Emily Ebbs
Emily Ebbs is a visual artist living and working on Gadigal land (Sydney), Australia. Her process-based practice is deeply rooted in evoking the emotional residue of memories through the technique of staining. Emily’s fluid stain paintings often on raw canvas to allow the paint to seep into the weaves of the fabric explore the stain of trauma that remains within the body. Drawn to the idea of the stain, something marked or discoloured that is difficult to remove. Ebbs explores its connection to emotional and psychological trauma. Each of her works functions as an innermost portrait, formed from lived experiences, observations, and imaginings spanning from childhood through to adulthood.
In recent years, Ebbs’ practice has evolved to incorporate the landscape as a quiet collaborator. Stepping beyond the studio, she engages directly with the environment, gathering natural materials such as eucalyptus leaves to create dyes. This process fosters an intimate relationship with the land, as its offerings become integral to her staining techniques. The act of boiling the leaves fills her studio with their scent, evoking a deeply sensory and bodily response. Through this exchange, the landscape transcends its role as a mere backdrop or subject, emerging instead as a vital tool for healing and transformation.
She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the National Art School (2022), where she was awarded both the Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olly Art Centre Nancy Fairfax (AIR) Award and the Yves Hernot Painting Award.
Since completing her studies, Ebbs has held multiple solo exhibitions at Hake House of Art, Artereal Gallery, and the Tweed Regional Gallery. She has participated in over twenty group exhibitions and has been a finalist in several major art prizes, including the 2023 Mosman Art Prize, the 2025 Blacktown City Art Prize.
Most recently Emily was the winner of the 2025 Paddington Art Prize, a $30,000 National Acquisitive Prize, now in its 22nd year for a painting inspired by the Australian Landscape.
Sarah Dugan
Evoking the transcendental and the tangible, Sarah Dugan brings the viewer into proximity with sanctuaries, rituals, and memories shaped by the vast Australian landscape. In doing so, Dugan offers reverence and longing for these familiar yet remote spaces, extending the legacies they hold and the impressions they leave on those connected to them.
Dugan deconstructs the landscape through mediums of cameraless photography —meditating on abstracted light, horizons, movement, and scale, highlighting culturally inscribed geographies and physically imprinting elements of the environment and its imposed memories around her. With the deconstruction of these elements Dugan is slowing down time, to reflect on these fragments of memory, time and sensation.
Martin Zvěřina
Martin Zvěřina (b.1989) is a Czech visual artist whose work spans painting, installation, video, and sound. His practice focuses on the relationship between material transformation and perception, often blurring the boundaries between image, object, and landscape. Drawing on phenomenological thought and Eastern philosophy, he approaches art-making as a meditative and transformative process, in which human experience encounters the elemental properties of material and time.
His work frequently engages with the medium itself—its essence, historical connotations, and at times an ironic questioning of its own limits. He draws inspiration from a wide spectrum of sources, including literature, biological systems, and philosophy, relating them to emotions, relationships, and modes of perception in contemporary society.
Lauren O’Connor
Lauren O’Connor is an artist based between Sydney and the NSW South Coast. Her practice draws a line between place, emotion and abstraction giving new interpretations of landscape. O’Connor conjures form through abstraction, with her radiant use of colour unfolding through loose brushstrokes and intertwining folds of paint. Her work is often infused with an introspective analysis of emotion and human experience, embedding this energy into the landscape where mountains, rivers, gums and the rhythms of nature emerge.
She’s a graduate of the National Art School in Sydney and was announced as a winner of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2023. She has been a finalist in various prizes including the Fisher's Ghost Art Award (2024), Paddington Art Prize (2023, 2021), Northern Beaches Environmental Art & Design Prize (2023), Mosman Art Prize (2022, 2024) and was awarded the 2022 AACI Internship placement at Ernabella Arts Centre, APY Lands.
