of talks and panels featuring artists, gallerists, curators, collectors, architects, critics, scholars and cultural luminaries.

This year, the CONVERSATIONS series will be hosted in ‘The Bubble’, a custom inflatable structure designed by OIGÅLL PROJECTS (Naarm/Melbourne). Intended to shift, breathe, and adapt, The Bubble’s semi-translucent walls will create a deliberately voyeuristic experience inviting passersby to catch fragments of conversation and participate in discussions as desired.

Highlights from the CONVERSATIONS program include: VIDEO – In Conversation With Video Curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel

Saturday 21 February, 1:30PM

Join VIDEO 2026 curator and international talent Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, director of Fondation Lafayette Anticipations in Paris as she speaks with Bianca Durrant, Director of Melbourne-based technological art organisation Experimenta, and Emily Sexton, Director of Curatorial, Programming and Education for ACMI, Australia’s museum of screen culture. Together, they’ll discuss their approaches to curating video and new media art, and the future of exhibiting in this ever-changing sector.

Women’s Art Register – Things That Keep Us Together Roundtable Discussion Saturday 21 February, 2:30PM

The Women’s Art Register recently turned 50 – a major milestone for an archive shaped by collective vision and sustained by volunteers. The new book, Keeping Things Together, brings the Register’s history and ongoing impact on Australian culture to life. To discuss this, one of the book’s authors Anna Daly joins founding member Meredith Rogers, artists Lesley Dumbrell and Azza Zein, and curator Maya Hodge for a lively discussion on art, archives, and feminism and to celebrate the things that keep community organisations together through the highs and lows of social change.

Complementary to the addition of FUTUREOBJEKT in 2026, the CONVERSATIONS program will also see the introduction of CONVERSATIONS ON DESIGN, presented by NHO (Naarm/Melbourne) and facilitated by founder Neil Hugh Kenna.

From Creativity to Capital: Scaling Practice in a Global Economy

Friday 20 February, 1:30pm

Designers and studios face structural obstacles, from manufacturing and logistics to financing, shaping their ability to operate at scale. How can creative practices negotiate these constraints while preserving integrity and ambition? Emerging and established designers and manufacturers Volker Haug, Jordan Fleming, and Susan Tait will discuss the strategic pathways toward commercial viability, examining how local grounding and global engagement intersect in building sustainable, resilient design practices.

Collecting with Conscience: Power, Privilege and the Politics of Collecting

Friday 20 February, 2:30pm

A new generation of collectors is reshaping the landscape by insisting on greater transparency around diversity, sustainability, and ethical practice. Their expectations are reframing not only how objects are valued but how institutions and markets position themselves. In this conversation, Executive Director of Craft Victoria Nicole Durling, interior designer Brahman Perera, and General Manager of Agency Projects Mayatili Marika will discuss how social activism and ethically driven collecting are influencing decision-making, expanding visibility for underrepresented artists and designers, and redefining what responsible stewardship looks like in the decades ahead.

Fetishizing Function: The Cultural and Economic Codes of Collectible Design

Friday 20 February, 3:30pm

As the market for collectible design accelerates, how do objects transition from utilitarian items to cultural artefacts? When is a chair simply a chair, and when does it become a vessel of artistic, historical, or speculative value? Join NGV Curator of Contemporary Design and Architecture Gemma Savio and designer Anna Varendorff for a discussion on the criteria that shape collectability, the forces currently defining the market, and the trajectories influencing its future.

The full CONVERSATIONS schedule can be found online HERE.

There are a couple more announcements still to come, but it’s here, it’s happening, and we can’t wait.

Click here to secure your tickets.

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Elliot Garnaut Thinks You Should Buy New Shoes

You may know Elliot Garnaut as a fashion stylist, having dressed a roster of star clients including Rebecca Harding, Andy Lee, Carrie Bickmore, Phoebe Tonkin and more. Maybe you know him from his new fashion-meets-footy podcast with Norm Smith medalist Isaac Smith. Or maybe, you have discovered why he is a MAF ambassador from our episode of Material Attachments (kindly watch here) where we dive into his art collection. 

We asked Elliot to share some of this favourite things to do in Naarm/Melbourne…

Where would you take your boyfriend if you wanted to seem cultured, but not “I read the wall text” cultured?

Melbourne Museum to wax lyrical about the dinosaurs. They’re impressive, extinct, and require no follow-up questions. I can gesture broadly at femurs, use words like “era” and “period” interchangeably, and speak with the confidence of someone who once watched half a documentary on SBS and has never looked back. There’s no pressure to interpret, no risk of disagreement, just enormous bones and the comforting knowledge that whatever I say, the dinosaurs will not correct me.

Must visit gallery to waste an hour in?

Sophie Gannon Gallery in Richmond. Sophie is a very close friend of my family and her space not only exhibits unique talent but her team are always warm, inviting and knowledgeable. If not leaving with a piece, you’re leaving with an education.

Where do you walk when you want to feel productive without producing anything?

The walk home down St Kilda Road from Flinders Street Station. Park side, always. The NGV slipping past on one side, the Shrine sitting patiently on the horizon like a reward I haven’t earned. It’s a walk that looks productive from a distance, purposeful stride, thoughtful face, but is really just an hour of gentle thinking, unnecessary reflection, and the comforting illusion that something important is happening internally. Nothing is achieved, nothing is resolved, but I arrive home feeling calmer, superior, and vaguely virtuous, which is often enough.

Where do you go when it’s technically nice outside but you don’t trust it and you need a cocktail?

My kitchen bench. I serve the coldest fizz all year ’round and consider it a point of personal pride. It’s where I perch with a glass that’s mostly bubbles, surrounded by picky bits arranged with the confidence of someone who’s hosted just enough dinners to know no one remembers what they ate, only that they felt looked after. The weather can do whatever it likes outside, threaten rain, flirt with sun, change its mind entirely, but inside there is certainty: good lighting, sharp snacks, and a bottle de jour opened “just in case.” Friends drift in, coats are abandoned, conversations deepen without anyone having to shout, and I feel productive in the very specific way that involves no shoes and absolutely no plans. If one must leave, Apollo Inn on Flinders Lane is a close second to my bench I guess.

Where should someone go before the Fair to feel prepared, emotionally and footwear-wise?

Above the Cloud at 80 Collins. It’s the rare place where emotional readiness and sensible footwear overlap. Even a novice can emerge feeling reassured, supported, and smugly prepared, shoes that appease the art snobs, excite the hipsters, and still allow you to stand politely for hours pretending not to be tired. You leave lighter in spirit, heavier in bag, and quietly confident that whatever the Fair throws at you; concrete floors, long conversations, unexpected encounters, your feet, at least, will not betray you.

Melbourne Art Fair, 19 – 22 February 2026. 
Click here to secure tickets.

Image: Melbourne Art Fair 2025. Photo: Liana Hardy. Courtesy LOEWE.

Broached Commissions to Design VIP Lounge as a Living Archive

For Melbourne Art Fair 2026, Broached Commissions will create a VIP Lounge focused on floral art; from 18th Century paintings on vellum to AI digital speculations on flora. The space will be conceived as a living archive of how women artists, from the 18th century to today, have rendered the natural world as both scientific inquiry and emotional landscape.

The lounge will combine living floral installations with the artworks. Floral art by Hattie Molloy will entwine with sculptural furniture by K5 and the warm acoustics of Bang&Olufsen sound systems, creating a contemplative refuge amid the fair’s intensity.

Across the exhibition, artworks by artists that represent how the natural world has been utilised as a reflection, rebellion and rebirth across centuries and continents will be placed within Molloy’s floral arrangements, an immersive relationship between staged and artistic explorations of nature. An ambient soundscape of abstracted natural environments, produced by artist k8 mo55, will inhabit the lounge, unifying it as an immersive experience.

“We are excited to curate a VIP Lounge around a set theme and work with Hattie and K8 mo55 to add more sensory layers to the space. Our desire was to bring warmth and calm to the space.” said Lou Weis, founder of Broached Commissions.

Melbourne Art Fair returns 19 – 22 February 2026 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Tickets are on sale now.

Broached Commissions is a research and narrative-driven production house. We commission and create collectible design and provide creative direction for public art and interior commercial spaces, such as hotels and hospitality.

Broached has had survey shows at the UCCA (Beijing) and NGV Ian Potter Centre (Melbourne). Their work is collected by museums and private collectors globally and they were the first Australian design house to show at Design Miami in 2019. Broached is committed to a narrative focused critique not just of history, but the role of design in defining each moment in history. To achieve this Broached has established a global network of relationships with curators and designers who they collaborate with regularly.

Broached was founded in 2010 by Creative Director Lou Weis and includes Lincoln Perdrisat as Designer.

Inaugural MAF X NGV Design Commission Awarded to Anna Varendorff

Anna Varendorff is an artist and designer whose practice spans jewellery, sculpture, product and lighting design. Since 2013, she has worked under the moniker ACV Studio, producing design works that are at once minimal and expressive, achieving cult recognition in Melbourne and beyond. Trained as a metalsmith, Varendorff fabricates with precision in metal, yet her works retain a poetic lightness. Defined by pared-back tubular forms, graceful arcs and slender brass or steel lines, they culminate in refined objects that merge craft discipline with industrial clarity.

Varendorff completed a Master of Fine Art at Monash University in 2015. She has exhibited extensively around Australia and overseas. She has exhibited at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art as part of NEW16; at CAVES at The Substation; and at TCB Art Inc., Bus Projects, Craft, c3 Contemporary Art Space, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and Anna Pappas Gallery, among others. In 2018, ACV Studio’s Glass Half Full Vase received a Wallpaper* Design Award for Design of the Year, cementing her reputation as one of Australia’s most distinctive contemporary designers.

WATCH | Don Cameron’s Sculpturally Functional Collection

Brahman Perera to Bring Effortless Luxury with the Champagne Bollinger Bar

There are partnerships that make perfect sense: caviar and McDonalds hash browns, Mary-Kate and Ashley, Champagne and art fairs. So, it was only a matter of time before Champagne Bollinger swept into Melbourne Art Fair as the official Champagne Partner. After all, all that art in one place can be overwhelming without a glass of fizz.

To mark the occasion, the ever-divine Brahman Perera, designer, ambassador, tastemaker, aesthete, is conjuring a Champagne Bar for Bollinger that promises to be part parlour, part hallucination. Expect brushed brass, soft velvet, and the faint suggestion that time has melted into fabric. Brahman, as always, moves with that impossible Melbourne poise: elegance with an air of mischief, restraint with a pulse.

Brahman has long been one of those people who makes beauty look accidental — the kind of elegance that doesn’t apologise for itself, just quietly orders another glass. Together, he and Bollinger aren’t just serving Champagne; they’re serving the fantasy of effortless perfection, with a twist of lemon and a subtle sense that you should’ve worn better shoes. Where every glass seems to refill itself and the room is full of good lighting and possibility.

So come, sip, and pretend (as we all do) that it’s just another perfectly ordinary Thursday in February.

Melboure Art Fair’s opening night Vernissage takes place on Thursday 19 February 2026. Click here to buy tickets.

WATCH | Tom Polo’s works are both mirror and portal

Tom Polo’s paintings have a distinctly human, yet otherworldly quality to them. Drawing from conversations, secrets exchanged in the studio, or simply beginning with a feeling, each work becomes a record of human connection, a moment shared between subject and artist that later fosters a connection between artwork and viewer, where recognition and reflection might unfold. Disappearing into huge washes of colour and gestural markings, viewers may be reminded of a feeling, a familiar shirt, or the way their favourite person cranes their neck when they laugh.

