What are you so afraid of?
Door’s already open. Can’t close it now. All you can do is look away.
But why would you?
Vincent is working it out.
I arrive there tonight at 8.48pm waiting for a bus home. Just before that, Dharani and I are stood laughing at a tram stop in Brunswick. I call Jac and ask if he’s at home, we’re just across the road. He comes downstairs but my tram arrives at the stop before we can say hi. I listen to Wildflower by Billie Eilish on the tram and I’m feeling sad. I don’t even like Billie Eilish but I like that song after a few drinks. This year brings a repeat of years prior, in February we all re-downloaded BeReal and now I’m seeing all the people I used to again and I’m standing outside the Crossroads Cafe again. Everything is the same but I’m tired, my face even looks a bit older - I think this might be because of my new hair colour. I talked to Jules about my previous stamina for going out every single night, she reminds me that it’s winter. I feel like the cold didn’t used to bother me this much, BeReal is back but nothing is happening.
I had a dream about the Bell Motel, it was similar to a dream I had about the Albion Charles back when I was in high school. One of India and I standing on a balcony on the first level. It had a Lynchian feel to it, like The Great Northern Hotel in Twin Peaks. I’ve always been drawn to the roadside motels of the inner north. The St Georges Motor Inn, the Bell Motel, Parkville Motel, etc. Going past them every other day, I imagine who stays there, they seem suspended in time, at least in the 15 years I’ve observed them again and again. I imagine criminals, scandalous affairs and people come from across the country to start new identities. I know the reality is people visiting their families or stopping in Melbourne for a work conference. In fact all the times I’ve stayed at similar motels it has just been that combination - passing through in a mundane and unmysterious way.
Today, I arrive at the motel with Lily, and we check in at a wooden counter that looks like the bar of a shitty comfort pub like the Brandon. I stare at the floor. The red tile that we’re standing on is arranged in a 2 x 2 metre square, a little island of luxury to welcome guests, cut off by metres of plain grey carpet opening out behind us onto the most beautiful dining hall I have ever seen. Above reception hangs a bright red dart board, the numbers repeat themselves, but I never paid any attention to them anyway. I’ve always only cared about getting a bullseye and never counted any scores. I ask the lady at the desk if I can play, and she says no and hands me the key to our room.
I’m distracted by the dining hall; people are dancing and they’re playing the soundtrack to Pretty Woman - the tables and chairs have been pushed to the edges of the room.
It feels like it’s the last time any two people in there will see each other, each part of a devastating love story on par with that of Hiroshima Mon Amour. This is at odds with the music playing - smooth FM sweet love ballads. It makes sense to me though; I always found those songs so sad. It’s a sound that popular music keeps trying to evoke now but never quite gets right. One woman sits alone at the bar, she looks back and seems frightened of us, I recognise her from somewhere. Maybe from a time in my past but I don’t bother lingering on it, this will also be the last time we ever see each other. I know that because that’s what the lyrics in the music say.
Lily and I move along to our room, there’s still work to do. The sun burns red
through the lace curtains, I sit at the wooden dining table and pour myself a drink.
Words by Raisa Mclean
Raisa Mclean (b. 2000) is an artist and curator making work in Melbourne/Naarm.
Through a practice of visual song making, her works explore landscapes of intimacy engaged with philosophies of deconstructionism as a way of looking at memory- based artwork and writing. She utilises the literary practices of auto-fiction and auto- theory as a conceptual framework to work from. Working across sculpture, etching, embroidery and found objects her practice links disparate materials through repeating written and visual motifs.
Working predominantly with materials that are usually used as support structures rather than in finished artworks with the intent of exposing multiple points of reference to memory, meaning is further deconstructed in her works.