Sarah Darling
Born in Wollongong, Sarah Darling now lives and works in Lismore in the Northern Rivers. Sarah graduated in 2013 with a Bachelor in Interior and Spatial Design (UTS) and then in 2019 completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (SCU and COFA) where she majored in painting and sculpture.
Her painting practice involves working with colour and abstract forms, often in large scale works. Sarah creates intuitively and her projects are often material led. They are as much about process as they are about outside inspiration. Sarah enjoys creating conversations between colours and mixing colours in unconventional ways
Emma Dillon
Emma Dillon Hill is a visual artist working in painting and drawing. Working with pigments and pastels, she strives to create a duality of softness and intensity, achieved through the use of colour and the materiality of her chosen mediums. Her work focuses on the moments of beauty found in the mundane and the expression of the internal through abstraction. She uses her practice to find meaning in the monotony of daily life and translate her internal longing into tangible form.
With a Bachelor in Fine Art, and having studied teaching and graphic design, she has been a practising artist since graduating from the National Art School in 2015. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at galleries including LEDA gallery, Lander-Se gallery, Saint Cloche and Rainbow Studios and she has been published in Hunter & Folk and Art Edit Magazine. She currently lives and works in South Sydney, Australia.
Talya Brookman
Talya Brookman is a British abstract painter based in Sydney. Raised between London, Los Angeles, and Australia, her practice has developed through prolonged movement across places and an ongoing attentiveness to how environments are felt, remembered, and internalised. This sense of geographic and psychological passage informs a body of work concerned with inner landscapes and the subtle ways external terrains are absorbed into lived experience.
Working primarily with oil and ink on canvas, Brookman builds layered surfaces through gesture, wash, and slow accumulation. Her process is intuitive, allowing forms to surface gradually through cycles of addition and restraint. The paintings draw on fractal structures and recurring natural motifs, including river systems, wings, and lichen. Her work balances density and openness, creating atmospheric fields shaped by repetition and subtle tonal shifts that echo slow natural transformations.
Brookman studied at the Pratt Institute of Fine Art in New York and returned to Sydney in 2009. In recent years she has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions across Australia. In May she will present a solo exhibition with CBD Gallery in Sydney. In 2025, her painting Tether received the People’s Choice Award at the Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize.
Rebeccah Power
Rebeccah Power’s practice is inspired by the vast sky that surrounds her home on Bunurong Country, San Remo, Victoria. Her works are often described as atmospheric, ethereal, and hazy, inviting viewers to shift between the realms of formlessness and structure while aiming to capture the transient beauty and atmosphere of her natural surroundings.
The works on exhibition in Slow Transition at LOAF Gallery, were made in collaboration with the rain and wind and form part of her current practice where she is experimenting with ways to embody natural processes evoking the atmosphere. The drawn motif on top is based on a cloud formation called ‘Mammatus Clouds’. These are used as a symbol of female power and our ancient and timeless connection to the natural environment.
Nick Pont
Australian artist Nick Pont works within the realms of abstraction, surrealism, and figurative art to tap into the human psyche. Meditation, nature, and the landscape inspire the works as Pont translates energy into paintings. His technique sees line and form bleed; a balance of light and dark in layers and washes of paint and delicate mark making.
Based on Gumbaynggirr Country, Urunga on NSW’s Mid-North Coast, nature is in abundance. The rivers flow through the mountains to the ocean. Passing mangroves and historic rainforests. Swell meets the tide. A meeting point of charges that the earth generates. Naturally, this feeds into Pont’s work, as does his day-to-day: swims in the saltwater, parenting three young children, and his meditation practice discovered through these last few years.
Helen Poyser
Helen Poyser lives and works on Dharug and Gundungurra land. She paints solely in watercolour on paper (as well as utilising the medium in her three-dimensional work). Experiences with severe amnesia have led her to compulsively and prolifically explore lost identity and selfhood through acts of creation. Mostly working in diptych form and with a quiet absence of overt mark-making or “drawing,” Poyser teases at the inherent limits of an artist’s intention and presence within their work.
