Recipient of the Composite Moving Image Agency and Media Bank Award and the Jack Willet 1301SW Honours Award. _________________________________ HERE/THERE (AND ME IN-BETWEEN) Just like walking in an alley, looking to see what will happen, then walking into another alley
The imagery in my work is akin to a form of assemblage and is intended to challenge notions of totality. Through relations of exteriority and emergent properties, these works may be understood in terms of material, expression, stability and coding.
Born in 2002, Aiko is an Australian painter of Asian diaspora, currently maintaining her practice on Wurundjeri Land of the Kulin Nations in Naarm/Melbourne. Currently enrolled in the Honours Fine Art course at RMIT School of Art, she excels in
RMIT Creative Residency Award The female body is judged biologically, evolutionarily and culturally for its fertility, sexuality, and aesthetics. As a young Western woman, I am shaped by this judgement, battling to find acceptance within my skin. My practice-led research
Home as Qualia: Reflections on the miniature object. My practice-led research project Home as Qualia: Reflections on the miniature object is an ode to places of memory and devotion—the home. I hand-craft miniatures, boxes, and lockets to examine how home
MISOPHONIA. (installation, performance and sound) Misphonia explores performativity; social scripting/masking, the psyche, the central nervous system and the erotic (as power/life source), through lived experience of patriarchy, trauma and (inevitably) late diagnosed neurodiversity. [(Currently), most AFAB people aren’t diagnosed until
Stardust: Ascension and the Art I Never Made. My practice-based research investigates the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) within a queer photographic and video practice to explore and amplify themes of fantasy, identity, and healing. Grounded in Deleuzian theory, which
This practice-led research project investigates the interplay between the seen and unseen within textile art installation practice. Central to this research is the use of agave fibres and other natural materials, which reflect spiritual and ecological interconnections as they allow
Koodak Award for Enamelling Prize for Technical Excellence. WHIMSY IN THE ORDINARY: AN EXPLORATION OF THE MUNDANE, ROUTINE AND PRECIOUSNESS THROUGH JEWELLERY. My practice explores the domestic space and the ordinary with a focus on processes and objects involved in
YELLOW CORRIDOR My site-specific installation practice uses the colour yellow to translate a neurodiverse experience of architectural space. Using a yellow cube as a self-portrait, I explore liminal spaces in institutional buildings to challenge formalist ideas and portray my sensorial
APHOTIC APOTHECA: OPENING SOON. Come one, come all and step inside, you never know what one might find. An immersive installation allowing visitors to travel through to an undisclosed time and discover the curiosities the little shop has to offer.
MAKING, BREAKING, MAKING: REFLECTING PERSONAL EXPERIENCES OF COMPLEX TRAUMA. This project investigates the multifaceted nature of traumatic memory through the making and breaking of handmade objects grounded in feminine roles. By creatively exploring the process of forming and fragmenting domestic
Christine Murray (she/her) is an object-based artist trained in gold & silver smithing with a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) at RMIT. She has also completed a Bachelor of Contemporary Arts majoring in Animation and Digital Culture (Deakin University). Murray
Internal dialogue, self-image, grotesque, gothic, infested, decay, temporality, memento mori, bodily and paradox are words and phrases that could describe my work. Through a self-reflective lens, I use oil painting, drawing and sculpture as a visual language to explore themes,
[1] FUTUREFOUND BUTTON:A dialogue between C (she) and F (the plant) C: They say regrets are based on wrong premises. What do you think.F: I think very little.C: Why are you here.F: To fill in the silence. F: What’s Sam
FEMINISM & THE OCCULT attempts to challenge the viewer as to whether or not their pre-conceived ideas as to what a witch is have been informed by, and/or contributed to, the misogyny, ageism, racism and violence that often overshadows the
