Artists

Tim Allen is an accomplished Australian painter whose practice is grounded in a lifelong engagement with the landscape. Working between en-plein air painting observation and memory, Allen transforms his experiences into richly atmospheric paintings that move beyond straightforward representation. With a painting career spanning more than three decades, Allen holds an MFA from UNSW and has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. He was awarded the Paddington Art Prize in 2017 and the Kedumba Drawing Award in 2016, among the 30 plus major Australian art prizes, including the Wynne Prize, Dobell Prize, Muswellbrook Art Prize and Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing. His work is held in significant public and corporate collections including Artbank, Bundanon Trust, Hawkesbury Regional Gallery and the Supreme Court of Victoria.

As an artist whose interest lies in the unseen, Kate Ballis uses infrared technology to reveal wavelengths of light that exist beyond the limits of ordinary human vision. This pursuit has taken her from the rolling hills of the Scottish Highlands and craggy shorelines of the Greek Isles to the expansive desert landscapes of Chile and the United States. More recently, Ballis has turned her attention to the intimate world of botanical life. Drawing on the decorative language of 18th-century English Jasperware, the series brings together historical ideas of beauty and ornamentation with unseen frequencies of light and contemporary digital image-making technologies. Working with a full-spectrum camera under artificial infrared light, Ballis employs meticulous focus-stacking techniques to construct each image from more than 100 individual exposures. The resulting artworks are further transformed through hand-applied mixed media painting, creating richly layered works that hover between photography and painting, the historical and the contemporary, and the natural and the imagined.

Delicate and structured, Keith Burt describes his still life subjects with a restrained technique. Chiselled brushstrokes contrast against sparingly rendered ground in his intimate and tonal renderings. Deep shadows paired with perfectly placed highlights give body and depth to subjects which advance from the canvas with stoic presence. Burt is an award-winning painter who creates from his studio in Brisbane, Australia. He has been shortlisted for multiple awards, notably winning the 2020 Brisbane Portrait Prize for his double portrait Urban Artists. He has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize on six occasions and was also a finalist for the Wynne Prize in 2023. Keith Burt is an award-winning painter whose restrained still life paintings explore the quiet tension between structure, light and form. Working with a highly considered technique, Burt distils everyday objects into intimate, tonal compositions, using chiselled brushstrokes against sparingly rendered grounds. Deep shadows and precisely placed highlights lend his subjects a sculptural presence, allowing forms to emerge from the canvas with a sense of weight and quiet authority. His paintings are characterised by sparing brush marks where nothing is superfluous, and every mark contributes to the balance, atmosphere and presence of the work. Based in Brisbane, Burt has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize on four occasions and a finalist in the Wynne Prize in 2023 and 2026. In 2020, Burt was awarded the Brisbane Portrait Prize, further establishing his position as one of Australia's accomplished contemporary painters.

Eva Fernandez was born Toronto, Canada in 1967, and lives and works in Perth, Western Australia. She completed a PhD in 2025, and has been a practising artist for more than two decades, developing a distinctive practice across digital-based media, photography and installation. Fernandez’s work is grounded in an interest in the ways images construct and shape our understanding of identity, history and memory. Drawing on archival imagery and the visual languages of popular and historical culture, she creates works that are both visually delicate and conceptually incisive. Her considered use of scale, repetition and digital manipulation invites viewers to look closely, often revealing narratives that sit beneath the surface of the image. Her practice is particularly attentive to representations of women and the cultural frameworks through which femininity, identity and social roles are constructed. By recontextualising historical imagery, Fernandez creates a space in which the past can be reconsidered from a contemporary perspective, bringing overlooked or partially acknowledged stories into focus.

With a decades long career, Neville French is one of Australia’s most revered classical ceramicists. His large-scaled porcelain structures explore a sincere engagement with the environment, paying homage to vast topographies, and silent, spiritual landscapes. A guiding principle of French’s work is the transformative effect of light on surface planes but through this mechanism, his works summon the eye across solid forms and into hollow spaces. By gently manipulating his thrown vessels French has developed a unique visual language, in an attempt to distil the very essence of place. This relationship is further grounded through hand crafted glazes created from materials which French personally mines at various locations around Australia. French's works are held in state and national institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, Queensland Art Gallery/GOMA, Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory along with more than 20 other public collections. French graduated with a Masters of Arts degree from RMIT University in 2000 and has been curated into more than thirty significant exhibitions in Australia, Germany, the UK and South Korea.