Mary Benvenuto
Mary Benvenuto is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works on Guringai and Gadigal land, Sydney. While her practice is rooted in painting, she expands her visual language through textiles, photography, and found materials to investigate the intersections of spirituality, memory, human connection, and yearning. Having recently completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School in Sydney, she focused her graduate work on the sensory and psychological realms of sleep, drawing specific inspiration from personal reoccurring dreams and memories. Now in her Honours year at the National Art School, Mary will continue exploring themes of human relationships and spiritual connection through painting and material experimentation.
Mary’s work is held in private collections in Australia, Norway and the US, and has participated in several group shows and local art prizes, including receiving a Highly Commended prize for her photograph, Morning Rituals, in the 2024 Hornsby Art prize.
Byron Kinnaird
For the past decade, Byron’s practice has engaged with landscape, skies, spirituality, iconography, and poetry. Working through an intuitive and reflective process, he creates pieces that move between personal inner explorations and shared human experiences.
Byron’s work is grounded in the natural and built environment, shaped by geology, architecture, colour, and atmosphere, while also reaching into the unseen and the imaginative, where the spiritual and the poetic intersect.
Katie Harvey
Katie Harvey is a painter currently based between Eora/Sydney and regional New South Wales. Traversing between semi-figuration and abstraction, her paintings layer colour-field expanses with shifting gestures and representational image-making to explore spatial tension, movement, and the sensory experience of being.
Her work explores how painting can register traces of felt and embodied experience. She utilises visual metamorphosis and subtle slippages between technique and mark-making to trace shifting psychological and sensory states. Through a sensitivity to light, colour, and gesture, she engages the unstable terrain between observing and sensing, where presence and absence continually blur.
Harvey completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at RMIT University in Melbourne, studied abroad at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and later completed a Master of Therapeutic Arts Practice at MIECAT in Melbourne.
Portrait by Tomm Hearn
Amber Hearn
Amber Hearn is a visual artist working on Dharug and Gundungurra Land, Blue Mountains, Australia. Hearn grew up in Tamworth in regional New South Wales and Papua New Guinea, where she was immersed in nature and developed a strong connection to land, and place. Her primary practice is painting but she has also worked in installation, performance, video, and virtual reality.
Exploring notions of the feminine, birth, and motherhood, along with her personal history and childhood experiences, Amber’s work explores individual yet universal experiences. Utilising the landscape both as a presentation of current place and memory, it is also a safety lens for her to investigate often painful yet beautiful narratives. Amber draws on her long-standing relationship with the bush and the natural world she has inhabited throughout her life. Being deeply interested in ancient history, ritual and particularly women, she also explores these themes through colour, form, repetition, and primal gesture.
Amber graduated from The National Art School with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) in 2014. Hearn has been exhibiting since 2012 and represented by Curatorial+Co since 2019. She has been a finalist in several major prizes including Paddington Art Prize, Glover Art Prize, Fishers Ghost Art Award, and Blacktown City Art Prize. Amber has exhibited in both solo and group shows across Australia including Caboolture Regional Art Gallery. Hearn’s work has been featured in Artist Profile, Art Almanac, Art Edit, Inside Out and Real Living.
Portrait by Tomm Hearn
Dalin Alejandrino
Dalin Alejandrino is a self-taught artist who creates abstract artworks, each embodying a sense of wonder and beauty in nature and its forms. Her works are a dialogue between motherhood and making as she navigates life, creativity, and her inner landscape through a world of visual storytelling.
Douglas Schofield - Past Artist
My work approaches themes of Landscape through the lens of gardening practice. As a gardener and horticulturist, I am attuned to the changes, both dramatic and subtle, in my surrounding climate and ecosystems. Personal experiences and social narratives around gardens interlace with themes of weather and plant protagonists to (hopefully) describe a nuanced and pervasive lived experience with Nature and Landscape. The abstract paintings are gestural, textual, dug, scraped and tenderly grown; they reach toward an atmosphere of garden spaces, celebrating the detritus and mess associated with them. Through abstraction I aim to contribute non-figurative visual language, narrating a contemporary experience of being in Landscape.
