RAW26

My name is Alannah Barnes, and I am 18 years old. I recently graduated from Billabong High School and am excited to pursue my passion for art at the University of Melbourne this year. I participated in RAW in 2023 and have since been involved in various art exhibitions, markets, and competitions. I enjoy working with graphite and charcoal, with a strong focus on realism and portraiture.

These artworks aim to delve into the multi-faced nature of stress and exhaustion, exploring the impact it has on humans’ psych, body and society. The works aim to shed light on the invisible burdens individuals often carry in contemporary life and reflect the idea that this is often hidden behind fake smiles and the words “I’m fine”. My work reflects personal experiences as it portrays specific feelings of pressure and being overwhelmed when completing the final year of schooling, striving to achieve your best results as well as having a casual job, playing sport and a social life. These artworks not only convey my personal experiences and techniques but also engage with wider societal contexts and elicit diverse reactions from the audience. I hope for my works to encourage discussion surrounding mental health, work-life balance, and the societal pressures that contribute to stress and exhaustion.

My name is Aoife Gordos and I am a 17-year-old artist. I grew up on the coast with my family where I spent a lot of time at the beach snorkeling and fishing. I have always loved art, and I prefer pictures to words. I love how art can capture and tell a story in a painting, and this is something I aim to incorporate in my works.

What my brother brought home is a series of six paintings that document the significant fish my younger brother has caught over the course of his fishing career, acting as a visual gallery. My inspiration came from my brother’s passion for fishing that he has had since he was four years old. I grew up constantly hanging around our local mariner as he fished off the jetty and these became core memories of my childhood. I begin my creative process by collecting images of the fish from my brother, then sketching them out on paper. These paintings symbolise the trophies of my brother’s life. Each was a hunt, a targeted fish, needing different lures and fishing techniques to secure “the catch”. My style includes keeping a plain background with the fish as the main focus - “the portrait” in the centre of the page. I paint using multiple layers of translucent watercolour washes to build depth and texture mimicking the fish’s natural appearance.

My name is Asha Michael, and I recently completed my HSC in 2025 where I created Colonised Currents – A Timeline of a Dying River as my major artwork. I am particularly interested in working with fibre and experimenting with different techniques. I have always been interested in art and environmental issues, and I have since moved to Port Macquarie to study marine biology at university.

Colonised Currents – A Timeline of a Dying River explores the environmental degradation of the Murray River through a symbolic macramé installation. Using woven fibres as both material and metaphor, the work reflects the river’s gradual decline caused by colonisation, pollution, and ongoing human impact.

The piece is structured in three layers that form a visual timeline. Vibrant green and blue fibres represent the river in its pre-colonial state, rich in biodiversity. As the work progresses, coloured fibres and embedded rubbish symbolise increasing pollution and human interference. Muted brown tones in the final layer reflect the river’s current degraded condition. Through this work, I aim to encourage reflection on environmental responsibility and ecological loss.

My name is Aurelia Altringer and I love creating art as a way to connect, reflect, and tell stories. Lino print is my favourite medium because of its tactile process, bold contrasts, and the care it requires at every stage. These pieces are especially meaningful to me, as they carry personal significance and reflect my family’s heritage, allowing me to honour where I come from through my practice. Having just graduated high school, I am at an exciting stage of growth as an artist, continuing to explore printmaking as a way to express identity, memory, and my passion to create.

My lino print series explores ancestry, revealing how the past shapes the present and guides the future. My lineage traces back to the Native American Chinook Tribe, and this work honours the legacy of my grandfather. Each print is united by the Chinook Salmon, symbolising the river of life and family flowing through generations, while individual symbols honour distinct ancestors.

The series begins with Chief Tumulth, represented by the sun, the ultimate power in Chinook culture, with mountains signifying resilience and aspiration. The second print portrays his daughter Kalliah Tumulth, “Indian Mary,” who resisted displacement and preserved Chinook traditions. Eagle wings reflect her strength and life force. The third print depicts Ida Altringer, Kalliah’s granddaughter, who stepped beyond the tribe to pursue further education. Her wisdom and adaptability are symbolised through a tree and hummingbirds. The final print represents myself, as I seek to understand and connect to my ancestral heritage.

My name is Claudia Browne and I work primarily with clay, creating ceramic sculptural forms through an intuitive, process-led approach. My work in this exhibition was made for my HSC body of work and reflects an interest in material response and form.

Holding Time explores fragility, memory, and personal connection through layered ceramic forms. Inspired by my Great Grandmother’s experience with dementia, the ceramics reflect the way bodies age, weaken, and adapt over time. The stacked forms mirror the fragmentation of memory, while remaining held together to suggest the endurance of emotional bonds. This body of work is an attempt to preserve something precious without freezing it in time. Rather than nostalgia, the work is grounded in acceptance — acknowledging that change, decay, and loss are inevitable, yet still deserving of care and attention. Through an intuitive making process, each piece evolved organically, shaped by both intention and material response.

My name is Jericho Ellao. I am an 18-year-old Filipino Australian emerging artist based in Albury, Australia. Working primarily with pencil and paper, my practice centres on sketching and drawing, with ongoing experiments in videography and music. Inspired by everyday surroundings and lived experience, I explores ways of making the ordinary and mundane feel like a dream. My work reflects quiet observations of daily life, transforming familiar moments into something personal and special.