Generously welcoming MAF into his studio, Tom shared his ways of working, and his fascination with psychological mirroring: the subtle (and not so subtle) ways people who spend a lot of time together tend to take on each other’s rhythms and idiosyncrasies.

STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney) will present new works from Tom Polo at Melbourne Art Fair 2026. Tickets on sale now.

Tali Roth’s Material Attachments

On a grey, damp August day, stepping into interior designer Tali Roth’s mid-century home felt like being wrapped in a blanket. Candles flickering away in the background, Tali guided us through some her favourite objects, not limited to pyrite crystals gifted from her father (thank you Trevor Roth), an incredible Georgia O’Keefe photograph by George Makos, and a Lina Bo Bardi chair that includes a sceptre fit for a queen.

This is Material Attachments — a series where we visit collectors not for what they’ve acquired, but for what they can’t let go of.

Elliot Garnaut’s Material Attachments

Elliot Garnaut has taste. Not just in clothes (he’s a stylist by the way), but in music, Champagne, and the art of doing both in front of a fire with Whitney Houston’s debut vinyl spinning away in the back. Vape in one hand, glass in the other, it’s a scene we at the Melbourne Art Foundation can only dream of.

Another brave soul to let the marketing department into his home (a team of 2 with minimal planning skills), Elliot’s space is curated for elegance and an underlying coziness. It’s the sort of place you plan to visit briefly but somehow find yourself there three hours later.

While he has fallen victim to the Labubu propaganda, Elliot’s home houses works by Nicholas Ives, Hannah Gartside, Drew Connor Holland, as well as a 17th century Tibetan bust that in another timeline, would be languishing in Kim Kardashian’s echoing mansion.

This is Material Attachments, a series in which we visit collectors not for what they’ve bought, but for what they’ve refused to let go of.

Yvonne Shafir’s Material Attachments

We assume you already know Yvonne Shafir.
If you don’t, well, you’re about to finally start living.

For reasons we’re still trying to understand, Yvonne allowed a group of under-caffeinated Melbourne Art Fair staff into her home (we promised to bring Babka—Andy forgot, Jodie panic-bought one arriving an hour late, and nobody made eye contact until it arrived).

What we found was a pink-hued labyrinth: part archive, part shrine, part psychological obstacle course. Art, objects, and what Yvonne lovingly refers to as “symbolic junk” filled the space. Everything meant something. Nothing was neutral. Even a stuffed deer head attached to the wall (discovered at an op shop) served part of her welcome ritual, singing a jaunty Christmas tune from its battery powered speakers. Down the hall several things blinked and swayed back and forth.

Yvonne has a soft spot for the pink, the fluffy, and the ambiguously alive. Her collection includes works by Hiromi Tango (Sullivan+Strumpf), Kathy Temin (Anna Schwartz Gallery), Cybele Cox (Ames Yavuz), her own creations, and a number of pieces that may once have been lamps or may, in time, evolve into lamps. Each object radiates story, memory, or mild psychic interference.

This is Material Attachments: a series in which we visit collectors not for what they’ve bought, but for what they’ve refused to let go of.

Melbourne Art Fair Appoints Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel as Curator for VIDEO

Since 2018, Melbourne Art Fair’s VIDEO sector has showcased innovative and experimental video works by Australian and international artists. Melbourne Art Foundation is thrilled to announce Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel as the curator for VIDEO in 2026. 

Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel is the director of the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, where she has curated shows by Martine Syms, Neil Beloufa, Issy Wood, Cyprien Gaillard (also at Palais de Tokyo), Martin Margiela, Marguerite Humeau and Jean-Marie Appriou, and a forthcoming exhibition by Diego Marcon (2026). Under her tenure, the institution has also presented shows by Lina Lapelyte, Pol Taburet, Mark Leckey, Mohamad Abdouni, and forthcoming projects by Meriem Bennani and Steffani Jemison.  

In 2020 she was the curator of the Riga Biennial, “and suddenly it all blossoms”, and director of the feature film based on the exhibition. From 2011 to 2019, she was curator at the Palais de Tokyo where she has presented, among others, the cartes blanches to Tomás Saraceno, ON AIR, and to Tino Seghal. She has also curated the exhibitions of Marguerite Humeau, Ed Atkins, Helen Marten and David Douard, as well as the group exhibition Le bord des mondes.  

She has regularly collaborated with international institutions, such as the Fondation Art Explora, the MoMA PS1, Nottingham Contemporary, the Stedelijk Museum, Palais de Tokyo, or the Château de Versailles. She is a regular advisor and juror for several institutions and art fairs such as the French Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, Art Basel Paris, the Villa Kujuyama, the Villa Albertine, among others.  

Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel regularly publishes in international prints and catalogs, and participates in seminars and juries worldwide. 

Artists previously exhibiting in VIDEO include Destiny Deacon with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney), Sara Cwynar with Cooper Cole (Toronto), Buhlebezwe Siwani with Galeria Madragoa (Lisbon), Amala Groom with BAProjects (Naarm/Melbourne) and more.

Melbourne Art Fair returns 19 – 22 February 2026 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC).

Image: Bettina Pettiluga

Explore & Collect with Keri Elmsly

A dynamic creative producer, Keri Elmsly is known for leading and developing creative experience-driven ambitious projects and businesses for global leaders in culture, tech and art. Currently the Executive Director of Programming at ACMI, Melbourne Art Fair speaks with Keri about her top picks of the Fair.

Explore hundreds of artworks on the Fair’s online platform, MAF Virtual, live until 7 March.

STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney)
Paul Yore, Sydney Opera House (You Make Me Feel), 2024

Paul Yore’s work nestles into your mind the way an earworm does with a song. His solo show Word Made Flesh at ACCA in 2022 was the first exhibition I went to when I moved to Melbourne from LA and was the welcome I needed. To me, every element of the visual language, materials and politics is an arresting and immediate refusal of the mundane and mediocre.  This piece shouts in the face of rising nationalism and retraction.

Paul Yore, Sydney Opera House (You Make Me Feel), 2024, mixed media assemblage on board comprising glass, crockery, Perspex, beads, glitter, found objects, synthetic fur, trim, ribbon, cotton thread, LED light, wood, adhesive, fixtures, synthetic polymer, enamel, 163.0 x 173.0 x 12.0cm. Courtesy the artist and STATION.

Australian Tapestry Workshop (Naarm/Melbourne)
Julian Martin, UNTITLED 12, 2020

I am drawn to tapestry so often, to see these works as the result of collective intention strike the core of my heart. The tightness of each thread and density of the work hums with intensity and constraint, without compromising the vibrant joy of the dance.

Julian Martin, Untitled 12, 2020, wool, cotton, 21 x 14cm. Courtesy the artist and Australian Tapestry Workshop.

Niagara Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne)
Noel McKenna, The snail watcher, 2024

We are currently obsessed with Adam Elliot’s Memoir of A Snail– as is the rest of the world right now! With so much inference, this painting’s immediacy sets me off with more questions than are reasonable to be asking. Mostly though, when is the dog going to be let out? Is there a red brick house in the background and how decorative is that wrought iron fence at the top?

Noel McKenna, The snail watcher, 2024, oil on canvas, 41 x 42cm. Courtesy the artist and Niagara Galleries.

Melbourne Art Fair continues online, with MAF Virtual until 7 March. Click here to discover hundreds of artworks from leading and emerging artists.

Mitch Mahoney on ‘Gurnbak’, Commissioned By the Victorian First Peoples Art & Design Fair Showcase and More

Multidisciplinary artist Mitch Mahoney focuses on the revitalisation of South-Eastern Aboriginal practices, creating cultural items such as possum skin cloaks, traditional canoes and kangaroo tooth necklaces. He is the recipient of the inaugural Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair Commission and his work, Gurnbak premiered at Melbourne Art Fair 2025.

Speaking with Melbourne Art Fair, he expands on his practice, how he collects his materials whilst maintaining a deep respect for Country, and his hopes for the VFPADF.

Your work, Gurnbak (Goodoo, Mulloway, Long tail), premiered at Melbourne Art Fair as part of the Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair Showcase. Can you describe the work and your process when creating it?

Gurnbak was created through the process of fish printing which is also known as gyotaku. This work was also mixed with an overlay of Southeast Indigenous line work. Gurnbak is created as a way to bring my passion for waterways into my work. The fish seen in the work were acquired through different methods to highlight the different ways we as humans, interact with fish and waterways and spark conversation around fish farming, commercial fishing, and wild-caught fish.

Mitch Mahoney, Gurnbak (Goodoo, Mulloway, Long tail), installation view. Melbourne Art Fair 2025. Photo: Cristina Ulloa Sobarzo.

Much of your work focuses on revitalising South-Eastern Aboriginal practices such as creating possum skin cloaks. How did you initially learn these practices?

All my knowledge was passed to me from my family in the beginning of my practice. Together as a family we would attend workshops and make possum skin cloaks as well as spend time together collecting materials and creating different objects.

Your works, including Kampitya (Father), represent a deeply entwined connection between the work and nature. How does the physical process of creating help you connect to Country?

For me, the work Kampitya (Father) was about time spent on Country with my own father, meeting other members of the community; particularly Dave Doyle and his family, and being able to go out in the bush and learn about that Country from him. I spent several years learning about coolamon making to work on creating a red gum canoe; an experience that is a defining moment in my learning.

Can you speak to the materials you use and how you source them?

When it comes to materials, I collect from many different places and gather a whole range. Generally, I spend time collecting stringy bark, coolamons, sap, resin and reeds. The main thing about collecting is to know where you are, whose Country it is, and to ask for permission. For myself, I make sure that I’m always considering what effect my collecting will have on Country and ensuring that I’m collecting in a responsible way.

Mitch Mahoney, Gurnbak (Goodoo, Mulloway, Long tail), installation view. Melbourne Art Fair 2025. Photo: Phoebe Powell.

How do you hope the introduction of the Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair will impact Victorian First Peoples artists in future?

For me, I hope that the Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair will be a place that can showcase who we are to the wider world, showing the distinctive styles that we use and the breadth and range of our work, but also stating that we are here and we are working hard to continue our practices and knowledge. I also hope that it will create more opportunities for young South-eastern Indigenous artists to continue practising the work they are passionate about and develop their practice into the future.

An initiative of the Victorian Government’s Creative State 2025 strategy, the Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair Showcase Exhibition premiered at Melbourne Art Fair, and was driven by the First Peoples Directions Circle – a group of esteemed First Peoples creative leaders who guide the work of Creative Victoria.

READ | Diena Georgetti x Melissa Loughnan 

I’ve been a fan of Diena Georgetti since curating Victory Over the Sun with Helen Hughes at Utopian Slumps, in its first location in Collingwood, in 2009. The work in the exhibition was an intricate geometric abstract painting in brown and primary-coloured tones. As a failed painter myself and an appreciator of the canons of modernism, Diena’s technical prowess completely blew my mind. I’d been told that she doesn’t really do email or phone calls and just dealt entirely with her gallery. She sent me a handwritten thank you note afterwards, in a sparkly peach envelope, which I have kept to this day. Sixteen years later I am now the proud owner of one of Diena’s paintings, and as new Fair Director, am pinching myself that she has agreed to chat with me. 

ML: I am a big fan of your new AI-driven works. Can you tell me how this new direction came about? 

DG: A lover whilst exiting my life, turned to say ”l never really loved you. l loved your art.” 

It wasn’t the biggest burn. 

I consider myself the art anyway. 

It’s the best part of me. 

Really, actually, the only me. 