Giulia Corradi - Past Artist
Giulia Corradi's practice utilises art as a form of self-care. Her creative process is driven by a desire to create based on instinct and impulse. Her paintings serve as abstract representations of personal moments, relationships, and life experiences.
By working through successive layers of mark-making and fluid paint stains, the artworks often become a physical manifestation of her internal catharsis.
Since becoming a mother, familiar art supplies commonly found at home, such as craft glitter, oil pastels, house paint, and rainbow coloured markers, have found their way into her studio, infusing her paintings with a sense of magic and playfulness.
Giulia alternates between the physical challenge of creating large-scale, expansive works on raw canvas, unrolled from the ceiling to the floor, and engaging in small, intimate conversations on off-cuts of wood. Her decision to work on a large or small scale is influenced by events, emotions, or her current surroundings. Born in the UK to Italian parents, Giulia Corradi has lived in Italy and is now dedicated to her art making on Dharawal Country. Giulia studied Fine Arts at the Brera Art Academy in Milan, which expanded her experimental process into the realm of painting.
James Watkins
James Watkins is a multidisciplinary artist primarily working in expressionistic mixed-media paintings. Enamoured with both the potential of colour and the materiality of mark making, Watkins explores an abstracted, organic vocabulary as a means of delivering highly pigmented work– whilst entertaining themes of consciousness, painting as a means of spiritual elevation and interconnectivity within the natural world. Having lived in both Melbourne and Sydney, London, Paris, Istanbul and Mexico City over the last 15 years - he has recently returned home to Auckland, New Zealand, where he continues to pursue his studio practice.
Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier
Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier are artists based in Sydney. They share a conceptual practice making artwork using textiles and sound. They create audio-visual worlds for intimate experiences, wielding personal emotions of love and friendship, sincerity, and grief.
Portrait by Jake Terry
Madison Baird
Based on Gadigal land, Sydney, painter Madison Baird explores the emotional landscapes of our internal worlds and the reprieve we find in nature. Working across bush landscapes, figurative works, and still life, she observes how our environments shape us, and how our inner worlds, in turn, mirror and respond to these surroundings. Rooted in observation, Baird’s practice finds meaning in stillness and the quiet solitude of the landscape after dark. In their inky night time worlds, these paintings capture the calm of evening and the gentle company found in nature.
Nathan McCarthy
Nathan Andrew McCarthy is a visual artist based in Darlington, Sydney, Gadigal Country, whose practice is profoundly shaped by his childhood on the Coast of NSW, where he experienced a prolonged period of delayed English development. As a result, his work is born from intuition and varied forms of communication, including the private language he shared with his brother and his earliest communication through drawing and scribbles. This foundation in non-verbal expression informs his artistic process—an exploration of personal history using materials like oil sticks and collage to focus on ethereal figures suspended in natural landscapes, reflecting memory and the persistence of nature.
Ruby Yates
Ruby Yates (she/her) is an emerging artist originally from rural South Australia, Nukunu and Barngarla Country, Port Augusta. She is currently based on Kaurna Country, Adelaide, operating out of Switchboard Studios. Ruby holds a Bachelor of Contemporary Art and a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours), graduating from the University of South Australia in 2022. Working primarily with paint, unfolding the self plays a pivotal role in her practice, exploring themes of interconnectedness, relationships, and embodiment. Often ambiguous, her work fuses abstraction and tangibility, drawing from her interest in the theory of becoming.
Will Collins
Will Collins is a multi-disciplinary artist inspired by his connection with nature. Will takes an intuitive approach creating playful narratives with recurring motifs and themes. These pictures combine impromptu techniques, figurative abstraction and portraiture, mixed with layers of patterns and sometimes naïve symbolic imagery that suggest meditative journeys and heightened states that create a sense of perspective with a visceral colour selection.