Stepping into Sarah Contos’s sprawling home studio in Kyle Bay, in southern Sydney, feels like a step inside the artist’s inventive and inquisitive brain—apt given that Contos’s upcoming show at UNSW Galleries, Eye Lash Horizon, explores aspects of what makes us human.
Step inside Clare Milledge’s Avalon home and studio, surrounded by a lush garden of coastal natives, as she prepares for her latest exhibition at STATION Melbourne.
Step into Melbourne’s iconic Nicholas Building, where Kez Hughes has been crafting meticulous oil paintings that depict ancient objects from European museum collections—all for her solo exhibition Translations at Nicholas Thompson Gallery.
25-year-old Serwah Attafuah is known for her hyper-luminescent dreamscapes and cybernetic archetypes. In her Sydney studio she discusses the scavenger methods, ancestral rituals, and socio-ecological concerns that scaffold her practice—and why The Matrix helps her understand the world.
Julia Gutman works with textiles donated by family and friends, creating layered figurative tableaux. We stepped inside her studio in Lewisham in Sydney’s inner west, learning how connection is central to her practice.
“It’s a relationship I’m speaking about, a relationship with environment, place, my grandmother and family,” says Christopher Bassi. With inspiration vested in a matrilineal connection to Queensland’s far north, the sea, and the tropics, Bassi practises from a light-filled studio in Brisbane’s West End.
Kirtika Kain’s Western Sydney apartment on Dharug Country is crowded with boxes of materials and new canvases. She came back from a residency in Italy in late 2022 and since then she’s been living alongside her work, preparing for her solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 and for the Biennale of Sydney next year. The cohabitation has been intense and sometimes messy, but Kain says studio life is teaching her new confidence.
Within her warehouse studio in the industrial area of Coburg North, Melbourne, with her dog Merri in tow, Isadora Vaughan creates sculptural installations that sustain a visceral tension between incongruent materials and forms. Her work is showing at STATION Gallery Melbourne.
“At times, your emotions might be conflicted by the outside world, and what is happening around you, but the heart and the mind are always intimately connected.” Karen Black takes us into her practice and thoughts, and her inspiring Sydney studio.
Ceramicist James Lemon creates often irreverent, yet sublimely aesthetic, ceramic works. Ahead of his solo at Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney, and his showing in ‘Melbourne Now’, we visited his light-filled studio, talking about his process, insects and religion, faith and humour.
Sarah crowEST is particularly known for her “strap-on paintings”—large, wearable objects on stretched cloth that can be exhibited or worn. Ahead of her inclusion in Melbourne Now and her solo at LON Gallery, we caught crowEST in the final days of her residency at Billilla Mansion in Melbourne, where she talks through the importance of sustainability.
Kate Rohdes’s whimsical sculptures are simultaneously natural, unnatural, and even supernatural. In a space shared with her fluffy ginger cat Lion and her 6-year-old son, Rohde’s warehouse in Melbourne’s Northcote is a busy site of creativity and play.