There is so little of me (‘my’ life). I have extra territory to make a variety of art personas. 

Early on, I saw a Mondrian exhibition that included bucolic landscapes, abstract still lives, and the hard-edge grid paintings. It read as a group presentation. Right then I wanted to be that artist – signatureless.  

Within this greed are the AI paintings. Late on a Sunday afternoon, bored but not, I entertained myself on a generator. I used all the prompts from my self-made archive, including art movements/artists/music lyrics/historical eras and dates. An example was ”please help my killer, Matisse.” 

In prompting, I was starting the art with words, which in turn became ideas. These are ideas made into paintings. Which isn’t a way I make art. My preferred way is to make imagery, that is then interpreted into ideas. An education. However, these newfound ideas became undeniably worthwhile. So, although I was initially uncomforted by the illustrative type of them, I gave over to the value of the content. 

Diena Georgetti, The Collector/foyer, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 101cm. Courtesy the artist and Neon Parc (Naarm/Melbourne). 

ML: Are The Collector/trinity and The Collector/foyer the basis of what you’ve presented at Melbourne Art Fair? Can you tell me about them? 

DG: The Collector collection came by thinking of my 40 years making art, isolated in the studio. I thought about those objects outside of the studio. I thought of the collectors, and how in number, they are rarer than artists. How private they are, not thirsty for acknowledgement. And how that small numbers of peoples’ attentions carry the continuance of many artists. To honour them, I made them the art. 

I’ve contributed two Collector paintings to the NEON PARC stand, as part of a group presentation, including Damiano Bertoli and collaborators Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley. The largest at 2 metres is titled The Collector/trinity and depicts a chain of three figures (portrayed as collector, artist, director?) in embrace within an art gallery. The physicality of that connection appears sexually driven, and may emit the question of art appreciation being, likewise hard wired. There is some kind of supernatural affect upon them, due to the proximity to all that art. Something extra metabolic erupts as a tumour upon them, connecting them by organic tissue. The smaller painting at 1 metre is titled The Collector/foyer, in which a single female figure is viewing a painting within a foyer. She is dressed for a soiree and appears to have ostracised herself to spend time alone. In that, an intimacy develops between her and the art. The painting appears almost smug, in its position of elder, having within it, the historical experiences of all mankind. Her pose, in response, is one many of us have struck. Self-aware, all eyes, with white noise screeching in our ears. Desperate to find, learn, and know what can be, via this mysterious object. 

Upcoming projects for Diena Georgetti include the Art Basel Hong Kong Insights sector with a solo presentation courtesy the artist and Neon Parc, March 2025; Circular Quay Foyer Wall commission at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, courtesy the artist and 1301SW Sydney, March 2025; and debut solo presentation at 1301SW Sydney, October 2025. 

Image right: Diena Georgetti, The Collector/trinity (detail), 2025, acrylic on canvas, 120.5 x 170cm. Courtesy the artist and Neon Parc (Naarm/Melbourne).

2025 Richard Parker Award Announced

Melbourne Art Fair is delighted to announce Hannah Gartside, represented by Tolarno Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne), as recipient of the Richard Parker Award. Founder of RATIONALE, an Official Partner of Melbourne Art Fair, Richard Parker brings a deep commitment to the support of contemporary art to all endeavours. Viewing art as inseparable from the function of daily life and culture, RATIONALE believes in the intrinsic value of artmaking and the paths of connection it forms across our lives.

Hannah presents a solo show at the Fair, transforming vintage gloves from her vast collection into small bunny sculptures which call on the viewer to empathise, opening a portal into their own longing, desired and sometimes buried feelings.

Discover Hannah Gartside’s work alongside works from 70 galleries and Indigenous art centres at Melbourne Art Fair.

Click here to learn more about her practice, and how she created her series, Bunnies in love, lust and longing.

Jane Yang D’Haene on Embracing Chance and Transformation Within Her Ceramic Works

Presenting a dual show of new works by Jane Yang D’Haene and Puuni Brown Nungarrayi, COMA Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney) returns to Melbourne Art Fair. D’Haene’s stoneware is profoundly influenced by her Korean heritage, particularly traditional ceramic forms such as the dal hang-ari (Moon Jar), an iconic symbol of Korean culture. Jane speaks with Melbourne Art Fair about her transformative practice, incorporating both traditional and contemporary techniques.

When were you first introduced to ceramics?

In 2017, my journey into the world of ceramics began, sparked by a thoughtful recommendation from my girlfriend. She intuitively sensed that ceramics would be the perfect medium for me, capturing my imagination and creativity in ways I had yet to discover. Her insight proved invaluable, as working with ceramics has opened up an entirely new avenue of artistic expression for me. It’s remarkable how someone can see our potential so clearly, even before we recognize it ourselves.

Jane Yang D’Haene, Untitled, 2024, stoneware, porcelain, glaze, 46 x 34 x 34cm. Courtesy the artist and COMA Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney).

Can you expand on your experimental take on the traditional Korean ceramic forms of dal hang-ari (moon jars)? Where does your interest in moon jars stem from and how does your process both pay homage to and depart from the traditional?

My experimental approach to the traditional Korean ceramic forms, particularly the dal hang-ari or moon jars, is deeply rooted in a desire to honour and reinterpret cultural heritage. The moon jar, with its serene and understated beauty, symbolises both the simplicity and complexity of Korean ceramic traditions. My interest in these forms stems from their historical significance and their ability to transcend time with their pure, spherical elegance. In my work, I aim to pay homage to the traditional essence of moon jars through meticulous attention to form and proportion. However, I also strive to push the boundaries by incorporating contemporary techniques and aesthetics. This involves a bold experimentation with colours, textures, and glazing methods, which allows me to infuse modern sensibilities into these age-old forms.  The process becomes a dialogue between the past and present, where each piece reflects a synthesis of tradition and innovation. By doing so, I not only preserve the cultural legacy of moon jars but also breathe new life into them, inviting viewers to engage with these timeless forms in fresh and unexpected ways. This journey is not just about creating art but also about forging a connection between history and modernity.

You have previously spoken about your work as transforming emotional experiences of memory into physical forms. Can you expand on how this idea is communicated through your work?

At the heart of my artistic journey is the transformation of emotional experiences and memories into tangible forms, particularly the complex narratives of the human body as it evolves through illness, age, and womanhood. Each ceramic piece becomes a vessel, capturing the nuanced interplay of human emotion and personal history. This transformative process begins with introspection, delving into memories that hold special significance and exploring the emotions they evoke. The process of shaping clay mirrors the shaping of memory and the transformation of our bodies. Layers of glaze and clay represent each memory, whether a fond childhood moment or a difficult recent experience. These layers embody the resilience and beauty of human evolution, capturing the fluidity and strength of form. By embedding my emotional landscape into each piece, I create art that resonates personally, offering a shared space for others to find echoes of their own experiences. My work seeks to transform fleeting moments of memory into enduring expressions of art, bridging the ephemeral and the eternal, and celebrating the ever-changing journey of our bodies and emotions.

Jane Yang D’Haene, Untitled, 2024, stoneware, porcelain, glaze, 28 x 31 x 31cm. Courtesy the artist and COMA Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney).

What is the significance behind leaving much of the textural formations to chance in your work? Is the final result always unexpected? 

Leaving much of the textural formations to chance in my work holds deep significance, as it mirrors the unpredictability and spontaneity of life itself. Embracing chance allows for a genuine expression of the organic and evolving nature of our experiences, much like how life unfolds with unexpected twists and turns. By allowing the clay and glazes to interact freely, I invite the material to speak for itself, creating textures and patterns that are unique to each piece. This element of unpredictability ensures that each work is a one-of-a-kind creation, reflecting the individuality and complexity of personal memories and emotions. The final result is often unexpected, and this element of surprise is integral to my artistic process. It encourages me to let go of control, embracing imperfections and serendipity as part of the creative journey. This openness to chance not only adds depth and character to my work but also resonates with viewers, inviting them to find beauty in the unexpected and to reflect on the serendipity within their own lives.

What can we expect to see from your presentation with COMA at Melbourne Art Fair?

At my presentation with COMA at the Melbourne Art Fair, you can expect a collection that delves into the themes of transformation and memory, with a focus on the narratives of the human body through illness, age, and womanhood. Each piece serves as a vessel to capture the emotional and physical evolution that defines our lives. The collection features ceramics with rich, layered textures and vibrant glazes, each telling its own unique story. The interplay of chance and intention is evident, as I embrace the unpredictable nature of the materials to create dynamic and intricate works.  At the end of the day, whether transformed or unchanged, we remain who we are—beautiful in our uniqueness and resilience. This presentation is a celebration of that inherent beauty, embracing the imperfections and changes that life brings. Each piece at the fair honors the journey of self-discovery and acceptance, reminding us that our true essence shines through, regardless of the transformations we undergo. It invites viewers to engage with art that resonates on a personal level, encouraging reflection on their own experiences of change and growth, and celebrating the beauty and complexity of life’s journey.

Melbourne Art Fair, 20 – 23 February at MCEC. Click here to secure tickets.

Art Guide Bookstore On Their Top Recommendations

Bringing a pop-up Bookstore to Melbourne Art Fair next week, the Art Guide Bookstore team suggest their must-buy books, all available for purchase at the Fair.

Renee So, Provenance
Publisher: Monash University Publishing

Working across ceramics and textiles, Renee So draws inspiration from a constellation of eclectic touchstones that traverse time and space. One particular reference point are Bellarmine (German for bearded man) stoneware jugs c.1550-1700 that can be found interpreted in many of So’s knitted paintings and ceramic objects.

So’s engagement with art history and artefacts is underpinned by cross-cultural thinking and a feminist worldview.

Surveying over a decade of So’s practice, Provenance the exhibition was held at MUMA in 2023. Viewing the exhibition in the flesh was a personal highlight. The accompanying publication is beautifully designed with insightful contributions from historian of archaeology Hélène Maloigne, academic and curator Chus Martínez, poet and editor Emily Berry, and Renee So in conversation with MUMA director and curator Charlotte Day.

John Nixon, Editions 1 & 2
Publisher: Negative Press

Editions 1 & 2 shines a spotlight on the printmaking activities of the much loved late John Nixon and features thoughtful and generous contributions from Sue Cramer, Lizzie Boon, and Trent Walter.

Spanning a 40 year period from 1982 – 2021, this archive provides insight into an important, yet lesser-known aspect of Nixon’s wide-ranging and vast oeuvre.
Nixon’s approach to printmaking is one of experimentation and dedication. In trademark reductive style, a range of printmaking techniques including woodblock, etching, and monotype resourcefully utilise everyday materials. By transforming the discarded and overlooked (plastic meat trays, newspapers, the humble potato) from ‘something that is not really wanted into something that is wanted’ suggests a joyous enthusiasm with endless possibilities. This is the material of a life well lived with art.

Lisa Radford, Jarrod Rawlins, Jon Campbell
Publisher: Uplands

Published in 2010, Jon Campbell by Lisa Radford and Jarrod Rawlins might now be considered an ‘oldie but a goodie’. Friends, colleagues, and former students join in to tell the tale.

To immerse oneself in Jon Campbell’s world is to catch the vernacular, the street signs, the slogans, the back yards, the beach, the surf, the car, the travel, the people, the community, the songs, the set-lists, the music, the painting, the print, the performance, the installation, the colour, the edges, the layers, the teaching, the attitude, the spirit, the love.

Discover a range of Australian publications at the Art Guide Bookstore, Melbourne Art Fair 20 – 23 February. Click here to secure tickets.