Amber Macklin is a Naarm/ Melbourne based artist currently preoccupied with drawing, painting and metalwork. Amber completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT in 2022 and Bachelor of Fine Art Honours at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2023. Amber has recently shown at 138 Gallery in 2024 alongside Milly James and Ange Nolan and in the VCA Honours 2023 Graduate Exhibition. Amber’s predominately workshop-based practice sees her cast and assemble found materials to produce and re-produce her objects. Through repetition, she looks to trace her desire as it shifts and circles.
Viva Hall is an artist and writer working in Naarm Melbourne, Australia. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Monash University 2018 and Honours at the Victoria College of the Arts 2023. Viva works with themes of value, familiarity, and transience, using loaded and unusual materials, often second-hand or domestic. In her work, she employs DIY methods as an affective and material-driven sculptural device to harness fragility as a method of questioning. She has been writing for Imprint Magazine since 2020 and has exhibited in Naarm Melbourne and Te Aro Wellington, New Zealand.
Sophie Spence, based in Naarm / Melbourne, works primarily with drawing, photography and painting. In 2024 Sophie exhibited work in a group exhibition at West End Art Space and Blindside as part of a summer residency in collaboration with Adrian J. Song.
With these paintings I aim to imbue the visual language of the sciences with syrup-like sentiment. I get emotional about synthetic chemistry like an estranged friend. I want to look at my lover’s sperm under the microscope. There is a fallibility in both the haziness of memory and the absolutist nature of scientific imagery.
Words by Sean Martin
Sean Martin is a painter working in Naarm (Melbourne), originally from Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country (Canberra). Much of his work is concerned with sentimentality and memory. Figurative scenes are stripped and scoured of their detailed truth, using a restricted palette and deliberate mark-making to embellish memories with absence.
He has recently been concerned with applying this aesthetic treatment to the visual language of the sciences. Recently graduated from a Bachelor of Science at the Australian National University, Martin is currently completing his Honours year at La Trobe University, majoring in molecular biology.
Across mediums, Liv’s work invites us to look closer, evoking notions of both surveillance and self-awareness. Exploring the intent of the ‘gaze’ in an effort to regain autonomy in spaces often associated with privacy and vulnerability. Ella Peck’s Untitled (White), 2025, is constructed with recycled materials to cast a window frame, blurring boundaries between private interiors and public view. The gesture and routine in the work invites reflection on the constructed nature of both physical spaces and emotional openness.
Billee considers the commercial bedroom and the advertisement of comfort. Dismissing the considerable amount of expense put into a home bedroom to make it a comfort, Window Shopping seeks the small nuisances of what makes a bedroom consoling and reassuring. The act of accumulating objects with memories and emotions taking president over inferred bedroom arrangement.
Ella Peck (she/her) is an emerging artist, curator and writer based in Naarm/Melbourne. She recently completed her Bachelor’s in Art History and Curating at Monash University. Her interdisciplinary practice is interested in domestic spaces as sites for curatorial engagement and resistance.
Billee Byrne (she/they) is an artist based in Melbourne (Naarm). Their practice revolves around being a homebody existing in a bedroom fashioned to their memories, desires and emotional connection to objects. How the window into their bedroom is telling on their character, Byrne’s artistry reveals these personal nuances like a written love letter selfishly to themselves.
Lily Hogan (she/her) is an artist whose practice reflects her eternal pursuit for connection. An ode to the tender fragility of her relationships, Hogan’s practice is spurred by a search for a tethering point: a way to calm the up-down motion of her heart as it beats in perpetual flux.
Liv Solar (she/her) is an artist whose work observes as much as it is observed, trapping viewers in a limbo of mutual gaze and quiet interrogation. Rooted in memory and melancholic suburban stillness, her process surrenders to chance, unmasking our hidden tethers and the eerie intimacy of being seen.