Recipient of the Bold and Beautiful Art Prize and the Wolf Wennrich Award for Craftmanship – Mr Michael Wennrich Endowment. _________________________________ In my creative practice, I have explored the inter-dependency of species using the symbiotic relationships between coral and people
RMIT Creative Residency Award Reconstructing the vessel depicted in paintings as novel metal work objects. The act of abstracting metal iterations of vessels from paintings blurs the lines between disciplines, positioning jewellery and objects as equal to traditional art forms
My watercolour painting practice reveals and communicates ideas of an ‘inner self’ via imagery that evokes a conscious and unconscious self, along with personal identity and attachment. Each of my paintings focuses on reconstructing something from the past via thoughts
THE THEATRE OF VIOLENCE This project is an exploration of the intense focus on violence in media and popular culture. I am curious about a society that views violence as entertainment and how this is reflective of rape culture. Rape
SQUISH: RESEARCHING SKIN WITHIN PAINTING Studies of the human form, with a focus on flesh. Examining the body’s unique movements and malleability. An inquiry into how physical senses such as grabbing and squishing, can be depicted within painting. Finishing my
AN UNCHARTED PATH To lay down a path, you begin by digging a hole. It can be challenging work. It involves risk. What if it collapses? What if you uncover something undesirable? What if it all leads to nothing, a
CONFINE DELL’INFERNO: PAINTING AS AN EXPULSION This practice-led research project grew out of a need to navigate my obsessive-compulsive (OCD) thoughts and actions related to the fear of disease and illness. My painting practice enables me to confront my
Through intense and obsessive patterning, I have made pen drawings on paper that seek to depict the sublime. Conceptually engaged with the symbols that reverberate from within the Catholic Church, I have linked my matrilineal connection to the Church with
AFFINITY investigates how material expression through painting can be used to explore personal affect and relationality to the natural environment. This project contributes and sits alongside wider discussions of connection to the natural landscape and its relation to colonial extractive
MATTERFLOW My creative practice is an exploration of material and transformation, and is focused on ceramic-based processes. I draw on traditional ceramic techniques, such as mould making, slip casting and glaze development, which I use in unconventional ways to create
‘GIRLY’ AND BODILY is a research project that aims to immerse the viewer in a bodily experience of painting installation that explores excessively bright colours and cute ‘girly’ bubbly forms to reclaim them as a symbol of powerful femininity. I
A HOME FOR LOST THINGS In my creative practice, I have explored the body through drawing and the sculptural medium, unpacking notions of how we host our lived experiences within us, along with what it means to find a ‘home’
ALIAS & ARTIST delves into the murky waters of art in the age of the internet. Through layered installations, niche subcommunities are brought out from the ether into the corporeal realm. By merging the online with the offline, the complexities
AMULETS FOR THE EARTH: This speculative research project imagines a post-Anthropocene world where food and plant production and growth rely on human care including conservation, modification and sustainability. The research utilises printing and bookbinding on handmade paper, metalsmithing and embroidery
Wolf Wennrich Award for Craftsmanship I Know You of Old: The Transmutation of Metal, Matter and Meaning. My practice-led research uses historical and contemporary metalsmithing techniques to find new and experimental methods to transmute copper and silver alloys into contemporary
Honours Fine Art Travelling Award. INTIMUS BOUND is a playful exploration of the search for emotional intimacy through imagined, metamorphic and metaphorical narratives. This body of work encompasses a year-long project contained in a single artist’s book. In what often
SLACK, refers to the looseness between taut stitches, alternating between moments of tension and relief. This is a project where fields of expanded painting and craft practices collide, to create works that occupy a hybrid space between painting and textile.