Explore & Collect with Louis Li

Founder and Managing Director of JKLP Group and Melbourne Art Fair ambassador, Louis Li is an ambitious collector of art and design in the global art landscape. He embraces and continues to expand the mysterious yet poetic Jackalope Art Collection at Jackalope’s luxury accommodation.

Speaking with the Fair, he outlines the works he is most anticipating seeing at the event.

1301SW/STARKWHITE (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Tāhuna/Queenstown), Booth A3
Mikala Dwyer, Empty Sculpture, 2024

Empty Sculpture is a playful and fantastical exploration of plastic. Mikala’s practice has developed through a series of evolving projects and research which align with my theories of the occult and alchemy. 

Mikala Dwyer, Empty Sculpture, 2024, plastic, 93 x 83 x 34cm. Courtesy the artist and 1301SW/STARKWHITE (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Tāhuna/Queenstown).

Sullivan+Strumpf (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney, Singapore), Booth C10
Dawn Ng

Dawn’s paintings and video works explore the concept of time and memory – I like the lyricism and nuanced use of colour with her feminine touch.

Dawn Ng, The Earth is an Hourglass (still), 2024, 4K res moving image work, h265 4:2:2 10bit Dolby Vision HDR, supplied on USB, 38m: 33s, edition of 5 plus 2 artist’s proofs. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf ((Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney, Singapore).

Nasha Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney), Booth K3
Drew Connor Holland, horse i

Drew’s work is reflected in ideology; every image represents a collage of his personal experience and imaginative anxiety. It reminds me of the working process of the great Belgian painter, Luc Tuymens.

Drew Connor Holland, horse i, 2024, synthetic polymer, marble dust, water colour, toner, graphite, oil, archival varnish on birch panel, 24 x 20 x 5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nasha Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney).

1301SW/STARKWHITE (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Tāhuna/Queenstown), Booth A3
Bill Henson, Untitled 2014-2015

Bill is my favourite Australian photographer. His dark, enigmatic photographs show a supreme sense of mystery and obscurity. The intensity and intimacy of his selection of motifs reflect an interplay between the mystical and the real.

Bill Henson, Untitled, 2014-2015 CL SH821 N9E, Archival inkjet pigment print, 127 x 180cm. Courtesy the artist and 1301SW/STARKWHITE.

Don’t miss Melbourne Art Fair, 20 – 23 February 2025. Click here to secure tickets.

WATCH | Tony Albert on Drawing From and Intervening with His Collection of ‘Aboriginalia’

One of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists with a longstanding interest in the cultural misrepresentation of Aboriginal people, Tony Albert, will present a solo presentation of new works at Melbourne Art Fair with Sullivan+Strumpf (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney, Singapore). Titled Reclamation, Tony draws on his collection of ‘Aboriginalia’: domestic and tourist artefacts that include images of Aboriginal people, their cultural objects and designs. Speaking with Melbourne Art Fair, he gives insight into how he started his vast collection, how he intervenes with the objects through his art, and what we might expect to see at the Fair.

Melbourne Art Fair, 20 – 23 February at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Click here to secure tickets.

Rachel Ciesla’s Guide to Naarm

Rachel Ciesla is the curator at The Art Gallery of Western Australia’s Simon Lee Foundation Institute of Contemporary Asian Art in Boorloo (Perth). For the 18th edition of the Melbourne Art Fair, she joins as curator of VIDEO, a dedicated sector of the Fair which presents a dynamic and thought-provoking collection of contemporary moving-image works. Now based in Boorloo/Perth, Rachel reflects on some of her favourite spots around Naarm/Melbourne, places she always looks forward to revisiting.

What do you miss most about the city when spending long periods of time away?

The Japanese breakfast at CIBI, then walking from Collingwood through Carlton Gardens and into the city, sitting in the front window at Dukes with a coffee before searching for something a little special at World Food Books or picking up a classic from Readings or Paperback, having lunch with an old friend at Sunhands and a few too many martinis at Apollo Inn after midnight.

CIBI, 33-39 Keele St, Collingwood. Photo: Tim Grey.

Where would you take someone to give them a good first impression of the city?

If the weather is just right then let’s walk through the Botanic Gardens, find ourselves at NGV, and come out the other side in China town for some dumplings.

Favourite dinner spot after a day exploring at the Fair?

Since it opened in 2016 it has been Napier Quarter. It has always been so very gentle to me.

Napier Quarter, 359 Napier St, Fitzroy.

Favourite place to discover art?

Some friends of mine recently opened a gallery in the Nicholson Building called ORDINANCE. If you’re in the city on a Friday or Saturday it’s worth a visit.

Darcey-Bella-Arnold, Cardboards, 2024, Ordinance-Gallery. Photo: Teagan Ramsay.

Melbourne Art Fair returns 20 – 23 February. Click here to secure tickets.

Janet Laurence on Interconnectivity and Alchemical Transformation

Presenting in a curated group show with ARC ONE Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne), Janet Laurence embraces the idea of interconnectivity within her work, which spans photography, sculpture, video, and installation. Melbourne Art Fair speaks with Janet about exploring alchemical transformation, creating works from a place of empathy, and what we can expect to see from her works at the event.

Laurence’s works will be presented alongside those by Marina Rolfe and John Young, Booth C1.

Your practice conveys the idea of interconnectivity between all living beings, and our conflicting relationship with nature, often in response to a specific site. Can you expand?

Indeed, my work embodies the interconnection between all living things. It’s something completely embedded in my thinking, so naturally it lives within my process in making work.

From the conceptualization of the work, the subject is partly triggered by the ability to see the potential which I want to amplify through the process of making the work. For example, right now I’m beginning a series of works about the evolving knowledge of the mysterious interconnection between plants and minerals, and the exceptional language between plants, trees, earth and rocks. There is now clear scientific data to support this fascinating language.

Janet Laurence, preparation for the new work. Photo: Jacquie Manning. Courtesy the artist and ARC ONE Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne).

You describe your work as exploring alchemical transformation. What do you mean by this term and how do you capture these transformations in your works?

I love imagining the invisible and illusive states of desire whereby certain elements and materials create a state of symbiotic alchemy, combining or reacting with one another.

It is of course chemistry, however taking it into an artistic realm the alchemical has a much more romantic and philosophical dimension.  It is its own abstract field with a world of possibilities. It enables me to make decisions combining matter, materials, objects, and colour that can create an aesthetic, based on my alchemical language.

I often use translucent images and materials in my work so that light can pass through, creating haunting bleeds and provocative combinations of colour, image, and shadow. This way, creatively I set up alchemy.

How has your decade-spanning interdisciplinary practice evolved since you first started? How has the climate crisis – which has only grown more dire – impacted your work?

I began my practice as a way of exploring the world of nature around me. This of course went into various areas of nature from clouds to forests to the sea and glacial world. The more I see the more I realise its fragility and wonder and the catastrophe of climate change and the human over development.

I bring this into my work not as a didactic statement but as empathy, care and love for this amazing world of nature, the more than human world that without a voice is being rapidly lost.

Janet Laurence, Celestial, Salt, Sea, 2024, duraclear on shinkalite acrylic, oil and pigments, 100 x 240 x 10cm. Courtesy the artist and ARC ONE Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne).

With a body of work that is as emotive as it is conceptual, do you hope that your works provoke action in some capacity from the viewer?

I believe strongly in the necessity for the artist’s voice to speak up. My question is how can art reach the hearts and minds of those in power, who seem more present and more remote than ever?

What can we expect see in your presentation with Arc One Gallery at Melbourne Art Fair?

The work will be the beginning of my new exploration into a love affair between rocks, and their inherent ancient minerals, and plants and their essential needs for survival.

I call it the Planetary gardening series and it questions the relationship between mining sites and the specific needs of the trees and plants that depend on those minerals. And yet, they continue to be extinguished by mining and so these plants become living planetary rarities and the great treasures of the world.

Janet Laurence, Hidden celestial from the Planetary gardening series, 2024
Duraclear on shinkalite acrylic, oil pigment, 100 x 273 x 10cm. Courtesy the artist and ARC ONE Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne).

Melbourne Art Fair returns 20 – 23 February, to the MCEC. Click here to secure tickets.

Explore & Collect with David Flack

David Flack, Founder and Principal of Flack Studio and Melbourne Art Fair Ambassador, is an Australian designer renowned for multi-faceted, experiential residential, hospitality, commercial and retail environments. As the scion of a construction business family, he has a deep-seated understanding of the built environment; as a sophisticated traveller with an appreciation for art and culture, he is attuned to the potential of interiors to not just provide shelter from the world, but to create one’s own identity within it.

Melbourne Art Fair speaks with Flack about his most anticipated artists, works, and galleries coming to the Fair next week. 

D’Lan Contemporary (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal/Sydney, New York), Booth C8
Timothy Cook

Timothy paints circular forms that represent Kulama – an important initiation ceremony for young Tiwi men that occurs at yam harvesting time. I love that this work is on locally sourced bark. When I see a work like this I think about how generous First Nations artists are in their willingness to share their cultural knowledge, when they have been disrespected so fully by the process of colonisation.

Timothy Cook, Kulama, 2023, locally sourced ochres on stringybark, 107 x 67cm. Courtesy the artist and D’Lan Contemporary (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal/Sydney, New York).

Niagara Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne), Booth E3
Noel McKenna

My dogs are family to me, I love how Noel always centres animals in his everyday portraits. The interior of this room reminds me of the austere but beautiful Louis Barragan House in Mexico city, which employs simple forms and shocks of bright primary colours to make evocative spaces.

Noel McKenna, The rain cries, 2023, oil on plywood, 42 x 44.5cm. Courtesy the artist and Niagara Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne).

Nanda\Hobbs (Gadigal Country/Sydney), Booth M5
Lottie Consalvo

There is a rawness to Lottie’s work that is very primal. I especially like the use of the hessian in this work, its rough texture in opposition to the lovely fine shapes that the frayed edges make.

Lottie Consalvo, Pause Again, 2024, scrylic and hessian on canvas, 102 x 122cm. Courtesy the artist and Nanda\Hobbs (Gadigal Country/Sydney).

COMA (Gadigal Country/Sydney), Booth K4
Jane Yang D’Haene

I like works that play with the tension between technical mastery, experimentation and looseness. The glazes Jane has used on this pot are so warm, it has a gorgeous glow.

Jane Yang D’Haene, Untitled, 2024, stoneware, porcelain, glaze, 46 x 34 x 34cm. Courtesy the artist and COMA (Gadigal Country/Sydney).

Neon Parc (Naarm/Melbourne), Booth E1
Janet Burchill

I love the strength and political potency of Janet’s works. In my office I have two of her and Jennifer’s portraits of Simone Weil the French Philosopher. This series hits home hard as we collectively reckon with the devastating effects of climate change.

Janet Burchill, Topophilia, 2025, fibre reactive dye, calico on canvasDimensions:153 x 122.5cm. Courtesy the artist and Neon Parc (Naarm/Melbourne).

Don’t miss Melbourne Art Fair, 20 – 23 February 2025. Click here to secure tickets.

WATCH | Hannah Gartside on Creating Her ‘Bunnies in Love, Lust and Longing’

Presenting with Tolarno Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne) at Melbourne Art Fair 2025, Hannah Gartside speaks on her approach to making as ultimately rooted in articulating emotions. In expanding her series, Bunnies in love, lust and longing, Gartside transforms vintage gloves from her vast collection into small bunny sculptures which call on the viewer to empathise, opening a portal into their own longing, desired and sometimes buried feelings.

Watch the full video below.

