Xanthe Muston
Xanthe Muston is a Sydney-based artist whose practice explores the intersections between literature and painting. Influenced by her postgraduate studies in English Literature, Xanthe’s process often begins by taking scenes from short stories and poems and creating narrative-rich scenes. In 2023, Xanthe Muston had the opportunity to view a retrospective of Edvard Munch’s work. In Munch’s surreal scenes Nature is portrayed with intense drama, claiming greater presence than the human figures who appear diminished beside towering, cliff-like trees and swirling clouds. Blue and Yellow references Munch’s Red and White, presenting two figures in a sleepless, dreamlike scene. The southern Norwegian coast is transported to the balcony of a weatherboard house and Munch’s two women, commonly interpreted as representing the stages of female vitality and life, are reimagined in a state of quiet thoughtfulness.
Muston has been the recipient of several awards including the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, 2021 Lane Cove Emerging Artist Prize, and the 2021 Tim Olsen Drawing Prize. Recently she has been shortlisted in the 2026 Salon de Refusés for her portrait of author and curator, Amber Creswell Bell.
Photography credit for portrait: Fiona Susanto.
Shanti Shea An
Shanti Shea An’s practice centres on how images are read, translated, and transformed through the process of painting. She works with source material drawn from mass media, art history, and personal photography, often searching for a latent ambiguity or instability that lies just beneath the surface.
Shanti Shea An (b. 1993) is an artist based on Gadigal Country (Sydney, Australia). She holds a PhD from the ANU School of Art & Design, where she completed a practice-led research project on the concepts of doubling and legibility within figurative painting. Her studio research focused on the image of the book within art, the philosophy of the fold, and Jacques Derrida’s writing on the parergon.
Recent solo exhibitions include Tropes (Velvet Lobster, Sydney, 2026) and The world folding in upon itself (ANCA Gallery, Canberra, 2023). She has exhibited in group shows across Australia, China, and France, including The Room: Our Landscape Interior (MARS Gallery, Melbourne, 2025), Tapestry (Tiles Lewisham, Sydney, 2025), and Folded Memories (Galerie Elsa Meunier — Galerie Mathilde le Coz, Paris, 2024).
Maggie Jane Doe
Maggie Jane Doe is an artist and retailer based in the Blue Mountains. Her practice is primarily concerned with colour, materiality and layered interior elements, anchored in discomfort and the female perspective. She also spends a near-unreasonable amount of time thinking about art materials.
Photography credit for portrait: Rosie Shephard.
Lilli Strömland
Lilli Strömland is a painter, living and working upon Gadigal land, Sydney. Her often psychologically-charged, observational oil paintings explore the subject of material nostalgia, comfort and home. Sensuous and tactile, they transpose the Dutch still-life tradition into the contemporary context of Australian suburbia.
Strömland holds a BFA in painting from the National Art School (2015) and has since gone on to win and be a finalist in multiple awards and prizes. These include being a finalist in the Brett Whiteley Scholarship (2020), the Portia Geach Memorial Award (2019, 2025), The Waverley Art Prize (2018, 2025), The Evelyn Chapman Award (2018), The Fisher's Ghost Art Award (2024, 2025) and the Salon de Refusés at S.H. Ervin Gallery (2019). After being a finalist in the Ravenswood Womens Art prize several times, Strömland was awarded the Emerging Artist Prize in 2025. In addition, she has partaken in numerous solo and group shows and has work held in private collections across Australia. Strömland has also participated in multiple residencies including the Shark Island Institute Kangaroo Valley (2023, 2024) and the Leif Hasles Foundation residency, Denmark (2025).
Jennifer Brady
Jennifer Brady is an emerging artist based in North-West Sydney (Dharug Land). She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from UNSW Art & Design. Brady’s multi-disciplinary practice explores the potential of language and expanded drawing methodologies in articulating mental health experiences. Brady has been actively involved in group exhibitions since 2016 across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Select solo exhibitions include: This is a Conversation Piece (2019) curated by Sarah Rose, at 107, Redfern; still learning (2021) at White Rhino Art Space; growing up, down, around (2023) at AiRSpace Projects; and space to think feel learn grow at Blue Mountains Cultural Centre (2024). She has been a finalist for the Lethbridge 10,000 Small Scale Art Award (2017), Jenny Birt Award (2018), the Kudos Emerging Artist & Designer Award (2018), and the Fisher’s Ghost Art Awards (2020-21). Brady is a co-founder of More Than Reproduction, a Sydney-based artist-run initiative.