Kalimutan is a collection of works that traces the ephemeral nature of memory through the metaphor of wandering. Drawing from my Filipino heritage, Kalimutan (forget) intertwines fragments from my past with invented recollections through intricate imagery that creates a dreamlike interface between truth, memory and childhood. My work invites the viewer to sit with nostalgia — not to resolve it, but simply to be with it — and to render the mundane with a kind of sacredness. Every morning, someone, somewhere, quietly builds the world by attending to its smallest details — precise, handmade, flawed, and deeply human. Similar to the intentions behind Salvador Dalí’s works, Kalimutan invites the viewers not to find answers, but to take a brief detour and to forget — just for a moment — what they came in looking for. Artists of influence: Salvador Dalí, Shaun Tan and Zdzisław Beksiński.

I am Lilly Anderson, an emerging Australian artist working primarily in painting and mixed media. My practice explores environmental themes, with a particular focus on the Australian landscape and the effects of natural and human-driven destruction. Through my practice, I aim to explore notions of environmental fragility, resilience, and regeneration within degraded landscapes.

The Bush Burns Again explores the destructive yet recurring nature of Australian bushfires and their impact on the environment and native wildlife. Inspired by the 2019–2020 bushfires, though relevant to the current bushfire disasters in the area, this multi-panel painting depicts a ravaged landscape fragmented across twenty canvases, referencing the compositional approach of Imants Tillers. When viewed as a whole, the panels form a cohesive image that reflects both devastation and rejuvenation. By presenting the landscape as both broken and interconnected, the work invites reflection on the fragility of Australia’s ecosystems and the enduring cycle of fire, loss, and regrowth.

My name is Natasha Beckett. I am a young artist whose work was selected for ARTEXPRESS after graduating recently from St Paul’s College, Walla Walla. Growing up on a family farm, my practice is rooted in rural landscapes, memory, and history. Using photography and archival imagery, I explore how the past persists within place. Outside of art, I enjoy practical making, including metal fabrication and building a trailer last year. Looking ahead, I am eager to continue developing my practice within this changing art scene.

Wallandool is centred on my family’s rural property, which has a long and intriguing history dating back to the 1880s. Through photography, I aimed to uncover the site’s forgotten past by documenting its evolving, decaying environment, integrating archival images, historical data, and a personal letter, and employed layered, deliberate techniques. This process mixes past and present by projecting, digitally layering, obscuring, and revealing fragments of historical imagery within contemporary photographs. I constructed compositions that suggest memory as active and shifting rather than fixed. Inspired by Linda Schwab’s layered, dreamlike paintings, I sought to evoke a nostalgic, living memory of the site, where history surfaces, fades, and reappears within the landscape, blending the past and present in a continuous, shifting dialogue.

My name is Noah Phillips-Trabant, a 19-year-old artist deeply connected to stories that are communicated through art that allow the individual who is viewing to feel an emotion. I graduated from Victory Lutheran College in 2024. I’ve loved anything creative since I could walk; being caught in class drawing on any flat surface and entering art competitions. I am drawn to figurative art with my favourite mediums being oil and acrylic paint. I have a dream to continue painting in the future and involving it in my career.

Intrinsic Release captures my raw emotions of anger, confusion and sadness that were consuming me in the lead up to the milestone of my 18th birthday. A turning point; no longer concealing the outgoing, theatrical and happy young Noah. I was finding power within my identity and not focusing on judgement and homophobia. A literal and cathartic ‘release’ of pent-up emotional baggage and feelings of dread. That night made visible how surrounded by love I am and started my journey of self love and acceptance. The artwork has grown in meaning over the last year; it now also represents my growth and courage. I utilised the concept of ‘letterboxing’ to tie in my love for films and my desire to express that my story is worth listening to. The right side of the piece highlights a bleed from that soulful night into my unforeseen future.

My name is Paddy Mayhew and I am an artist specialising in digital media using various art and animation techniques. I’m driven to create because I want to draw everything. I draw inspiration from character elements and design and everyday objects that others might see as mundane, in my quest to draw the world. From a young age I was mesmerised by illustrations in the children’s books I read and by classic animated films such as the rotoscoping for Cab Calloway’s St. James Infirmary. While some people see things one way, I see something completely different.

This animation captures highlights of the local area and, using hand-drawn artistry, adds dream-like elements to them. Places and historical structures are features of the piece with a surreal element intertwined. While some folks see one thing, the artist sees something else. The creative process commences long before projects are even mapped out. An endless supply of sketch books, pens and drawing paper are almost an extension of the artist. This project began with storyboarding and key-framing. This way the primary movement of the characters could be visualised and drawn digitally. A Surreal Point of View moved from taking photographs of local landmarks to drawing them digitally and designing the surreal elements. Colour palettes were selected carefully to create a sense of vibrancy. A Surreal Point of View seeks to replicate the connection people have to their hometowns and add some humour and child-like elements to the everyday.

My name is Tuscany Taylor and I am a textile and mixedmedia artist whose practice explores cultural heritage, identity, and tradition. I work primarily with textiles and soft sculpture, drawing on personal history and family narratives to reinterpret traditional techniques in a contemporary context. I am interested in how making can preserve memory and connect generations, and my work reflects a strong appreciation for craftsmanship, cultural storytelling, and bold colour and pattern.

Threads of Zimbabwe is inspired by the bold colours and striking patterns of Zimbabwean textiles and reflects my family’s cultural history in Southern Africa. This work explores identity, heritage, and the way tradition is preserved through making.

The triptych wall hanging investigates flour-and-water resist printing, a traditional technique passed down through generations of women in my family. The process embraces repetition, intuition, and imperfection, allowing the material to record memory and movement. Accompanying the textiles are soft sculptural guinea fowl, a bird that symbolises resilience and adaptability and holds personal significance within my family. Together, the 2D and 3D elements invite the viewer to engage with the playful visual relationship between surface and form.

Through colour, pattern, and symbolism, this work honours cultural memory while celebrating continuity and intergenerational knowledge.