Melbourne Art Fair, 20 – 23 February at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Click here to secure tickets.

Image right: Hannah Gartside, #53, 2025, found leather gloves, mixed media, 26 x 30 x 6cm, courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne).

BEYOND | Jahnne Pasco-White On Expanding Sensory Experiences and Her BEYOND Work

Jahnne Pasco-White’s expanded painting practice explores the interconnectedness between humans and our environment. Her work, Embodied watery entanglements II, will be presented at Melbourne Art Fair with STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney), as part of BEYOND, the Fair’s sector for showcasing large-scale installations and spatial interventions. BEYOND is curated by Anna Briers, Curator, Len Lye & Contemporary Art, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (Aotearoa).

The Fair speaks with Jahnne about harnessing a watery approach to movement in her practice, working with recycled materials, and what to expect from her new work.

Continuous renewing, repurposing, reworking, and mark making seem to be integral aspects of your practice. What is the intention behind this process and the layers of authorship that you cover and uncover?

The expanded painting field has been a productive site for me to explore the relationship between humans and the environment. For this, I draw upon research in disciplines including ecology, feminism, and the field of human relations into conversation with material methods such as natural dyeing, staining, assembling, drawing, painting, collage and sewing. The resulting paintings, themselves often made from repurposed artworks and other recycled everyday materials, also come into relation with one another; both in the process of their making (i.e. I often work simultaneously across multiple works at a time) and compositionally when exhibited in the gallery (i.e. in how and where they are installed, on the floor to be walked on, for example). Put another way, I present works in exhibitions not as individual works but as a collective body of painting.

Into these many surfaces, I introduce segments of old paintings, cut up and reworked in an ongoing cycle of decay and renewal. I am interested in the generative process of creating, and the layers of authorship that are variously revealed and concealed by my continuous process of mark-making, as well as adding, subtracting and reworking old works into new ones. Through these varied approaches to painting what I hope to achieve with my work is an appreciation of the entanglements of the sustaining, contaminating and messy ecosystems that both human and more-than-human bodies inhabit and contribute. This interconnection emerges not only in the overlapping details of matter brought together on the surface but also in how works hang together as bodies and collaborators— cohabitating and intermingling. Composition spans beyond the individual to the collective painting ‘bodies’ where they are both mutating, feeding, and exchanging from one another through material, texture, line, form and colour.

Jahnne Pasco-White, Kinning with Lake 10, 2024, plant based crayons turmeric, oil pastel, watercolour, reclaimed oil paint, coffee, tea leaves, raw pigment, indigo dye, tempura, various plant dyes, acrylic, rice glue, paper, pen, hemp, silk, linen, cotton on canvas, 185.0 x 156.0cm. Courtesy the artist and STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney).

What materials do you use in your work?

I collect and recycle old and tired textiles into my work like collage. I primarily work with natural textiles as I also work with natural seasonal dyeing. Hand dyed fabrics pigmented with organic materials gathered from my surroundings ­ including domestic debris and matter collected from the natural environment – are complemented by acrylic paint, oil stick, pastel, pencil, old drawings, watercolours, receipts, tags, plastic, flowers, plant matter, seeds, bamboo, felt, hemp, old cotton thread etc.

Recalling your work Milky ways for Maternal Inheritances and Embodied watery entanglements, their scale seems to envelop and immerse the viewer. Can you elaborate on the importance of scale in your practice?

In each of these site-specific installations I used a variety of textiles to expand the sensorial experience. These immersive installations aim to reconfigure the experience of painting beyond image making but to consider how one’s body relates to its environment. In this way attention between fine details through to the larger installation shifts constantly between the macro and micro scales.

Water is in a constant state of transformation just as bodies are. Harnessing this watery approach to movement, change and porosity has become core to my painting practice. Here, across exhibitions, studios and time scales paintings can resurface, sink, or float among each other. They can ingest, mutate, become a multitude, separate, and reinvent themselves. Like porous bodies being both absorbed by and absorbing the world, this painting practice is too. Moving between various scales, the detail and installation, these paintings, through their intermingling of layers, materials and collective gathering can offer ideas of regeneration, interconnectedness, decay and most importantly a method of continual questioning because I realise, my habitat is in movement.

Jahnne Pasco-White, Embodied watery entanglements, 2022, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). Courtesy the artist and STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney).

How do you approach a new body of work? Does it start with an idea, a material, a feeling? Or is it something different each time?

An old body of work is usually the starting place for the new body. Like the skin cicadas leaves as the head for the trees I usually pick up the scraps and that is the beginning of the new life. Sometimes its cutting old works up, other times its working on the opposite side, it might be a stained piece of material that becomes the way towards new work. I am interested in responding to particular spaces that inform how I think of the larger body of work as a whole. I think of my works as bodies; in this way they are ever changing, they are porous, have scars, watermarks and stories to tell. The painting bodies archive the many material encounters.

Can you expand on your interest in exploring the interconnection between humanity and our environment?

I am committed to an environmental position which situates my body as enmeshed and co-constituted with other living and non-living beings and things. I work with materials that have flowed in and out of use and disuse. For me, the fluidity of these material forms—the plant dyes, viscous rice glue, painterly washes, cutting up and re-using old works and feeding them into new paintings—all speak to the cyclical and porous flows that connect my body to the painting. Water is emerging as the connector between how I paint, why I am increasingly making work, and my environmental consciousness. By situating water as the connective flow through my work I embody the interconnection of all life, through temporal and material scales, aiming to mesh my environmentalism with material practice. This approach has shaped processes of art making that is underpinned by an attunement with currents of my ever-transforming environment. In the studio, water flows through the processes of natural dyeing, staining, assembling, drawing, collaging, and sewing to explore both the material and temporal limits of a painting practice. These processes connect colour to a surface and right back to layers of deep geological time that occurs within the development of mineral pigments where waters presence is vital. Water informs connections through the methods of making, environmental position, and my embodiment, revealing to me their entanglement with one another. To think and make with this watery attunement becomes a practice that intimately connects my existence with other living bodies and proposes a set of ethical questions of how my actions are implicated with others’ lives, both human and more-than-human.

Jahnne Pasco White, installation view, STATION. Photo: Jessica Maurer.

What can we expect to see from your work for the BEYOND sector at Melbourne Art Fair?

This body of work aims to be an immersive painterly encounter. The work is about including the smears, the stains of living, the Western concept of waste and inverting this into a vital component of the assemblage. It is a soupy gathering of the generative and toxic flows of living in the world today and putting into question how to co-exist. It’s a material engagement that seeks to prioritise the imperfections that make up the world. From soaking acacia seeds and flowers to boiling avocado stones in a pot of water to gathering the dusty pink hues, painting becomes a form of haptic engagement with the world, a method of archiving my material encounters like a digestive system. I think about the studio as fostering waves of compost where material in one form is gathered or accumulated, where under the right conditions they are transformed to a third form. There is no order over paint, sock scraps, or turmeric powder as it becomes more about what unfolds when they meet entangled upon or staining each other’s skins. It is painting in relation to other paintings which nourishes the idea that the individual does not operate without a larger eco-system. For me, painting is more than a pictorial image as it operates both with and beyond a visual register. It becomes a touching-feeling way of being in the world.

Melbourne Art Fair, 20 – 23 February 2025. Click here to secure tickets.

Fair Ambassador Henny Scott’s Guide to Naarm

The Stokehouse, St Kilda
Located just 10 minutes walk from my home, this gorgeous St Kilda beachfront has got to be my number one favourite spot to dine with loved ones. With stunning views of Port Philip Bay, consistency in flavour and great service, it is not hard to keep coming back whether for a special occasion upstairs, a casual fish and chips night or just some spritz and cicchetti to watch as the sun goes down. 

The Stokehouse. Photography: Gareth Sobey for Broadsheet.

Kirk’s Wine Bar, CBD
Kirk’s Wine Bar is a great meeting spot after hours of exploring art or a day of shopping. Headed by TV personality, Chef Ian Curley, this place has the vibes and wine list to match for boozing in the city.

Kirk’s Wine Bar. Courtesy Visit Victoria.

Your go-to for exploring art in the city?

National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), CBD

Melbourne Art Fair returns 20 – 23 February at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Click here to secure tickets.

WATCH | Kim Ah Sam On Representing Personal Journeys and Country Through Her Weavings

Kuku Yalanji and Kalkadoon artist, Kim Ah Sam’s works explore the connection between Country and the human body through sculpture. For Melbourne Art Fair’s BEYOND sector, Kim has produced Before & Beyond, Our Journey, a constellation of levitating sculptures which gently hover and spin, possessing a kinetic quality.

Speaking with Melbourne Art Fair, Kim provides insights on her self-taught, intuitive and improvisational weaving process, her use of recycled materials, and capturing personal journeys on Country through her works. Watch the video in full below.

Kim Ah Sam is represented by Vivien Anderson Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne)

Harnessing the monumental exhibition spaces within the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, BEYOND presents three large-scale installations and spatial interventions from leading contemporary artists. Melbourne Art Foundation supports the sector by providing a monetary grant to participating galleries. This year, BEYOND is curated by Anna Briers, Curator, Len Lye & Contemporary Art, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (Aotearoa).

Michael Cook On Sharing Knowledge Through Art and His New Series ‘Individuation’, Debuting at Melbourne Art Fair

Michael Cook’s magnificent hyper-real photographs often capture roles in reversal, histories re-written, testing viewers’ relationships to aspects of Australia’s colonial history, and to society’s tendency toward overconsumption.

This year, debuting his new ongoing series, Individuation at Melbourne Art Fair with Jan Murphy Gallery (Meanjin/Brisbane), he explores the societal forces that pull us toward materiality. Speaking with the Fair, Michael provides insight on his decades-spanning career, exploring Australia’s layered histories through his photographs, and more. Michael’s work will be presented by Jan Murphy Gallery, Booth B2.

How were you first introduced to photography?  

My older brother bought me my first camera when I was 14. He worked in a photography lab and introduced me to all the basics of photography and the darkroom. By the time I was 17, I was also working in the lab and 5 years later I opened my own photographic studio, mostly shooting weddings and fashion style portraits.

Michael Cook, Consumerism, 2024-25, from the series Individuation, archival pigment print on paper. Courtesy the artist and Jan Murphy Gallery (Meanjin/Brisbane).

Can you talk us through your transition from commercial photography to fine art? What influenced your decision to make this career shift? How does your experience in the commercial sector influence how you create your current work? 

By the time I was 40, I had already experienced various areas of photography, labs, darkroom, weddings, portraits, fashion, commercial photography, which all taught me things which I could apply to my artistic process. I always had my own projects whirring in the back of my mind so I decided to focus on making my own work for 12 months and see how it went. I made the Prime Ministers series and got gallery representation with Andrew Baker in Brisbane and I’ve been making major bodies of work ever since.

Much of your work interrogates the ‘what if’ – alternative histories, like in Majority Rule where the Indigenous population makes up 96% of Australia and the non-Indigenous 4% or in Fake, in which a white child is adopted into an Indigenous family – a reversal of your own personal history. Can you expand on your interest in communicating these alternative histories and thus interrogating those currently in place? What insights are you hoping that the viewer might gain? 

I grew up with a lot of questions about my identity. I was never taught any First Nations history at school, only about the ‘discovery’ of Australia. My work continues to question the ‘what ifs’ of our history and the impacts of colonisation, and I hope that it raises questions for the viewer too. I have a strong narrative element to my work but rather than coming from a place of moralising (or demoralising) I hope that I can highlight the complexity of our layered history. Art is a way of expanding and sharing knowledge, it provokes a different way of thinking about things. I’m proud that I get to tell my story – I’ve been making work for the past two decades, and hope that my work will still be here long after I’m gone.

