‘GG’ - George Giann lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria. A visual artist who specialises in mixed-media installations that explore the interactions between language/text and image/object. GG’s work highlights the importance of randomness, curiosity, and play as a means of understanding life with his newly acquired Tetraplegia, life’s Terrorplegia. GG co-founded multiple ARI’s and was a Gertrude Studio Artist in Residence.
“Look up Geoffrey Rush movie pianist. My phone is flat” Carys said to me.
And there it was, Geoffrey Rush with his arms outstretched, abandoning himself to the sky.
“what’s it called again?”
“shine” I said.
“Shine!” Carys exclaimed.
Carys’ inspired reaction came without surprise to me – knowing her to have a disposition for such words and themes pertaining to freedom, the desire for it. Such words I know Carys to trust in already: peace, prize, surrender. These words allude to particular elements, as there are no words to express the whole, of a higher state of being – of a freedom beyond language.
We may find in the few syllables of such words, when rolling off the tongue, a realisation of the ineffable freedom that is otherwise hidden from us. That is not to say that we ourselves grasp it in that moment, as that freedom is not contained within ourselves. It is neither in the mind or the mouth, but in that small, invisible escape of air when the word is expressed, where we are just capable of sensing it.
The polo shirt has evidently been liberated from conventions of proportion and functionality. Yet as of all things significant, there contains a contradiction. Georgia and Carys have only found freedom by placing themselves in service and at the mercy of the tailoring process which normally serves to standardise. A commitment to craftsmanship has uncovered gaps in traditional tailoring practices which they have exploited to serve their own ends. This has amounted in the creation of a sacrilege polo shirt which may be draped on a torso, roll off the shoulder and down the bust in gentle folds as a tunic would.
The embroidered horse dragged along the shirt is a gallant, nearly mythical symbol of a horse. It reminds me of Phar Lap in its symbology. Phar Lap translates to lightning – “like a flash on the sky”. Like the instant of freedom. When Phar Lap died, it was discovered that his heart was 1.5 times bigger than that of an average thoroughbred racehorse. As of the embroidered horse – the entire polo shirt for that matter, Phar Lap reserved an unconstrained anatomy. Maybe Phar Lap himself could have worn the shirt – double freedom.
- Riley Orange
Claudia Saballa Hobbs (she/they) is an artist making and living on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri peoples in Naarm. They completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2021 and received the Fiona Myer Award in their graduating year. They have participated in, and coordinated numerous projects, exhibitions, and film screenings in Naarm, at spaces including BLINDSIDE, George Paton Gallery, Woven Projects, The Substation, TCB, and Dogmilk Films. Their creative practice is a collection of everyday fragments—falling between photography and something else. Evolving as a mixture of humour, grief, and mundanity—Saballa Hobbs wants to share the experience of being overwhelmed by photography, by its length, duration, speed, and convoluted somethings. Collecting and connecting memories of the past and present, ruminations can be fleeting before moving to the next. Among it all, perhaps there are things that can be seen, picked out and held onto, sort of like photographs.
Looking at the history of glass and mirrors, from using them to see the future, to their implications of vanity, Jessie Turner bends and captures light in solid yet transient objects; photographs, and glass itself. Here, light and reflection become sentient beings that flit and dance across the surface of the mind and the world around us. By depicting ecological pasts and futures through reflection, the interactions and hybridisations of these materialities in Scrying in Oil Spills demonstrate the inherent interweaving of the natural and the human-made.
Jessie Turner (she/her) investigates speculative futures through photography and sculpture, focusing on the intertwining of the future and past, to create a layered time that positions the natural world as an all-consuming, ever present entity with sentience far outweighing our own. By investigating specific moments in history and their relevance to contemporary and future times, Jessie’s works evoke a fantasized melding of time and place to create hallucinogenic worlds. She graduated from Honours at the Victorian College of the Arts and has shown at Museum of Australian Photography, George Paton Gallery, and Centre for Contemporary Photography.
Emma Salmon (she/her) is a Nyikina and Celtic artist born and based in Naarm's northern suburbs on Wurundjeri land. Her practice spans stringmaking and weaving, set and costume, installations, comics and video. She is guided by intuition, honesty and Country. She tells stories of her ancestry, family and communities, and their unbroken connection, memory and spirit. She has exhibited with Trocadero Projects and Koorie Heritage Trust and was a set and costume assistant on Blak In The Room (ILBIJERRI x Melbourne Theatre Company 2024) and Scar Trees (ILBIJERRI 2024) and was the scenic artist for The Whisper (Brodie Murray) and Oh My God I'm Blak! (Maryanne Sam). She is currently completing a BFA in Drawing and Printmaking at VCA.
Room Sheet with exhibition text by Lillian Phillips.
Johanna van der Linden (she/her) is an artist living and working on unceded Wurundjeri country. Her practice spans print making, metalwork, and sculpture, where she reinterprets traditional iconography through a contemporary lens. Johanna explores themes of embodiment, materiality, and the intersections between the body and the material world, engaging with feminist materialisms to examine the relationships between physicality and symbolism. Her exhibitions have included solo and group shows across Melbourne, such as Seventh Gallery, Blindside, and Rubicon. In 2024, she was recognized as a finalist for the William Blake Prize. Johanna holds an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa, and an Honours degree in Fine Arts from RMIT.
Pictured Left: Johanna van der Linden, Residual Sanctum, 2024, Soft steel, etching, latex, bronze. Installation view, dimensions variable. Documentation by Bonnie Thorn.
The flag, as a charged symbol of nationalism, is layered with meaning in this work. It not only evokes the nationalist sentiments of right-wing politics but also critiques the symbiotic relationship between the state and the Orthodox Christian Church, both of which have historically supported and reinforced authoritarian ideologies in Romania. Panoschi subverts this authoritarian symbol by incorporating elements from kink culture, most notably the hole in the flag designed to align with pelvic height, suggesting the image of a glory hole. This provocative element invites a complex reading of power dynamics, sexuality, and subversion.
The crucifix-shaped bracket that secures the flag to the wooden plinth further deepens the symbolic resonance of the work. This reference to Christ’s stigmata suggests the intertwining of religious martyrdom with political martyrdom, particularly in the context of Nicolae Ceaușescu, who remains a contentious figure in Romania, revered by some as a martyr following his execution in 1989. The flag’s suspension via a spear-shaped implement additionally evokes the figure of Vlad the Impaler, another Romanian leader who, like Ceaușescu, fled insurrection and met a violent death. Both figures, though from different historical contexts, are linked by their authoritarian rule, their violent ends, and their lasting legacies in Romanian national identity.
Ceaușescu’s Freak F(l)ag serves as a critical exploration of identity politics, the fetishisation and martyrdom of ruthless leaders, and the enduring influence of nationalist ideologies in contemporary society. Even in nations such as Australia, which promises utopian economic and social models, the work underscores the ways in which systems of exploitation persist and continue to shape the lives of the masses.
Stefa Panoschi (b. 2000, she/her) is an emerging artist working in Naarm/Melbourne. Stefa has spent the last few years queering the limits of cultural identity, religious nationalism and home. Stefa is interested in the conflicts/ contradictions and problematics of an “East-West” life. Stefa works from a personal and familial history.