b. 1982, Gadgial/Sydney, Australia
Lives and works in Paris, France

Gregory Hodge is an Australian artist based in Paris, France. His paintings oscillate between abstraction and figuration, layering personal source material with painterly gestural marks and obscured motifs of foliage, interiors and architecture.

With an ongoing interest in how to render different material surfaces in paint, Hodge’s recent works eschew a slick, pop finish for a deliberately handmade quality designed to resemble the warp and weft of tapestries and other woven materials. He does this using specially handmade tools and brushes, working from illustrations and photographs that are digitally collaged before being painstakingly recreated in paint. These layered compositions convince as collage, with Hodge’s use of shadows and sharp edges reinforcing these intellectual as well as visual collisions, with forms and shapes seeming to hover and stack. The foremost layer of Hodge’s paintings though are the ribbon-like painterly gestures that move across the surface of the composition, standing in for figures, fabric and other restless forms. In paintings that appear to grapple with wanting to be representational, these gestures are designed to disrupt any coherent reading of the symbols and surfaces, and to return these densely packed paintings back to the subject and experience of painting.

b. 1954, Brisbane, Australia
Lives and works in the Northern Rivers, Australia

Since the early 1980s, Lindy Lee has explored ideas around connection, family, history, time, and personal identity through works that draw on her experiences as a second-generation Chinese Australian. She has also made a significant contribution to the development of contemporary art in Australia through ongoing leadership in the cultural sector as an academic, board member, cultural advocate, educator, founder, and mentor.

Working across installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, printmaking and public art, Lee considers ideas of materiality and immateriality, existence, and selfhood. The artist often works with processes of chance and spontaneity to create her thoughtful and beautiful works. In the mid-1990s, Lee began to study Daoism and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism which explore the connections between humanity and nature. The philosophies of Buddhism and Taoism are central to Lindy’s work, most recently resulting in works that explore our understanding of the cosmos and are created using elements of fire and water. Over the last decade the artist’s practice has extended into the public realm, enabling Lee to develop large-scale sculptural works that create spaces of belonging and community.

b. 1982, Singapore
Lives and works in Singapore

Dawn Ng is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, who has worked across a breadth of mediums, motifs, and scales, including sculpture, photography, light, film, collage, painting, and large-scale installations. Her practice deals with time, memory, and the ephemeral.

Ng’s body of work, Into Air, began as a study into the articulation of temporality. Rather than relying on numerical terms Ng turns to the most ephemeral material available to her in her native Singapore – ice – and from there has devised an emotive language of creation, destruction, trace and remembrance. The passage is a cyclical one. She assiduously builds blocks of frozen pigment with the skill of a chemist, a painter and a sculptor creating a topographical medley of pigments, watercolours, dyes. The works are all traces and residues of each block’s existence, and record the movement of its states from solid to liquid, and eventually to air: from weight to lightness, monumentality to nothingness.

b. 1988, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Lives and works in Gadigal/Sydney, Australia

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran is interested in global histories and languages of figurative representation and their intersections with issues relating to the politics of idolatry, the monument, gender, race and religiosity. He has specific interests in South Asian forms and imagery. While he is best known for his inventive and somewhat unorthodox approach to ceramic media, his material vernacular is broad. He has worked imaginatively with a range of sculptural materials including bronze, concrete, neon, LED and fibreglass.

His signature neo-expressionist and polychromatic style has been adapted for works in museums, festivals, multi-art centres and the public domain. This has included significant presentations at the National Gallery of Australia, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Dhaka Art Summit, Art Basel Hong Kong and Dark Mofo festival. His first major permanent public artwork was recently installed at the entrance of the new HOTA gallery.

b. 1977
Lives and works on Gadigal Land/Sydney, Australia

The Monobloc Throne Series (2017-2024) is a continuation of Seton’s ongoing exploration of contemporary thrones, threading back to the earliest days of his practice, recreating and reframing gallery benches (2003), couches (2004), Namco chairs (2006), Thonet 14 chairs (2016) and Monobloc chairs (2017-2024).

The Monobloc Throne is a monument to a quotidian object and the folly of our best intentions. The ubiquitous monobloc plastic chair, that everyday piece of garden furniture is rendered here in marble as a raised throne. The work draws on the format of the monumental raised monoliths of Egyptian sculpture, where the figures are bound to the raw stone from which they are created. Only this throne sits empty, seemingly free of the imperial figures, a benign testament to the egalitarian credentials of the modern industrial age. The monobloc chair is an injection moulded lightweight stackable polypropylene chair, affordably produced in their millions, and is considered the world’s most common plastic chair. We have all sat on one, in various stages of suffering under the elements and almost always ready to be tossed. This kind of chair is purchased with its end in mind. As such, it is now considered a major contributor to environmental damage in the form of microplastics. There can be objects that stand as monuments to our achievements, even if they end up testifying to the failures of our best intentions.

The name comes from mono- (“one”) and bloc (“block”), meaning an object forged in a single piece.

b.1952, Djarrakpi

Larrakitj Forest recalls the way in which the Yol u people move through the world – through this gathering of Larrakitj ceremonial poles, rendered in scintillating surfaces of black, white, and grey ochres. The Yolŋu are First Nations peoples inhabiting northeastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. Yolŋu art involves a continuous dialogue between abstraction and representation – a conversation connected to the deep meanings of Yolŋu life and an intimate relationship with the natural world.

Naminapu Maymuru-White‘s (b.1952, Djarrakpi) paintings on the surface of the Larrakitj poles depict the Milky Way as it is experienced by the artist and convey how everything is connected: stars, water, sky, ground, river, kin, the painted Larrakitj, and the artist’s hand. Maymuru-White witnesses the passage of time through the ceaseless transformations of the elements, and the cosmos serve as evidence of all that we have all met and how we live in this present moment.

b. 1970
Lives and works in Karachi, Pakistan

Adeela Suleman’s monuments point to the fragile and fleeting ephemerality of life and reference recent violent and catastrophic occurrences within the artist’s sociopolitical landscape. The screens are representative of the paradise one experiences after death. Each sparrow in When you’ve had enough of paradise represents sacrifice, resurrection and the soul. Traditionally, the death of a bird is a sign of a new beginning. Beginnings come from endings and in that light, there is the suggestion of loss and sacrifice before starting a new. The work confronts our earthly fears butremains suggestive of transcendental relief. It may be seen simultaneously as a symbolic representation of the coexistence of love, nature and the chaos of man. 

b.1973, Auckland, New Zealand
Lives and works in Gadigal/Sydney, Australia

Spanning three years and filmed over four countries, The Dark Current represents the most ambitious project of Tiatia’s career. The work weaves film, AI-generated visuals and a mesmeric soundscape to create a dream-like visual poem that carries the audience through moods that shift and swell in a time-place belonging to no definitive idea of here or there, then or now.

Set against a hopeful, lush vision of oceanic futurism, The Dark Current extends many of the themes and imagery synonymous with Tiatia’s work: the impacts of climate change on Pacific peoples; the reclamation of female power; the collapse of the public and private realms; and the supposed binary of the real and unreal.