Michael Cook, Authenticity, 2024-25, from the series Individuation, archival pigment print on paper. Courtesy the artist and Jan Murphy Gallery (Meanjin/Brisbane).

Each element in your work is meticulously and intentionally chosen and positioned, across the palette, subject and mis-en-scene, reflecting the overall narrative of a series. Can you expand on your process when creating a composition – from ideation to finished result? 

It all stems from an idea. It doesn’t matter the scale of production required to create the work, only that I need to tell a message. Sometimes it’s a large production with lots of people involved, sometimes it’s small. The thing that matters is being able to get the vision I see in my head onto paper.

What projects are you currently working on? What can we expect to see from your solo presentation with Jan Murphy at Melbourne Art Fair? 

My next series is titled Individuation and it is largely set in London. Following on from my last series Fake, this body of work continues to explore the psychology of conditioning and the contemporary forces that constantly prompt us towards materiality. The title of the series ‘Individuation’ was coined by psychologist Carl Jung to describe the process of developing an authentic individuality. As with most of my work, there is an autobiographical element woven into the story – I’m in my mid-life now and I don’t think I’m alone in seeking out what Indigenous cultures around the world had all along – a deeper connection to country, culture, spirit, community. The things that most of Western society seem to be lacking a little of.

Visit Melbourne Art Fair, on from 20 – 23 February at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Click here to secure tickets.
Michael Cook is represented by Jan Murphy Gallery (Meanjin/Brisbane).

WATCH | Ministry of Clouds on Crafting Wine and Collecting Art They Love

With extensive careers in the world of wine, Bernice Ong and Julian Forwood founded Ministry of Clouds in 2012 with the sole goal of crafting wines with gastronomy in mind.

The independent winery and Official Wine Partner of the Fair finds its home on 11 hectares in the McLaren Vale. Their modern Australian wines are crafted simply and traditionally, with complexity derived from many small ferments, either in traditional open vats or concrete eggs, with indigenous yeasts, multiple picking passes to retain acid, and a mosaic of distinguished vineyards to provide layers of flavour and tannin. The goal is transparency, balance and elegance, recognition of site and season, sustainable farming, and contemporary yet classic wines from the ancient vines and geology of their vineyard.

Melbourne Art Fair speaks with Bernice and Julian about their journey in wine, and their avid interest in art, showing us some of the pieces they have collected in their home over the years.

Visit the Ministry of Clouds Wine Bar & Bistro, designed and furnished by Dann Event Hire, at Melbourne Art Fair this month. Select from a McLaren Vale Dry Rosé, a Clare Valley Riesling or an Adelaide Hills Chardonnay and discover art from over 100 contemporary artists.

20 – 23 February at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Click here to secure tickets.

Noel McKenna: It is Ordinary to Love the Sublime, But Sublime to Love the Ordinary

Noel McKenna has a unique instinct for capturing often unobserved and underappreciated moments of the everyday with endearing clarity. His spare canvases hint at narratives beyond the picture plane, often movingly depicting the relationship between humans and animals. With an extensive career spanning over forty years, McKenna has exhibited his work locally and internationally. This year at Melbourne Art Fair, Niagara Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne) presents a solo presentation of works by the artist.

Speaking with Melbourne Art Fair, McKenna provides insight about his animal subjects and what we should expect from his presentation.

Your work often depicts elements of the mundane, leaving much to be said about the lives of the subjects depicted, as if a snapshot in a story. What is it about the seemingly unextraordinary that sparks your interest?

My attitude to the humbleness of the everyday world, I would best sum up by saying it is ordinary to love the sublime, but sublime to love the ordinary.

Noel McKenna, The two faces of January, 2024, oil on canvas, 46 x 37cm. Photo: Simon Hewson. Courtesy the artist and Niagara Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne).

Animals, particularly dogs, cats and horses, are often the focal subjects within your works, even when a human subject is present. Would it be appropriate to consider your own pets as your muses? Why is it that animals seem to gauge your interest more than their human counterparts?

My own pets I have used as subjects but for the most part, the subjects I use to begin a painting more than often comes from a photograph I have taken, from books, Instagram, many different sources. I have a genuine fondness for most animals believing they have a complexity that a lot of people do not notice. When you look into the eyes of most animals be it a horse, cat or dog one sees the soulful nature of them often.

Is it your hope to capture an animal’s likeness, demeanour or personality through your paintings? Or are they more concerned by an overall sense of a scene or story at hand?

I do not try to capture the likeness of an animal when I am painting. I try to make an important part of the narrative of the work their relationship to other things, people, in the picture.

What is your process when creating a new composition? Does each work start with an idea, image, or story? Can you describe a moment when a scene has caught your eye, enough to inspire a piece?

My paintings generally begin by putting one thing on the canvas: could be a chair, tree and I then may just paint something beside the chair: could be a lamp, animal. It goes through many changes when I may wipe out the lamp, the composition usually comes out of moving things around to find an interesting use of negative space between things. More instinct than strategy or planning, I enjoy being surprised when I am working on a painting.

Noel McKenna, Edith’s Diary, 2024, oil on canvas, 100 x 100cm. Photo: Simon Hewson. Courtesy the artist and Niagara Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne).

What influenced your transition from studying architecture to fine art? How has your practice evolved throughout your career?

I left architecture because the lecturers at Queensland University when I was there told me I would have trouble graduating as an architect. One of them advised me to go to art school, which I had not thought of at all. I came from a working class family of Irish heritage where art had no real place.

Can you tell us about what we can expect to see from your solo show at Melbourne Art Fair with Niagara Galleries?

The works I will be showing at Melbourne Art fair continue my exploration of the relationship between humans and animals.

There is in the works a sense of apprehension in some of the compositions. I have been reading Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, by Andrew Wilson, the biography of the American suspense writer best known for Strangers on a train and the Ripley books. She was tortured, difficult, quirky and deviant. I have read many biographies of artists but I was very affected by this book. Drawn from her diaries from when she was very young, a psychological portrait of someone when you read from her childhood to dying one feels you almost know them.

Totally devoted to her craft, always striving for her best, her personal life suffered as a result. I reached times in reading things she had done and said that I had to stop reading as it was upsetting me.

Visit Niagara Galleries, Booth E3, at Melbourne Art Fair, returning 20 -23 February. Click here to secure tickets.

Portrait Photo: Antony Clare. Courtesy the artist and Niagara Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne).

BEYOND | Paul Yore on Wonderment and Conjuring Paradoxical Connections Through His Works

Harnessing the monumental exhibition spaces within the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, BEYOND presents three large-scale installations and spatial interventions from leading contemporary artists. As part of BEYOND, Paul Yore will present FUCK ME DEAD, a vibrantly mosaiced hearse, upcycled and modified from an iconic Australian car, the  ’70s Ford Fairlane. His new series, Souvenir, will also feature in a solo show at the Fair, presented by STATION.

Melbourne Art Fair speaks with Paul about his installation, facilitating a deeper engagement with works through the interplay between the macro and micro, and conjuring paradoxical associations through imagery.

Paul Yore’s work for BEYOND is presented by STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney) and Hugo Michell Gallery (Tarntanya/Adelaide).

How did your work which will be exhibited for BEYOND, FUCK ME DEAD originally come about? 

The origin point for all my work is wonderment. I follow my curiosity about the world, about objects, forms and images, and I try to reveal what things are in themselves, their inner essence, and bring this feeling or sensation to the surface level of perception and experience. My process pivots around the logic, materiality, and methodology of assemblage, wherein multiple objects and forms are conjoined creating dynamic hybrids. I endeavour to communicate new possibilities of meaning by detaching things from their original context, exposing the material condition of things, and questioning the social production of forms and images within this particular cultural milieu.

Paul Yore, FUCK ME DEAD, 2022, mixed media assemblage comprising funeral hearse, found objects, glass, shells, LED lights, acrylic paint and plastic flooring. dimensions 592.5 x 379 x 149cm. Courtesy the artist and STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney). Originally commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art for the survey exhibition WORD MADE FLESH, 2022.

The car in this work is listed as a found material. How did you source it and why was it chosen? What initially drove you to this idea? 

Found materials are a way to dialogue with world in a very immediate and direct manner. I am attracted to things that circulate widely and yet seem underexamined or overlooked. Consequently, the source of my artworks is often obsolescence and waste. As a child I was already an avid collector of things – I was drawn to coins, gemstones, seashells, feathers, fossils, and other trinkets. I have always felt there is a hidden reality behind surface appearance, and that the contemplation of objects can bring us into proximity with other times and places. In this regard, the car could be read as an allegory for the transportative potentiality of art. The automobile is recurrently associated with modernity, progress, momentum, mobility and individual freedom, and these are ideas that speak loudly to the project of art.

Can you expand on the car as a symbol of Australiana, traditional masculinity and death? 

Art takes place in the mind of the viewer, and I am most interested in what someone feels when they experience art and encounter its multiple possibilities. I see the work as a conduit for collective memory and unconscious associations, allowing a plurality of available interpretations to surface. I ensure my pieces are very open and speculative by setting up polarities within the work, holding seemingly paradoxical concepts in proximity. For example, the car may evoke an optimistic by-gone era of Australian automotive manufacturing or conversely may conjure up images of industrial decay and entropy. The piece may exude a phallic energy, but one underscored by a distinct femininity. Likewise, this sculpture undoubtable confronts death as an inevitable aspect of the human condition, but this only reasserts the primacy of existence, the here and now of life itself. All these potential readings are animated by their opposing or contradictory impressions and held in a dialectical tension.

You have previously spoken about influences from David McDiarmid’s quilts and religious iconography from the Byzantine period. Can you expand on these influences and why it is that you incorporate the mosaic in your work as a means of transformation? 

I admire the manner with which McDiarmid used reflective materials to play with light and produce compelling works of great pathos and profundity. The exquisite icons of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition similarly used glass, gold, and precious stones to imbue images with a sense of transcendental luminosity. In a contemporary setting, information is illuminated through electric signage and the brightly lit screens of television and digital media, and so light remains a captivating device for the transmission of visual information. Correspondingly, I use light to imbue my work with a sense of immediacy and urgency, to heighten its semiotic potency. The fragmentary surfaces of my works in mosaic are inlaid with thousands of hand-cut pieces of glass, plastic and shell, refracting light in multiple directions simultaneously. I consider reflection in both its meanings: as outward shininess but also in relation to inward contemplative thought. The word mosaic also seems to carry this dual connotation, etymologically relating to both decoration and the idea of the muse.

Paul Yore, Sydney Opera House (You Make Me Feel), 2024, mixed media assemblage on board comprising glass, crockery, Perspex, beads, glitter, found objects, synthetic fur, trim, ribbon, cotton thread, LED light, wood, adhesive, fixtures, synthetic polymer, enamel 173cm x 165cm x 12cm. Courtesy of the artist and STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney).

Your large-scale works are often highly detailed, containing small fragments of collaged ideas, symbols and text. What is the significance of scale in your practice? How do you approach moving between macro and micro in your work? 