Photography credit for portrait: Hayley Zena.
India Jablonski
India Jablonski (B. 2004) is an artist living and working in Sydney’s Northern Beaches (Garigal Country) and is graduating a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at the National Art School. Her emerging practice explores the underlying geometry of the Australian landscape conveyed through a hybridised representational and abstract composition. Inspired from observations of the world around her, an attentiveness to the spatial relationship between organic forms and architecture is revealed. Expanding upon her understanding of place and its transformative nature when investigated on canvas.
She has been involved in several group shows such as New Voices at CBD GALLERY (2026) and featured as a participant on ABC’s Portrait Artist of the Year AU (2025).
Hayley Zena
Born 1992 Eora Nation (Sydney), Australia.
Hayley Zena is a Blue Mountains based painter. Her grid systems are influenced by the colours and patterns of Australian insects, birds and plants.
She has completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) at Sydney College of the Arts USYD, and a Master of Curating and Cultural Leadership at UNSW Art and Design. Hayley has exhibited three solo shows, and participated in a multitude of group shows across NSW.
Hayley Zena Poynton uses an intuitive system of applying colour and generating grids. The grid is a structure which the artist uses to track each garden she mends, nurtures, observes, and inevitably must leave, as is the transience of renting. The nature of the grid (inside the grid versus outside the grid) has provided the artist with a familiar and consistent structure in which to examine living organisms through man-made materials. Using her digital library of garden sketches, photographs, videos and notes, the artist examines each garden or 'project space'.
By delineating areas within her project spaces as a scientist or archaeologist might, Hayley narrows in on the insects, plants and living colour palettes which form the basis of her colour-fields. Canvas is deconstructed and woven to create an asymmetrical and at times, unpredictable, grid system, reflecting the research component of the artist’s methodology.
Daniela Cristallo
Daniela Cristallo is a Sydney-based visual artist whose practice unfolds in the quiet architectures of care. Her work centres on abstract painting, with sculpture emerging as a natural extension of her ongoing exploration of form, material and memory. She is interested in the moments that accumulate within everyday life, the gestures, memories and emotional traces that often remain unseen.
Working across painting, paper clay, fabric and woven elements, she incorporates loved, kept and found materials from the home. Her paintings move between body, memory and landscape, shaped by a recurring return to water as a source of reflection. Working through an intuitive language of colour, gesture, pace and texture, she develops each piece through a responsive process; observations of place, movement and feeling are gradually translated into layered surfaces that hold traces of lived experience. A feminine landscape of keeping, holding and tenderness runs quietly through her work.
Daniela has been exhibiting since 2019 in solo and group exhibitions across Australia, including two solo shows at Straitjacket in Newcastle (2023 and 2025), alongside more than 30 group exhibitions. She has been a finalist in several contemporary art prizes, including the Blacktown City Art Prize (2019, 2024), Hawkesbury Art Prize (2019), Calleen Art Prize (2021), Fishers Ghost Art Award (2021), Georges River Art Award (2025) and Defiance Award (2026), and was awarded the Leda Gallery Art Prize in 2024, which led to a solo exhibition there in 2026. Her work has featured in Art Almanac and Art Edit Magazine
Profile image credit: Emma Dillon
Dan Kyle
My painting practice often extends out of the studio, a shipping container perched in the middle of a rocky sandstone escarpment, surrounded by towering gum trees. The large property that I am so fortunate to inhabit borders directly with the Wollemi National Park, a culturally significant place for the Dharug People.
The bush and garden here have been my primary subject for almost twenty years. My paintings are a reflection on my long term relationship with the landscape that I experience daily, a landscape that is constantly shifting and is very much alive.
From simple everyday moments that often go completely unnoticed, like a fog, a cloud or a puff of smoke to catastrophic events like flood, fire and drought.
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 - Past Artists
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 - Past Artist
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.