15 Australian artists to discover before everyone else does

How to fall asleep by Francesca Zak.

Francesca Zak, @francesca.zak
How to fall asleep is the reimagining of abandoned imagery and the traditions of storytelling and memory. The work serves as a reimagining of the visual and hidden languages that were developed and learned between the artist and her grandmothers. It is the kind of language that grew as they were able to extend themselves to one another and find ways of sharing memories, methods of care and understandings of the worlds around us. The kind of language shared in this work is that of storytelling, the passing on of folklore, practices of harvesting, cooking and breaking bread with one another. Although most of this lexicon is deeply rooted in memory, the artist still finds herself performing the actions that were the basis of their vocabulary.

Sean at Petersham by Rosemary Lee.

Rosemary Lee, @cooldog94
Click Here: New Zealand rugby storeThis portrait is largely a study of form and light. While painting this portrait Rosemary Lee was interested in John Bratby and Kitchen Sink Realism. She says that the liveliness of the subject’s hair is symbolic of his mind.

Words That Came Before, New Language and Heights / Floor by Belle Blau.

Belle Blau, @belle_blau
Belle Blau is a Sydney-based artist, currently completing a MFA titled A Feminist Expansion of Reductive Abstraction. Her work explores the history of hierarchical logic within philosophical and artistic practice, exercising feminist strategies to disrupt the logocentric authority of formalist and minimalist painting. In doing so, she argues for a return to love, intimacy and care as de-gendered and de-marginalised modes of functioning, both within and outside of art. What results is a visual conversation; paintings that stand alone yet speak to each other, of human dynamics distilled into image.

Peripheral View 36 by Joshua Charadia.

Joshua Charadia, @joshification
Peripheral View is an ongoing series of works in which Charadia renders industrial scenes, photographed in passing, in the ‘slow’ mediums of oil paint and charcoal. Through painting he affords time to these usually fleeting images of shipping containers and terminals, and hopes to make visible what can often go unseen. Ubiquitous yet overlooked, these objects are containers of capital; vital cogs in the unceasing machine of globalisation and chess pieces in an indifferent global market place. Charadia asks the viewer to reconsider their passive perceptions of these anonymous objects and, with discerning eyes, become more aware of what is really happening in the world around us. His latest works are painted in colour, drawing attention to the incidental, transitory compositions formed by shipping containers in wait.

What the moon knows about you by Romy Cole-Groth.

Romy Cole-Groth, @romes_cg
Romy Cole-Groth is an abstract painter based in Sydney producing work on Eora nation. Rendered in soft pastels and metallic paints, acrylic ink and marker pen, her gestural, expressive, abstract paintings are a record of the artist’s research into shape and colour; an instinctive, spontaneous exploration of an innate visual language. Her work is concerned primarily with a consideration for colour – or at least the impression of colour – and its synchronicity. Romy’s work is then involved in articulating the loosely narrated stories that are purely visual. These stories are impressions of her close interpersonal relationships and their moments of intimacy, love and sharing.

Who’s Failing Who? by Jade Court-Gold.

Jade Court-Gold, @jadeccg
Jade Court-Gold is a Sydney-based artist working predominantly with metal and clay. Jade’s practice is a negotiation of materials in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to exist in a time of severe ecological upheaval. This is processed in real time through the making of objects – thinking through making. Objects, artefacts, aberrations; a continuation from one to another, without a specific desired outcome. Reflecting on societal and ecological dissociation, the artist uses intuition and emergence as methods to create space for alternative ways of knowing.

Inside on the stool was a red telephone by Eliza Gosse.

Eliza Gosse, @elizagosse
Eliza Gosse’s paintings depict Australian suburbia. Working within the canon of Australian artists who have debunked stereotypical suburbia through a ‘super flat’ lens, Gosse comes to her painting from a design background having commenced architectural studies before transitioning to a Bachelor of Fine Art at the National Art School in 2017.

In a time of rapid gentrification, increasingly unaffordability and rising inequality, Gosse turns focus to design history. With the majority of the houses depicted now gone she questions our value assessment of past culture through the built environment. Her depictions of these buildings are not merely love letters to this period of design, but moreso an attempt to posit such homes as an integral component of Australia and its national chronology.

Most recently, ​Gosse has been included as a finalist in some prestigious art prizes including the 2019 Ravenswood Female Art Awards, and for the second year running, the Waverley Art Prize. Gosse is currently undertaking her Masters at The National Art School and was one of the few students included in Sydney Contemporary Art Fair in 2018.

Spring, looking forward by Alessandra Joseph.

Alessandra Joseph, @alessandracjoseph
(Curator) Through my work, I explore the emotive response that can be brought on by an ever-shifting backdrop of the local landscape. My process-driven practice employs gestural mark and intuitive use of colour informed by and layered with memory. Revisiting suburban gardens and objects of nostalgia, I like to meditate on the quiet moments that shape us. Spring, looking forward is a rumination on memory and place, on evolving relationships and longer warming days.