The interplay between the macro and the micro scale in the work is a strategy for increasing audience receptivity, creating multiple access points for the viewer to enter into a dialogue with the work. Meticulous attention to detail facilitates this deeper engagement with the work and enables a temporal shift – time seems to slow down as the viewer gets lost in all the intricacies of a composition. In everyday experience, we perceive things as neatly delineated objects, but on closer inspection we see the constituent parts of things or notice that the separation between individual entities is somewhat illusory or unclear. I am interested in the gap between the way reality seems to be (an expanded field of energy and matter in constant flux) and the way it is framed and represented by social and linguistic conventions (a linear series of relatively fixed and stable structures and categories). In my art, I am always trying to locate and exaggerate these internal contradictions between appearance and actuality.

What can we expect to see at your solo presentation with STATION at Melbourne Art Fair? 

I am excited to finally be unveiling a new series entitled Souvenir that has been in development for the past two years. The presentation is a study in folkloric images and forms, seeking beauty and mystery in the familiar. Deploying assemblage, mosaic, appliqué and embroidery, this new body of work extends my interest in the revival and adaptation of traditional decorative craft methodologies, artisanal techniques and vernacular forms. Engaging memory, nostalgia, and collective experience, my new pieces reimagine overlooked cultural symbols, transforming clichéd and naïve icons into monumental and mythic tableaux imbued with sincerity and gravity.

Paul Yore in studio. Photo: Devon Ackermann. Courtesy the artist and STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney).

FUCK ME DEAD will be exhibited in the heart of the Fair as part of BEYOND.  STATION will also present a solo show of Paul’s works within the Fair, Booth K5.
Click here to secure tickets to Melbourne Art Fair this February.

Victorian First Peoples Art & Design Fair Showcase Artists and Program Announced

In 2025 MAF welcomes the Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair Showcase Exhibition, a preview of the upcoming Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair, which will officially launch in 2027

An Opening Ceremony creatively produced by Jason Tamiru (Yorta Yorta) and Nathan Lovett-Murray (Wamba Wamba, Dhudhuroa, Baraparapa, Dja Dja Wurrung, Yupagalk, Wergaia, Yorta Yorta, and Wiradjeri) will officially mark the start of the VFPADF Showcase Exhibition and feature a historical narrative, smoking ceremony and cultural dance performances.

The exhibition showcases the rich cultural and creative diversity of Victorian First Peoples contemporary art and design, and features new and recent work by twenty independent Victorian First Peoples artists and designers: Moorina Bonini (Yorta Yorta, Wurundjeri, Wiradjuri)l, Lorraine Brigdale (Yorta Yorta), Glennys Briggs (Yorta Yorta, Taungurung, Wiradjuri), Janet Bromley (Yorta Yorta), Bradley Brown (Gunditjmara, Gunai Kurnai, Bidawal), Trina Dalton-Oogjes (Wadawurrung/Wathaurung, Gunditjmara), Talgium Edwards (Taungurong, Yorta Yorta, Muthi Muthi, Boonwerung and Palawa), Deanne Gilson (Wadawurrung), Tammy Gilson (Wadawurrung), ENOKi (Dja Dja Wurrung, Yorta Yorta), Gail Harradine (Wotjobaluk, Djubagalk, Jadawadjali), Kelly Koumalatsos (Wergaia, Wemba Wemba), Glenda Nicholls (Waddi Waddi, Ngarrindjeri, Yorta Yorta), Ray Thomas (Gunnai), Zeta Thomson (Wurundjeri, Yorta Yorta), Kim Wandin (Wurundjeri), Lewis Wandin-Bursill (Wurundjeri), Peter Waples-Crowe (Ngarigo), and Lisa Waup (Gunditjmara, Torres Strait).

In addition, seventeen artists and designers are represented by Victorian First Peoples art centres. Baluk Arts, from Mt Eliza will exhibit Adam Magennis (Bunurong) and Iluka Sax-Williams (Taungurung); Kaiela Arts, from Shepparton will exhibit Jack Anselmi (Yorta Yorta), Ally Knight (Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung, Kamilaroi),  Norm Yakaduna Stewart (Kwat Kwat, Wurundjeri, Yalaba Yalaba, Moira) along with a Ceramics presentation by Cynthia Hardie, Laurel Robinson, Amy Briggs, Rochelle Patten, Lyn Thorpe, and Melinda Solomon; Perridak Arts, from Ballarat will exhibit Donna Blackall (Yorta Yorta, Taungurung) and Adrian Rigney (Wotjobaluk, Ngarrindjeri); and The Torch, from Naarm will exhibit Alfred Carter (Gunaikurnai), Stacey Edwards (Taungurung, Boon Wurrung), Ash Thomas (Yorta Yorta, Wiradjuri), and Robby Wirramanda (Wergaia, Wotjobaluk).

Co-curators Janina Harding and Dr Jessica Clark said, “The Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair Showcase Exhibition will be a first glimpse as we build up to a full-scale presentation of the event in 2027. We are working closely with twenty independent First Peoples artists and four arts centres whose artwork and culture are unique to the South East, and we’re so excited to share and profile their incredible talent with Melbourne Art Fair collectors, buyers and the sector more broadly.”

Additionally, the inaugural VFPADF Commission has been awarded to Mitch Mahoney (Boon Wurrung, Barkindji) and will premiere as part of the Melbourne Art Fair COMMISSION program. 

Alongside the Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair Showcase Exhibition, the public program offers opportunities to connect with and hear directly from Victorian First Peoples artists through daily tours, artist talks, weaving workshops and panel discussions.

The VFAPDF exhibition celebrates the incredible breadth of creative and cultural practice by Victorian First Peoples artists and designers while providing a unique opportunity to meet, connect with, and hear directly from them. Collectively representing more than twenty Victorian First Peoples language groups from across all regions of the state, the artists attest to the strength, resilience and continuity of culture in Victoria.

Melbourne Art Fair takes place 20 – 23 February 2025. Click here to secure tickets.
Click here to explore the full Fair Program.

Image: Ray Thomas, Jerail Ceremony of the Gunnai, 2021, acrylic on canvas, Jirra skin and redgum, two panels 60cmx140cm each. Courtesy the artist.

WATCH | How Camille Laddawan Explores Language Through Coded Bead Weavings

Camille Laddawan is an artist working primarily with Japanese glass seed beads, coded and woven into tapestry-like works which explore systems of language. Each bead can be seen as an individual agent, acting within a much larger system, where the final work can be decoded and read as a script or a score.

Presented by BAProjects at Melbourne Art Fair, Camille’s weavings will be exhibited alongside paintings by Umatji Tjapalyi, one of the founders and senior artists at Mimili Maku Arts.

Visiting her home studio, the Melbourne Art Fair team speaks with Camille to learn more about her intricate coding and weaving processes.

Melbourne Art Fair 2025 returns 20 – 23 February at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Click here to secure tickets.

Contrived Casualness: How Zoe Young’s Work Spans the Ordinary and Extraordinary

Transforming everyday settings and objects into idyllic scenes that hold unique emotional depth, Zoe Young’s work connects individual stories with broader human emotions. Showcasing a solo presentation with Sophie Gannon Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne) at the Fair in next year, Melbourne Art Fair speaks with Zoe about how she creates her still-life compositions, honoring her voice, and what she’s currently working on for the event.

Your paintings often elicit feelings of nostalgia, leaving the impression of a personal memory or a film still. What draws you to these everyday domestic scenes?

I think of my work as contrived casualness. On the surface, it might look effortless or ordinary, but it’s carefully staged—my studio becomes a set, and life beyond it is edited into moments that feel suspended in time. Beauty has the power to freeze things, and painting lets me rearrange those fragments. Sometimes, it feels uncanny—I’ve even lived out scenes from my paintings. The ordinary and extraordinary blur in ways I can’t fully explain. There’s an alchemy to the process.

Courtesy Zoe Young and Sophie Gannon Gallery.

Are your paintings often based on scenes in your personal life? Do you see painting as a form of journaling or recording personal histories?

In a way, yes. At first, I doubted whether anyone cared about my perspective, but I realised the personal is political. Growing up, I struggled to believe in my own voice—I even wanted to take my father’s name, Butch, because Zoe felt too soft. Painting has become a way to claim and honour that voice. I often find that the more sincere and personal the work, the more it resonates with others. Having spent a big slice of my childhood on Sydney Harbour, there are glimpses and rituals that are quintessential to my experience that I hope are an echo for others of our entwined lives.

Can you describe your process when forming a still-life composition, from ideation to final outcome?

For this show, still life goes beyond the studio walls. Instead of arranging flowers or books, I’m composing with streets, clouds, yachts, terraces—all the motifs of my misspent youth: dawdling about, loitering with friends, walking up back laneways, and sunbathing my life away like I had all the time in the world. I think about Pamela Anderson’s no-makeup photos, and I want to reveal Sydney in the same manner—give her some time, scratch the surface, rip off the facade, and she’s actually even more beautiful.

Courtesy Zoe Young and Sophie Gannon Gallery.

How has your practice evolved throughout your career?

Painting has always been how I make sense of things. In high school, my catchphrase was, “Do you get what I mean?” and every painting I make is still asking that question. I’ve always had an insatiable appetite for expressing the slightly indefinable. I really want to get to the core of something—the essence—whether it’s a person, place, or side dish in a restaurant. I’m just really interested in doing the best painting I can of whatever I’m trying to define at the time.

What can we expect at Melbourne Art Fair in 2025?

It’s a love letter to Sydney, from someone who knows her,  without her makeup on. It’s a tribute to all the years of loitering about the harbour, weaving through the lounges, lingering in the kitchens, where the scent of salt unites every window. I’m trying to bring all these ideas I’ve been hoarding in my mind since childhood about the harbour to life—collaging decades and incarnations into scenes. I’m trying to distil the essence of the harbour, the subtle aroma of Moreton Bay figs, the swell on the dock, the faded shirts on the weathered bodies, the glistening of time as people pass from youth to age about the bays.

Melbourne Art Fair returns 20 – 23 February 2025 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Tickets are currently on sale here.

Melbourne Art Fair Partners With LOEWE To Launch The LOEWE x Suna Fujita Collection And Ceramic Exhibition

Ahead of its 18th edition in February 2025, Melbourne Art Fair is proud to announce a dynamic new partnership with LOEWE, a global leader in luxury fashion lauded for its artistry and commitment to craftsmanship since 1846. 

Melbourne Art Fair joins LOEWE to celebrate a world-first preview with the debut of Jonathan Anderson’s reprised collaboration with Kyoto-based ceramicist duo Suna Fujita in Australasia. Exhibited for the first time with an intimate viewing experience exclusively within LOEWE’s Melbourne Collins Street store, a selection of twenty delicate and playful pieces from the Suna Fujita ceramic studio were unveiled alongside the new series of bags, ready-to-wear and accessories. 

“This partnership is a reflection of Melbourne Art Fair and LOEWE’s shared commitment to supporting living artists and creatives, and an exciting precursor to the 18th edition of the Fair, which promises to be one of our most dynamic and anticipated showcases yet,” said Fair Director Melissa Loughnan. “Melbourne Art Fair is thrilled to partner with LOEWE in celebrating the playful launch of the LOEWE x Suna Fujita collaboration.” 

Launching today in stores and online, the LOEWE x Suna Fujita collection brings to life the work of the acclaimed ceramicists, known for their miniature hand-painted scenes. Featuring whimsical characters—from ocean creatures to cosmic animals—the collection transforms everyday pieces into dreamlike works of art across LOEWE accessories, ready-to-wear and mesmerising facades. 

The debut of the LOEWE x Suna Fujita collection arrives just ahead of the 18th edition of Melbourne Art Fair. Taking place 20-23 February 2025 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, Melbourne Art Fair will bring together 60 of the region’s most exciting galleries and Indigenous art centres to showcase works by new and iconic artists, with a focus on solo and tightly curated presentations, and works of scale and significance. 