The Bold and the Beautiful Award. DRIFTING STARS: The sense of alienation seeing through self, objects, place, and community. My work captures and expresses the isolation and the anxiety of self-identity experienced between life in Korea and Australia while
Recipient of the Liquid Architecture Prize. _________________________________ MISCEGENASIAN My practice is interdisciplinary and includes audio-visual media, performance, installation, and publication. Conceptually, my creative work is focused on critical discourses around white supremacy in gay culture, which forms via exaggeration and
Spiralling outward from the central practice of drawing, my work covers a number of mediums and practices from drawing to photography, performance and installation. Drawing is often overlooked within the artistic cannon as an approach that is preparatory, or incomplete,
Jade Power is a Naarm/Melbourne based emerging artists practicing primarily in the expanded field of ceramics. Power’s practice is grounded in a deep engagement with material and the quiet, yet rigorous labour of making. Working primarily with porcelain,
This practice-led research project unites my digital and non-digital artworks to build digital worlds that invite exploration and create a sense of disorientation and wonder. My digital artworks, such as my computer games, often explore ideas of narrative and sense
Dean’s Award for Excellence in Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) (Honours). The Emily Hope Prize- Professor AD Hope Endowment Award. SOMETIMES I CAN’T EVEN SLEEP BECAUSE I LOVE SOMEONE SO MUCH: AN EXPLORATION OF DEVOTION, LOVE, AND CRAFT THROUGH FANDOM
ON EXIT WOUNDS: A WALKING TOUR OF THINGS LEFT BEHIND (For Dawn Kelly) My practice persistently engages with concepts of the archive, and archival objects, along with explorations of intimacy. This year my research was focused on creating art and
Kings ARI Award. BLINDNESS: A MODE OF ABSTRACTION My practice harnesses my lived experience as a legally blind artist to explore and develop a pictorial language around perception itself. Conceptually, this project is concerned with destabilising the notion of blindness
Liquid Architecture Award. ECHO is an immersive installation of reflection and revealing. Named for the Oread, one’s reflection is infinitely duplicated and fractured upon entering the work, as they are simultaneously aware of invisible onlookers who can see clearly through
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BETWEEN PERSONAL AND THE GENDER POLITICS: THE SYMPHONY OF MATERIAL SUBSTANCES, ACTIONS, AND BODY MOVEMENTS Through creative practices informed by ceramic processes, this practice-led research project explores gender identity within the context of contemporary Chinese society, delving into narrations, experiences,
My practice uses performance, installation, sound, video, and digital technologies to examine the creation and perpetuation of national myths and how they lead to the formation of national identity. It explores the critical potential of failure as a tool to
CATHARSIS Humans have entered the epoch of self-surveillance and datafication through the use of everyday objects. This practice-led research project seeks to critique surveillance and data capitalism, and its apparatuses of control, including its impact on selfhood. The research
QUEER IDENTITY: GROWING UP IN REGIONAL AUSTRALIA AND ITS INFLUENCE ON ONE’S EVERYDAY LIFESTYLE My creative research investigates the impact on queer people of an upbringing in rural Australia, examining their understanding of identity, community and connections between themselves and
In You is my Honours creative project. I journey through unseen sentiment, memory, and perception, tracing vulnerability and self-preservation woven into familial and cultural memory. This perceptual exploration unfolds within a series of artworks, engaging with quiet yet unconscious emotional
Melbourne Artist Supplies – Professional Practice Award The Koodak Award for Academic Excellence in Gold and Silversmithing Glimpsing mourning: an encounter of loss, mourning & ecological grief. This project has grown out of the urgency I feel to address personal
The Bold and The Beautiful Award. INTO THE CAPITALOCENE “Shower him with all earthly blessings, plunge him so deep into happiness that nothing is visible but the bubbles rising to the surface of his happiness, as if it were water;
THE SOFTEST PART THAT I CANNOT SHARE WITH YOU Transformative Journey of Home, Memory and Identity My project examines
WAVE DYNAMICS: an interweaving of wave phenomena, becoming, and geometric abstraction. Waves appear in many forms: in the warmth of sunlight, in colour, in the swell of the ocean, in music, and in our heads and hearts. They are fundamental
Creating Stuff out of Existing Stuff (2024). During my ever-growing multi-media art practice, my project embraces material exploration, intuition, instinct and ideas of overconsumption via the manipulation of sustainably foraged items and art assemblage. Working within a multi-media and sculptural
THEATRE OF OPERATIONS Kat Rae’s work explores how place, memory and experience layer and mesh, and who and what is forgotten after a war. Kat served in the Australian Army for twenty years before deciding to become a full-time artist
Recipient of the Alpha60 Prize. _________________________________ NO ONE TOLD ME I WAS LIVING IN A BRUTALIST NIGHTMARE My installation No One Told Me I was Living in a Brutalist Nightmare seeks to question the impact of growing up in a
Composite Award. CYBERROT: CORPOREAL DECAY INSIDE LIMINAL TECHNOLOGIES CYBERROT CYBERROT CYBERROT CYBERROT CYBERROT ROT ROT ROT ROT ROT IT’S ROTTING DECAYING SPREADING DISTORTING GLITCHING ENDLESS
Utilising the expressive qualities of paint, my creative practice intertwines realistic portraiture with abstracted Farsi and Arabic calligraphy to raise insights into the spiritual reality of the human condition. Drawing on the writings of the Baháʼí Faith, a religious minority
TO THE SKY WITH HOPES AND DREAMS: IMAGES OF RETRACING THE PAST PRINTED ON CERAMICS In this project, I use different art techniques like printmaking, collage, pottery, and ceramics to explore my personal experiences and connect them with broader
NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP Drawn from ceramics-based processes, my creative practice forms via constituent and material relationships as an exploration of metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is the free space of transition outside of notions of containment, restraint, and inhibition.