Timber Dwelling I and II by Nina Juniper.

Nina Juniper, @laninajuni          
Nina Juniper focuses specifically on urban construction and reconstruction sites and their associated temporary support structures that have become a dominant visual part of the contemporary cityscape. Her print-based practice concentrates on the translation of these transitional architectural sites through abstracted pictorial representations, offering a renewed context for the viewer to engage with the aesthetics of urban temporal environments. By working with industrial materials found in construction – plywood, treated pine, compressed fibre cement and concrete – these works explore valuations of subordinate materials and the work reminds us that built environments are always at the same time unbuilding environments.

Jumpers (part of the Ephemera series) by Ruth Shipman.

Ruth Shipman, @ruth.shipman
Ruth Shipman is a Sydney-based ceramic and mixed-media artist, whose practice centres on seeking representation through the act of making. Shipman experiments with mixed media and non-traditional ceramic methods to create objects that explore the intricacies of emotional consciousness, memory, the physical body and the self.

Shipman’s Ephemera series is a eulogy to loss: a manifestation of memory through living textiles and ceramics. She investigates textile as a vessel for memory, and how cloth becomes imbued with meaning and nostalgia due to its intimate presence in human lives. Ephemera places clothing as object and as signifier, and examines loss, transience, memory and grief through the process of transforming cast-off items into ceramic artefacts.

Point of View: Looking down by Shannon Smith.

Shannon Smith, @shannon.rc.smith
Shannon’s practice as a contemporary stone carver is driven by her interest in translating physical experience into static rock. Propelled by the question of how to express sensation through sculptural form, her carvings grapple with the aim of suggesting the body without representing it; at once pursuing abstraction and referential meaning.

Hey Mate by Cameron Stead.

Cameron Stead, @cameron.stead
This artwork belongs to an ongoing series that draws content from unsolicited online messages (often of a sexual nature), and also historical artworks. In considering every work as an expanded form of self-portraiture, these drawings and paintings are a way of organising personal ideas, memories and information received from others, as well as a way of examining the potential relationships between them.

Floor work by Lyn Heazlewood.
 
Lyn Heazlewood, @lynflash
Lyn Heazlewood is an artist living and working in Sydney, whose practice spans sculpture, writing, performance and music. Their work is often collaborative or site responsive and brings together sincerity and absurdity, questioning what it is to be a human alive today. Between feeling and thinking, Lyn explores the edge, what’s lost and found, void and form, potential and content, object and moment. Originally from Tasmania, Lyn completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at National Art School, Sydney. Lyn has exhibited in group shows in Sydney and Alice Springs since 2014 and has been involved in artist run spaces Join the Dots Workshop (Marrickville) and Watch This Space (Alice Springs). Currently a janitor at Frontyard Projects (Marrickville), Lyn is interested in misunderstanding, dead ends and the backyard-job. Lyn is a member of Sydney band Witness K, and has performed with Bree Van Reyk and for artist Nell. 

This must be the place by Neva Hosking.
 
Neva Hosking, @nevahosking

Neva Hosking is a Sydney-based artist and recent National Art School Graduate. She is motivated by portraiture, plans and linework. Prior to her formal art education, Hosking developed a habit of working with scrap mediums; found paper, telephone books, damaged surfaces. These are processes which inform her later work and built the understanding that a broken and fractured viewpoint often presents a more accurate, multi-faceted view of whatever subject needs to be explored. Her current practice expands beyond her drawing roots; collecting and collaging found materials, with the hope of reproducing ethereal forms of personal memory. Four-leaf clovers collected by the sitter and pressed in a passed-down flower press reflect the serendipity of found family.

Postcards to Boomerang Avenue by Sylvie Veness.

 
Sylvie Veness, @v_e_n_e_s_s
Sylvie Veness is an emerging artist based in Sydney, Australia. With the archetypal grid as her syntax, Veness challenges her propensity for perfection by exploring antithetical themes such as beauty, fallibility, chance and obsession. These concepts, coupled with the simultaneous limitations and endless variations of the grid are conveyed via a minimalist aesthetic and the subtle layering of marks. Specialising in printmaking and textiles, Veness creates works on paper by combining etching, painting and drawing with perforations and stitch-work. Each layer signals a process of repetitive mark making resulting in tactile surfaces that call for closer inspection. Her ongoing series Postcards to Boomerang Avenue forms part of her MFA body of work inspired by her travels in Japan and her residence in Sydney.

 

Each of these artists has work on display at the Fifteen Exhibition, 8-21 October 2019, Chrissie Cotter Gallery, 31A Pidcock St, Camperdown NSW. The show was co-curated by Alessandra Joseph, Sylvie Veness and Ruth Shipman.