Junko Go’s practice is grounded in a search for universal values, drawing together elements of painting, drawing and storytelling to create a visual language that moves fluidly between cultures and histories. At the heart of her practice is an enduring interest in duality and the idea that seemingly opposing states can coexist. Ancient Japanese philosophies of balance, impermanence and interconnectedness are brought into dialogue with contemporary ways of being, resulting in works that both deeply considered and poetic. Born near Kyoto in Japan, Go studied art for three years in New York, and immigrated to Australia in 1992. She has been exhibiting for more than 30 years, and shortlisted for the Glover Prize on three occassions along with the Hutchins Prize among others.

Sue Lovegrove’s painting practice reflects an intimate and personal experience of landscape; often remote and isolated places that are relatively free of the presence of human beings. Immersing herself within secluded environments she becomes uniquely attuned to the bodily experience of being one with nature. The wild and remote landscapes she’s experienced firsthand include glacier research in New Zealand (2025) and Iceland (2023); Tasman Island (2011); an Arts Tasmania Wilderness Residency to Maatsuyker Island (2006); and the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship (2003). Lovegrove’s delicate and layered mark-making explores the patterning and pulses of the natural environment. Building on her sensory perception including sight, sound and touch Lovegrove creates poetic responses to landscapes that resonate with a visceral sense of being present to the rhythms of place. As she shifts between abstraction and figuration, she evocatively captures water, clouds, snow and ice, both in imagery and essence. Her delicate painted linework can mimic sound, text, inscriptions of weather, hair, nests, or habitats, communicating something about the presence and the transience of the natural world. Born in Adelaide in 1962, Lovegrove completed a Bachelor and PhD at the ANU in Canberra. She lives in Lutruwita/Tasmania

Ema Shin is a Japanese born artist with Korean heritage who lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. Her interdisciplinary practice interrogates notions of femininity, sexuality, identity, and womanhood. Working predominantly in soft sculpture and tapestry, Shin turns a feminist lens to the erasure of women from history within her family, heritage and culture. Absent women are represented in Shin's practice through soft sculpture facsimiles of human organs made from soft cloth or woven as tapestry and embellished with beading, embroidery and needlework. These intricate sculptures draw on the tactile tradition of women’s craft to reclaim agency within a cultural narrative that is historically gendered. Her works act as vessels, not only as an expression of personal and collective histories, but as a means of symbolic reclamation against a backdrop of marginalisation. Each thread, bead, and stitch stands as both a silent protest and a powerful tribute to absent and unseen women. Shin obtained a residency at the Australian Tapestry Workshop in 2012 and has continued to work in textiles and the tapestry medium since that time. Her accolades include being Highly Commended in the 2013 Irene Davies Emerging Artist Award for Small Tapestries, winning the Kate Derum Award for Small Tapestries in 2017 and in the same year being selected for the 3rd Tamworth Textile Triennial (touring), curated by Glenn Barkley. 2017 saw her selected for the Chaozhou International Embroidery Art Biennale in China and in 2023 she was Highly Commended in the 10th International Artist’s Book Triennial in Lithuania which travelled to seven venues in Europe and the USA. The same year she was also shortlisted for the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award. Shin has exhibited in curated exhibitions in Lithuania, USA, China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Germany, England, Kenya, Mexico, Bulgaria and in curated projects, solo shows and art prizes throughout Australia. She featured in the 25th Biennale of Sydney in 2026.

Valerie Sparks is a photomedia artist whose practice is driven by her interest in the history and aesthetics of immersive environments. Her visual dialogue with frescos, glass houses, stereoscopic photographs and French scenic wallpapers from the 1800s inspire the creation of floor-ceiling dioramas where the boundary between reality, history and fantasy is often blurred. Sparks also creates bespoke wallpaper for private residences and commercial projects.  The exploration of historical collections and archives is a core element of her practice, including those at the Vienna and La Rochelle Natural History Museums, the Musueè du Papier Peint in Rixheim, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Whitworth Gallery of Art and the Royal Institute of British Architects.  Her work has expanded from photography to encompass laser scanning, CT scanning and medical imaging software, using these technologies to investigate different ways of seeing, recording and understanding the world. She brings together diverse systems of knowledge and representation to explore the intersections between photography, radiography, science, geography and visual technologies. Sparks has been the recipient of a number of awards including the Australia Council London Residency, the French Embassy Cite Des Arts Studio in Paris, the City of Port Phillip Rupert Bunny Award, Australia Council New Work funding, and Arts Victoria International Program funding. She was awarded the OMNIA art award in 2021, the St Kevin’s Art Show prize for work on paper in 2018, the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize in 2016, and in 2025 received an honourable mention in the Hadley's Art Prize. Her work is in collections including the National Gallery of Australia, The National Gallery of Victoria and Artbank.