I CAN’T STAND IT: A MULTI-MEDIA EXPLORATION OF MEMORY AND EMOTION My drawing practice focuses on themes around memory, sentimentality, and individual disposition, framed via a conceptual representation of personal experience. This is shown through soft gestural graphite and coloured
PIMP MY RIDE: DELUSIONS OF FOUR-WHEELED GRANDEUR Inspired by an upbringing surrounded by enthusiastic car modifiers, aberrant working-class hoons, and an absurdly exuberant TV program dedicated to ‘pimping’ out derelict dregs of cars, Pimp My Ride: Delusions of Four-Wheeled Grandeur
Recipient of the School of Art Honours Travelling Grant. _________________________________ NISAM SPAVALA ALI SAM LEŽALA (I WASN’T SLEEPING BUT I WAS LAYING) Looking, touching, being; my research-based practice is an investigation of these three elements in relation to my position
Recipient of the School of Art Honours Travelling Grant. _________________________________ SOMETIMES I WRITE SO CONFIDENTLY I START TO BELIEVE MYSELF My practice-led research uses queer ecology as a framework to explore phenomenological spaces of encounter/occupancy. My practice constructs both metaphorical
Lucy Ramsay (she/her) is a contemporary mixed-media artist originally from Ngunnawal country (Canberra) and living and practicing in Narrm/Melbourne. Graduating at RMIT from her Bachelor of Fine Art, she majored in printmaking with a specific interest in etching and textiles.
MY QUEER BODY: SELF-ACCEPTANCE AND HEALING THROUGH AN INTERSECTIONAL LENS. This activist practice-led research project explores my Chinese-Australian, queer and non-binary positionality and the psychosocial impact of physical scrutinisation and the expectation to conform to beauty standards, heteronormativity, and the
UNSTILL LIFE My painting practice forms as a way of gently unpicking assumptions about the way we see and think about the world. In exploring the tenuous state of human disturbances during the Anthropocene, each work sits in a place
Madelyn McKenzie is an emerging artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, working primarily across ceramics, sculpture and installation. She has just completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at RMIT University whilst also participating in Craft Victoria’s Fresh! Fellowship Program. Madelyn’s Honours research
HER HOME ON CHICKEN LEGS: an interweaving of feminism, folklore, and sorcery My creative practice examines folklore and fairy tales via a contemporary, feminist lens. The working method that I employ involves researching fables to locate stories that may have
Dean’s Award for Excellence in Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) (Honours). Travel Scholarship Award. Ballarat International Foto Biennale GradFoto 2024 finalist. ____________________________________________________ Substantial and Significant is a multimedia installation, involving a combination of performance, projection and sculpture made from found
Recipient of the Tania Doropoulos Prize. _________________________________ ATTENTION ON PERIPHERAL MOVEMENTS Attending to materials and material determination. Shifting, transforming, sliding. Contained and coming undone. Un-restricting materials and re-contextualising the everyday through transformative processes. Transforming material narratives. Taking the functionality of
URBAN ANIMALIA: Exploring the human-animal relationship within the ever-growing urban scape of Australia. Urban Animalia engages the subject matter of birds, insects, reptiles and mammals as devices to explore the adaptation of animals to the Victorian landscape. I engage in the
Nocturnal Flux: Discovering Dimensions of Night. This project explores my changed way of looking and feeling at night through partially deconstructed, shifting, painted representations. My work explores my fascination with the experience of night spaces and the ranging aesthetic and
Beyond the Canvas My art is abstract Neurographica, which seeks to depict subjective reality by documenting an experience of the present moment. This abstraction helps me navigate thoughts to experience an embodied state of being. It is a process-driven
Community of Practice Award THE INK GROWS LESS, THE SEA INCREASES. This practice-led research project engages with longing, magical realism, sensation poetry, and word-to-image translation to explore how the alchemy of word and image has the capacity to generate worlds;