Standout Solo Presentations Coming to Melbourne Art Fair in 2025

The 18th edition of Melbourne Art Fair returns in the Victorian summer, 20 – 23 February 2025, to present new and iconic artists. With a focus on solo shows and works of scale and significance, the Fair supports the exhibition of thoughtfully curated presentations that offer an in-depth exploration of artistic practice from Australasia’s leading galleries and Indigenous art centres. 

Ahead of the 2025 edition, discover a selection of upcoming solo shows coming to the Fair next year.

Michael Cook
Jan Murphy Gallery (Meanjin/Brisbane)

Past, present and future collide in Michael Cook’s works, home to both vast chasms of disparity and intense points of connection. Cook’s photographic works critically examine the historic and present-day treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia. He employs the camera as the supreme intermediary device – the ‘third eye’ which can bridge European and Indigenous worlds and perspectives. The photograph is, for Cook, that imaginary place of possibility where we can be invited to experience the other side of the coin, roles in reversal, worlds inverted, histories re-written. The images promise imaginative pathways through minefields of associations, as we sense potential unravellings of historical consequence. 

Cook has exhibited extensively, nationally and internationally. His artworks are held in all major Australian collections, and in significant international collections, including the British Museum, London; The Museum of World Cultures, Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Utrecht; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, USA. 

Michael Cook, Welcome Sign, archival pigment print on 310 gsm paper, various sizes. Courtesy the artist and Jan Murphy Gallery.

Kenny Pittock
MARS Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne)

Pittock’s playful practice draws on the iconography and nostalgia of quotidian Australia. Hand-crafting the everyday ephemera and experiences of collective memory, Pittock’s works are humorous microcosms of the greater anxieties that face our world today. By creating tangible representations of transient objects and encounters, his visual language reminds the viewer to locate a constant in the fleeting, melding the timeless with the timely. 

At the Fair in 2025, MARS Gallery will present Poems and Portraits, showcasing a new series of Pittock’s unique ceramic shopping lists.  Inspired by the real text on one anonymous, discarded  shopping list recovered by Pittock, Poems and Portraits, reminds us of the universality of the mundane. 

Pittock has held solo exhibitions in Italy, Singapore and Aotearoa / New Zealand, as well as in many public institutions throughout Australia. His work has been a finalist in many prizes including the 2024 Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the 2024 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize at Geelong Gallery, and his artworks are included in many collections including Artbank, Bendigo Art Gallery, the University of Queensland and the National Gallery of Victoria. 

Kenny Pittock, Burger Bread Rye, 2024, Acrylic on ceramic, 21cm x 7.5cm. Courtesy the artist and MARS.

Reko Rennie & Harriette Bryant
Ames Yavuz (Gadigal Country/Sydney, Singapore)

Next year, Ames Yavuz will present two dynamic solo exhibitions featuring newly created works by esteemed artists Harriette Bryant and Reko Rennie. Both artists bring powerful narratives and visually compelling styles that examine and challenge perceptions of Aboriginal identity, power structures, and cultural history within an Australian and global context. The presentations aim to highlight the strength and significance of their individual practices while drawing meaningful connections between their approaches to storytelling and artmaking. 

Rennie will present a series of vibrant new paintings and intricately crafted stone sculptures. The new body of work continues to explore and assert Aboriginal identity within a contemporary setting, pushing the boundaries of visual language. Through his signature blend of street art aesthetics, bold use of colour, and symbolic iconography of his Kamilaroi heritage, Rennie’s paintings carry a narrative of cultural pride, resilience, and the assertion of Indigenous presence. 

Reko Rennie, RR-RS, 2024, acrylic and pigment on linen, 150 x 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and Ames Yavuz.

Emerging artist Harriette Bryant from Mimili Maku Arts in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands will showcase a series of wall–bound assemblages of vintage serving plates to create a profound recount of the Aṉangu experience of atomic testing, and the devastating effects of nuclear weapons testing by the British at Maralinga. Bryant’s autobiographical practice pieces together different storylines related to her extended family, often working with found materials and content, creating equally sinister and humorous retellings of Australian history. 

Installation view of works by Harriette Bryant, 2024. Courtesy the artist, Mimili Maku Arts and Ames Yavuz. Photography by Jessica Maurer.

Drew Connor Holland
Nasha Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney)

Returning to Melbourne Art Fair next year after a standout solo exhibition of works by Mark Maurangi Carrol, Nasha Gallery will present three drafts of the same poem by Drew Connor Holland – a continuation of the exhibition of the same name presented by the gallery in December 2023. Of the exhibition Holland writes “When I was asked to describe these works I saw them as a Reformation of heartbreak— symbols of an alchemic spiritual repentance eroded with the passage of time. The Lutherian sensibility reframes things. How might one heartbreak look after a thousand years of merciful transformation? How would an archaeologist understand the notes app? How would my search history make someone feel in the deep future?” 

Holland’s work is about how we catalogue memories: in digital archives, in junk drawers, in our heads. He sees his work as contemporary archaeologies, collating our experiences of love and anxiety through the transformation of hoarded data. Every piece is rendered as fragile; each differing surface absorbs or rejects elements of the image depending on their material qualities. Instead of slick and new their finish is battered and old — like a crumbling fresco or tapestry. In this state they force a gentle hand and ask for care. 

Drew Connor Holland, angels keep empty spaces where something can be left, 2023, synthetic polymer, marble dust, damar, watercolour, ink on birch panel, 14 x 14 cm, 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. Courtesy the artist and Nasha Gallery.

Hannah Gartside
Tolarno Galleries (Naarm/Melbourne)

Tolarno Galleries will premiere 40+ new small sculptures from Hannah Gartside, made from worn antique and vintage women’s leather gloves. These new sculptures of anthropomorphised rabbits form part of Gartside’s ongoing series, Bunnies in love, lust and longing, which began in 2016. Gartside expands on the series, “The gloves have been manipulated to depict bunnies cuddling, hanging out, pleasuring themselves and each other. After years of functioning as protection against impropriety and cold weather, these gloves now bring to life little experiences and relationships. Bunnies… use the intrinsic human practice of interpreting hand-gestures and body language to convey secret feelings and hopes, desires, and elicit empathy and recognition in the viewer.” 

Hannah Gartside works across kinetic sculpture, installation and quilt-making. Characteristically sensual and poetic, her works transform and, in some cases, animate, found fabrics, clothing and ephemera to articulate experiences and sensations of longing, tenderness, care, desire and fury. 

Recently, Gartside won the 2024 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize and was announced as a recipient of the prestigious Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship for 2025. Recent commissions include Forest Summons (for Lilith) at the Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria for Melbourne Now, 2023, and Loie, Lilith, Sarah, Pixie and Artemisia for Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art. 

Hannah Gartside, from the series: Bunnies in love, lust and longing, 2024, found leather gloves, wire, cotton and wool fabric, weighted curtain cord, thread, 13cm L x 9cm W x 7cm H. Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries.

Chunxiao Qu
FUTURES (Naarm/Melbourne)

Chunxiao Qu is an artist and published poet whose work folds pointed humour into conceptual making with irreverence and serious intent. Her wide-ranging practice spans installation, sculpture, painting, neon, print-making, poetry and fashion. Both her poetry and art embrace play in language, provoking her audience and testing truisms regarding art and life. Her ‘tributes’ to conceptual artists copy and adapt key works in art history while shifting meaning beyond satire. Humour’s tricks of contrast and surprise are employed, yet irony lives side-by-side with sincerity, as bedfellows in disguise. 

Select solo exhibitions include Art is a washing machine that is washing itself, FUTURES, 2023; An artist doesn’t need a label, Curated by Amelia Wallin, LRI Biannual Façade public Art Commission, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo (2022-2023); COPY, Curated by Chelsea Hopper, 99% Gallery, Melbourne(2022); Chunxiao Qu, Lon Gallery, Melbourne (2021); The title is no longer relevant, curated by Chelsea Hopper, Trocadero ArtSpace, Melbourne (2021). Select group exhibitions include Person, woman, man, camera, TV. Curated by Chelsea Hopper, BLINDSIDE, Melbourne (2022); White Night Bendigo, 2022, Bendigo (2022); Everything That Is Outside Of Us, Curated by A Constructed World, Palazzo Vai, Prato, Italy (2017). She has published two poetry collections: This poetry book is too good to have a name & Logic Poetry (Discipline, 2022) and Popcorn, Porn of Poetry (no more poetry, 2021). She is currently a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary. 

Chunxiao Qu, Wig shoes, 2017, shoes, synthetic wig, 45 x 15 x 32 cm, unique. Courtesy the artist and FUTURES.

Melbourne Art Fair returns 20 – 23 February 2025, taking place at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Click here to secure tickets, on sale now.

Leading Contemporary Artists Yona Lee and Dawn Ng Awarded Two Major Commissions

Under the Melbourne Art Foundation 2025 commission program, two ambitious new works from leading international artists represented by Australian galleries, will be presented at Melbourne Art Fair, 20 – 23 February 2025.

In partnership with Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) celebrated Singaporean multi-disciplinary artist Dawn Ng, represented by Sullivan+Strumpf(Gadigal Country/Sydney, Naarm/Melbourne), will exhibit a new moving image work exploring the tenor and trajectory of time via a hypnotic cascade of falling colour. Ng’s presentation at the 2025 Melbourne Art Fair is supported by The Ritz-Carlton Melbourne.

Additionally, in partnership with the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre, Auckland-based artist Yona Lee, represented by Fine Arts, Sydney (Gadigal Country/Sydney), will develop a large scale installation, calling into question what it means to make sculpture comprised of found objects in the networked digital age. Lee’s commission at the 2025 Melbourne Art Fair is supported by Artwork Transport. It is the first time a Melbourne Art Foundation Commission will be in partnership with an international institution.

The two major new works will be gifted to the permanent collections of the respective partnering institutions.

Reuben Keehan, Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery Modern Art (QAGOMA) commented: “Dawn Ng’s mesmerising video The Earth is an hourglass 2024 is the central component of her striking installation in the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial. It is also a significant work for Ng, marking the first time that she has experimented with a deep black ground, adding cosmic and metaphorical scope to her evocations of the elasticity of time. With Melbourne Art Foundation’s generous support and collaboration, it will join QAGOMA’s deep and wide-ranging collection of work from across Asia and the Pacific as an enduring document of strength and diversity of art from the region, and of this edition of the Triennial.” 

Dr. Zara Stanhope, Director of Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre, shared her enthusiasm for the collaboration: “This is a significant event as the first collaboratively supported artist commission between an institution in Aotearoa and one of the most important art fairs in the region, and an opportunity for South Korean, Aotearoa-based artist Yona Lee to reveal new developments in her creative practice. Internationally known for her large-scale installations blending public and domestic spaces, this commission provides the chance for Lee to take creative risks and engage audiences in new ways.”

Subsequent to the Melbourne installation, Lee’s work will enter the Govett-Brewster Collection and be exhibited as part of Direct Bodily Empathy – Sensing Sound, a major group exhibition as part of the celebrations for the 10th anniversary of the Len Lye Centre.

Melbourne Art Fair returns 20 – 23 February 2025, bringing together 60 of the region’s leading galleries and Indigenous Art Centres, spanning 10,000sqm at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

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Image Credits: (Left) Yona Lee. Photo: Seowon Nam. Courtesy of Art Sonje Center ⓒ 2024. Art Sonje Center all rights reserved. C/o the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney. 3 (right). Dawn Ng, Photo Credit: Paulius Staniunas | All Is Amazing.