DIM Furniture, Thomastown (Industryscapes 34) is a precise and detailed industrial landscape presented to the viewer from an eye-level street perspective: a factory located in Thomastown, a northern suburb of Melbourne, comprising silos and heavy equipment together with a jumble of accumulated debris. Employing a flatness of form and colour, Senior’s watercolour palette is deliberately subtle using many colours with similar tonal values to construct a composition that reflects our understanding of a stereotypical Melbourne industrial site.

In Bridge Merri Creek, Katherine Hattam continues her exploration of local waterways and their locations. This work on plywood depicts the bridge over Merri Creek on High Street, Northcote with accompanying trees and powerlines and the much ignored cyclists dismount sign. It is surrounded by a repertoire of recurring domestic motifs significant to the artist including chairs, clocks and a shopping basket, creating a psychological layering of memory via personally symbolic objects.

In Moorina Bonini’s Bitja (Fire), we see a Koorie pattern emerge on river gum bark as it is revitalised and reformed through the smoke and fire. Bitja (Fire) is a reference to caring for Country, using fire as a healing tool to revitalise new beginnings or as a reference point for restoration. A poem accompanies the work: Caring for my Country Breathing Country pulses and the blood in my veins pulse in response I walked outside and I put my feet into the sand Dirt Water Country I covered my feet with Country one handful after another and buried myself in the space Where I have always belonged. Bitja (Fire) revitalises, and through the smoke and charcoal Country heals. Listen.

Escape is a body of work by Taungurung/Filipino artist Alan Stewart made during Melbourne’s long lockdown to reflect his longing to connect to Country. Alan says, “Country has always been my escape and connection to my culture. Without it, I lost a sense of self and a way to revitalise my spirit. Those early mornings and long drives helped me to see what’s special about being on Country, land that holds such a deep meaning to my ancestors. I look back now and realise how lucky I was.”taungurung

Escape is a body of work by Taungurung/Filipino artist Alan Stewart made during Melbourne’s long lockdown to reflect his longing to connect to country. Alan says, “Country has always been my escape and connection to my culture. Without it, I lost a sense of self and a way to revitalise my spirit. Those early mornings and long drives helped me to see what’s special about being on country, land that holds such a deep meaning to my ancestors. I look back now and realise how lucky I was.”

Deanne Gilson is a Proud Wadawurrung woman, emerging Elder, cultural educator and award-winning visual artist from Ballarat, Victoria. Deanne works primarily in painting, fabric/textile design, clay installation and digital imagery. She explores the colonial disruption of her Wadawurrung family, looking at how the male and female gaze has and still does impact her matriarchal women. With an art practice that looks at the objectified, Deanne has found ways to cope with trans-generational trauma through art. Deanne is the first Wadawurrung artist since colonisation to revive lost cultural knowledge found specifically on her ancestral artefacts, consisting of four marks that define her family. Along with re-telling her mother’s Creation Story and the stories based on today’s lived experiences concerned with the physical and spiritual experience. Deanne has been developing her multidisciplinary practice in regional Victoria for almost 35 years and has shown across the National Gallery Victoria and the Koorie Heritage Trust. Post Preston, After the Bushfires, Our Country, Plants and Animals Need Healing is winning work in the 2021 Koorie Art Show.

“The sweet-smelling chocolate lily is a favourite of mine. It has a scent similar to that of chocolate and can be eaten raw and added to other foods as a decoration on top of cakes. I like it because it is a pretty little plant that you can’t walk by without noticing. The cabbage butterflies are ancestral spirits watching.” — Deanne Gilson In 'Karrap Karrap Beenyak — Flower Baskets of Knowledge', Deanne Gilson depicts dilly bags and baskets drawn from the South Eastern collection of artefacts held within the Melbourne Museum, and gifts from family and friends. They reclaim cultural knowledge, mixing tradition with the lived experiences of her ancestors and re-enriching her life with culture, Country and connection, through the creation of new art. The works highlight the use of Indigenous plants for healing and bush foods, and the Wadawurrung Creation Story and connection to Dja (Country). Dr Deanne Gilson is a proud Wadawurrung woman and an award-winning visual artist living and creating from her ancestral home of Ballarat in Victoria. Her multidisciplinary art practice interrogates the colonial disruption of her family and explores ways in which contemporary art can create a platform towards healing, acceptance and reclaiming cultural identity, often drawing upon traditional knowledges of her ancestors. The Victorian bush where Gilson grew up features predominantly in all of her paintings, alongside many Indigenous plants, trees and birds from her Creation Story. Gilson draws upon layers of tangible and intangible knowledge, she talks about the presence of the intangible as spiritual connections to Country and her ancestors, while the tangible knowledge reflects artefacts and other objects of daily Wadawurrung life. Her works portray a rich cultural history that continues to thrive and grow today despite the restrictions placed on her family by settlement. Gilson’s practice defines Aboriginal women’s business past and present through contemporary art. Traditional marks alongside contemporary marks, link her to the practices of Indigenous mark-making, especially that on her body when in ceremony. Stating that “all of my artworks are an extension of my women’s business and draw on ochre sourced from Wadawurrung Dja (Country)”. The white is used in traditional ceremonies, while the charcoal is a direct link to Gilson’s matriarchal line of her mother’s business. Gilson’s mother, Marlene Gilson, also an artist, gathers charcoal from her daily fire, passing this onto her daughter, extending upon the old and the new ways of sharing knowledge and connection to Country. Painting