DRiPPY Oliver Brown (he/him, b.1997) is an experimental interdisciplinary artist who frequently works with sound, kinetic installation, and interactive media. He has a keen interest in (urban) ecologies and the interactions between humans, their technologies, and their natural environments. In
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“KINDS OF CONNECTIONS” I’m Poppy Clarke and I’m a multidisciplinary figurative painter. This project is an exhibition about kinds of connections. It is a series of portraits on panels and canvas to remind and inspire a renewed sense of excitement
Alpha 60 Award. Wolf Wennrich Award for Craftmanship – Mr Michael Wennrich Endowment. THE DIAGRAMMATIC IMPULSE: WAYS OF KNOWING Diagrams are abstractions, taming messy reality through their orderly summaries of information and relationships. In my practice I explore the formal
Colour is Content – a scandalous notion. Colour, I keep telling myself, can be anything it wants to be. An untouchable, anthropomorphic body of expression. An agitator. A goddess. It seems however, that the higher values of colour are all too well
MATTERS proposes that creating multi-sensory atmospheres in sculptural installation art can reconnect us to our sensitive and material nature, blurring the boundaries between participants, artwork and environment. These gatherings could become sites for (renewed) embodiment whilst revolting against hegemonic power structures
GOSSAMERY I am a Peruvian-born sculptural installation artist working in Naarm, Australia. My work explores how we experience embodied meaning through interconnection with our environment. I pick my materials based on their sensorial and somaesthetic qualities. As such I have
Highest Academic Achievement in Honours Year Gold & Silversmithing. IN THE GARDEN: AN EXPLORATION OF MEANING, MATERIAL AND CONNECTION Whilst acknowledging that all our actions impact others, both human and non-human, and that all beings are connected, I explore
CONCILIATION: THE ARID GARDEN Roots are intriguing. They are an engagement – a plant’s engagement with the soil, a grounding, a base, an establishment, support to stand up and remain standing against outside forces and elements, a seeking of sustenance
Devices of Desire. This research project explores desire as a human experience through the context of arcade machines and vending machines. Inspired by the fascination and curiosity I experienced during my upbringing in Hong Kong, the project investigates the captivating
Artist Bio Sun Wai Wise Yeung Yeung was born in China, grew up in Hong Kong and is studying in Melbourne. Yeung is a contemporary artist who combines wheel-throwing, carving and the ceramic process to create sculpture and functional pottery.
MOTHER IN BRAILLE. My Honours project explores how sculpture, installation and personal symbolism can address intimate family bonds, strong feelings and things that are difficult to say with language alone. My project seeks to pay homage to my mother, and
The Bold and the Beautiful Award. DESIRING THE SELF: Embracing Autonomy & Rethinking The Gaze I am a young, queer, multi-disciplinary artist based in Melbourne/Naarm working across mediums of painting, drawing, sculpture and video performance. My artistic practice explores how
Wolf Wennrich Award for Craftmanship – Mr Michael Wennrich Endowment. I SPOKE TO AN ECHO: THE JEWELLERY STUDIO AS AN ARCHIVE OF HUMAN INTERACTION WITH MATERIAL The bench peg (or bench pin) is a timber object affixed to the jewellers
AN EMBER IN THE PAINT: A STRATEGIC APPROACH TO AFFECT AND TIME. My project investigated the possibility of embedding something into a painting while it was being made so that, at some future point, it would spark into life and
THE FUTURE IS FICKLE: A FALSE PROMISE. Vittoria Cugno (b.2001) is an emerging Melbourne-based artist who specialises in oil figurative paintings. Her Honours research project formed as a dedication to the early passing of her father. She learned that our
Recipient of the The Bold and the Beautiful Art Prize. _________________________________ THE LANGUAGE OF MATERIALS In my project I have investigated how after immigrating to Australia in 1998, having been brought up in a traditional Chinese culture, I was exposed
Recipient of the Reflektor Prize. _________________________________ Originally from the traditional unceded lands of the Kaurna people on what is now known as the Adelaide Plains, I moved to Naarm/Melbourne, where my current creative work has generally developed into an expanded
