Artists

Chris Hagen’s work is shaped by doubleness: two surface outcomes, two countries and multiple ways of reading the same image. Living between Australia and the United States, Hagen is attentive to the space between places, perspectives and systems of meaning. His works do not resolve these differences, but hold them in suspension. Raised in northern Wisconsin by a biologist and a journalist, Hagen grew up between observation and storytelling—the impulse to record what is present and the need to interpret it. Images and information are layered across opposing or interconnected surfaces, allowing each work to be encountered from more than one position. What appears stable from one side may shift, fragment or become uncertain from another. Weather recurs as both subject and metaphor. Atmospheric changes and unstable conditions become ways of considering the broader environmental and political climates through which we move. Hagen’s works occupy the space between knowing and not knowing, asking viewers to reconsider what they see and how understanding is continually formed and revised.

Between the intimacy of handmade paper and the visual intensity of public space, Harvey transforms clothing gifted by members of her community through a physical process of breaking down, beating and reforming the fibres. Embedded within each surface are traces of previous use, personal connection and collective experience. Harvey’s work in public environments informs her sensitivity to the built world: its layered surfaces, shifting light, accumulated markings and competing visual signals. In Under My Skin, the handmade paper becomes a receptive field for these observations, with sprayed gestures overlapping like fragments of architecture, passing shadows or marks encountered in the street. Layers of colour and interrupted forms generate a sense of vibration, as though energy is moving beneath the surface. This visual noise is balanced by the slower labour of papermaking, bringing immediacy and duration into the same object. The works become records of movement and feeling, shaped by the body, the city and the communities from which their materials originate. She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts in Printmaking from Southern Cross University and a Master of Visual Arts from the Sydney College of the Arts. In 2024, MJ was awarded an artist residency at the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, USA. They were also a finalist in the Burnie Art Prize and presented a solo exhibition at the Print Council of Australia Gallery in Melbourne in 2025.

Matthew Hurdle works at the intersection of contemporary papermaking, material transformation and devotional practice. His labour-intensive processes investigate humility, vulnerability and renewal, with meaning embedded through the physical transformation of natural fibres into paper. Presented at Sydney Contemporary, these new bodies of work extend Hurdle’s ongoing investigation into clothing as both material and metaphor. Garments carrying traces of ritual and everyday use are soaked, beaten, formed and pressed into handmade paper. In You are beautiful when you cry, pulped hessian is brought into dialogue with ultramarine blue. Sackcloth has long represented humility and repentance, while ultramarine has signified virtue, sanctity and wealth. Hurdle holds these opposing symbolic positions in tension, suggesting that vulnerability and beauty can exist together. In Self Portrait {when my hands relax I can sleep}, pulped hessian is combined with the artist’s worn black cotton T-shirt. A garment associated with rest becomes a tactile paper surface, drawing attention to the body’s quiet rituals and the presence accumulated by everyday objects through use. Across both series, papermaking functions as material process and conceptual framework. Through the slow transformation of worn materials, Hurdle considers how memory, devotion and human experience can become embedded within paper.

Matthew Newkirk examines the power of visual language in shaping how we understand news, commerce and social relations. Drawing on familiar formats of public communication, including street signage, his works seek an immediate response before unsettling what is being read. Through shifts in context, typography and scale, Newkirk reveals how meaning can be constructed, redirected or distorted. A sign that appears authoritative in the street can become ambiguous in the gallery, prompting viewers to consider not only what they are reading, but how they have learned to interpret it. Referencing the history of signage in contemporary art, Newkirk’s work maintains a distinctly local and contemporary position, reflecting on the systems through which images are produced, circulated and believed. Matthew Newkirk received his PhD from the Queensland College of Art and Design, Griffith University.

Alethea Richter explores within these works at Sydney Contemporary what happens when the visual language of the screen is translated into material form. Pixel-like images are hand printed in layered fields of paint, then cut and woven back into the surface as paper threads, shifting between image and object. Light operates throughout the work, from the glow of the electronic display to the UV exposure used in the silkscreen process. Gradients, interruptions and woven depths slow the act of looking, revealing surfaces that cannot be resolved at a glance. Through accumulation, touch and shifting conditions of light, Richter recasts the pixel-like mark as something tactile, unstable and held in time. n 2023, Alethea was awarded the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Emerging Artist Prize and selected for the Print Council of Australia 2023 Print Commission. She was awarded in 2022 with the Grey Hand Press Internship Award and was a nominee for the Iain Turnbull Memorial Prize in 2021. Alethea has been selected for multiple group exhibitions including Disruption International Printmaking Exchange 2023, Megalo Print Studios (Canberra) Future Proof National Graduate Online Print Exhibition 2022, and the Highpoint Centre for Print International Juried Print Exhibition Stand Out Prints 2022 and 2024, Minneapolis. Richter has also exhibited her work at Sydney Contemporary since 2024. In 2024, Alethea was awarded ‘Best in Show’ at the Ipswich Art Awards and in 2025 the Emerging Artist winner at the Burnie Print Prize, Tasmania and the Turnbull Award, Brisbane, in recognition of her outstanding work in contemporary printmaking at the Queensland College of Art and Design, Griffith University. In 2026, Richter is a finalist in the National Works on Paper prize and Du Reitz Award.

Characterised by robust figures and suburban dramas, Woodrow has earned significant recognition, including winning the Gold Coast Art Award twice and Brisbane’s first major art prize, the GIO Art Award along with a solo exhibition at Phillip Bacon Galleries. Becoming a full-time artist also allowed him to complete an art history degree at the University of Queensland. After completing his studies, he left Queensland, first relocating to Canberra to work at the National Gallery of Australia, and later accepting a position at the School of Fine Art at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales. During this time, he held regular exhibitions in Newcastle and Sydney and earned both a Master of Philosophy and a Doctor of Philosophy from The University of Sydney. While Woodrow has worked across most art mediums, his return to Queensland in 2006 to teach at the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University, marked a shift to an almost exclusive focus on printmaking. A pioneer in using the Internet for teaching and visual arts research, he offered Australia’s first online art theory course in the 1990s. However, his artistic focus on the graphic arts and historical print technologies stems from their ability to interrogate and explore the status and significance of iconic and symbolic images. Woodrow’s research often centres on representations within the field of physiognomy, a recurring theme in both his writing and creative work. His engagement with the synergy between old and new technologies informs the critical operations underlying the muscular iconography in his prints. This approach makes his work conceptually rich, technically proficient, and deeply resonant in exploring the complexities of visual representation.