Tropical Flesh (ii) draws upon the slippery experience of identity to explore family connection. There are threads of dislocation and the thickness of tropical time. Silicone casts of tropical jackfruits are fused with a cast of the artists’s aunt’s foot, the cast of which was made upon her permanent return to Thailand. Together, the visibly-aged foot and a fruit that decays quite vividly, evokes a sense of time passing. The work is informed by the experience of witnessing members of family age in slices of time, across vast distances. The artist asks us to consider the work as a memento mori.

Holly Hunt is a Melbourne-based artist, working across painting and printmaking. Her work is influenced by her everyday environment and experiences living in the northern suburbs of Melbourne — an area defined by its rich multiculturalism and working-class history. Her work captures and conveys fleeting moments of everyday life, and the diverse neighbourhoods and people that inhabit them. ‘Market Days’ reflects a period in time when Preston Market faced increasing uncertainty due to plans for redevelopment. The unusual presence of the fox symbolises these concerns, echoing the looming threat posed by the development to the market's cultural significance within the community. This scene evokes an element of nostalgia and illustrates the tension between the old and new in our society.preston market

"When making this series of images, I was interested in the unforeseen alignments and compositions that were created through a process of chance. I used the technique of double-exposure – an analogue photographic process that superimposes two images together by running the same roll of film through a camera and exposing it twice – thus creating a third, combined or composite image. This process is of particular interest to me – working with ideas relating to the self, memory and identity – as it helps me to create images that seem ambiguous, fragmented and in a state of transition, rather than fixed or essential."

Wall Kisser is a kinetic sculpture that is hand-cranked by the viewer. On turning the handle the wall receives the repetitive, kiss-thud, kiss-thud of the leather and velvet hearts which have been padded out with dried lavender and rosemary from the artist's garden (a version of an 18th Century pot pourri recipe commonly used to ward off disease and disguise bad smells). The sculpture's rotating form is loosely based on the design of a vibrator that the artist saw online: an electromechanical wheel of 10 plastic ‘tongues’. This sculpture was part of a body of work entitled Gorgeous, first presented at the inaugural Ellen José Art Award at Bayside Gallery in 2022. Gorgeous was an exhibition that imagined the physical gallery (walls, floor space), as if an abstract version of a lover’s body. Gartside explains, "I am curious about the potential connections between a viewer and an artwork... What could we ask of viewers beyond their attention, and as artists, what can we offer? What is possible when both artwork and viewer have skin in the game? In this work I am teasing out possibilities for eliciting surprise, delight, humour through art, and offering my gratitude for the 'lover' type relationship that I have with my art practice."

Racist Paintings is a series of works that seek to unpack art history, eugenics, language, and colonialism through the use of hard-edge painting, colonial ethnography and orientalist ideologies. The works seek to do this by combining French colonial postcards from and of Vietnam, lines relating to key colonial structures, and the use of a limited Dulux colour pallet consisting of the colours ‘Pale Oriental’, ‘Oriental Bay’, ‘Oriental Rose’, ‘Oriental Princess’, ‘Oriental Blush’, ‘Oriental Blush Half’, and ‘Oriental Blush Quarter’.

Your Place is Empty is an expression used in Iran as a way of saying ‘you were missed’. The works in this show are like spaces left behind when someone or something is gone, temporarily or permanently. They are disjointed, fading memories of a long time ago. They have become unreliable fragments, manifesting like floor plans of a childhood home drawn from memory. But the lines are disjointed, no longer connecting enough to make any discernible maps. They are fading trails.