Two specific objects, a tautological pair. Have you seen the painting recently? No, I haven’t. Maybe it’s better that way, that you haven’t seen it. Screws are drilled in – approximate. They can’t go in any further – the sound of timber under pressure. Charlie traces a right angle on a big plank of pine clamped to a dolly. These will sit between large panels of plywood repurposed from an Australian Open tennis stand – originally painted Australian Open blue. Salvaged materials from a junkyard as far up Sydney Road as you can go. The internal structure has been built once before, it has been rehearsed. Yet it takes exactly two people to prop it up, hard to hold. Lidia has finished pushing screws into the wood, it stands on it’s own. Half done and erect – totally symmetrical arches. The top-heavy wave crashes over a perfect cross section etched into the concrete floor. Flexible veneer conceals the skeleton, painted a darker shade of teak that matches the lower half of the surrounding gallery walls, a seamless extension of space. Everything lathered in linseed oil. Slabs of teak also line the side of the box that contain the painting suspended on the wall: built in. Precise. Unlike the surface of the painting itself – irregular. Bigger than a wingspan, also salvaged from scraps. Australian modern painterly marks decorate the solid rectangles, interrupted by haphazard diagonals, two tall towers, newly painted with thick black around the edges, hold residual saw-dust. Overlaid with roughly white circles on the battered board. Barely perceptible smear of dirty pink and sky blue in the middle of the painting – a depression in the surface of the board, concave and minor height. Larger than a bird bath. Aluminum alloy Jhansi tray and mirror small, round indentations that form various concentric circles. Set into the painting, within the box fixed onto a makeshift stand strung to the real wall behind, pulled back by blue straps that prevent it from falling forward.
Words by Stacey Collee.
Documentation by Claudia Saballa-Hobbs
Lidia and Charlie’s collaborative sculpture practice seek to question value systems and the hierarchy of cultural materials.
Exploring how one can learn from our natural surroundings and the adaptable nature of an instinctual longing to thrive in an environment, despite ongoing devastation. Healing is ingrained into their being and thus the question arises; if this regeneration is too ingrained in ours?
When trees are injured they develop physical and chemical boundaries, callus tissue is formed and the growth of new wood is used to close over the injured place. A form of mental and physical memory is inscribed upon the body of the tree, helping it to better resist future inflictions and trauma, therefore aiding in the notion of ‘growing a thick skin’.
Do scars fade or do we grow around them?
Paying homage to past struggle and embracing the body's resilience lives at the core of our existence, finding place and comfort in that place shortly follows.
Bridie Fitzgerald is a multidisciplinary artist working and creating in Naarm, so-called Australia.
After commencing her studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, Fitzgerald has specialised working across several mediums of analogue lens-based creating. Her practice seeks to identify themes of place and personhood as she navigates her own understanding of her surroundings, and how she fits into the narrative of belonging in one’s own space.
Working with feelings stemming from both familiarity and unfamiliarity in the world around her, Fitzgerald navigates her impermanence as her work attempts to make these feelings of uncertainty, tangible. Seeking beauty in the mundane and interconnectedness with the land and waterways as she identifies personhood through place. Capturing still texture, holding the moment, looking closer, and indulging in the fervour of just being. Making sense of an ever-changing world, and utilising the act of creating as an optimistic guide through an established appreciation for the artist's incorporation in the process of making, an evocation which intermingles her interests in environmental sciences and creative photography.
If that sounds impossible—after sunset, in the Ukrainian Afterglow, even more unbelievable things happen.
This project is a series of mixed-media epoxy resin artworks that immerse the viewer in both the Ukrainian cultural-political context and the artist’s personal experience of growing up in a developing country, spanning from the 2000s to the present. The works explore political transformation and Eastern European visual codes, and sublimate family memory, subjective perception, and collective trauma.
At the center of it all is Yulia Tymoshenko—a politician who rose out of the wild ’90s, emerging from big business while channeling the energy of a glamorous blonde sex symbol with a provincial accent. A living meme and pop icon, she embodies the fleshiness of the Ukrainian Afterglow.
Using real campaign photos—Tymoshenko in space, on a motorcycle, hugging a tiger, spraying graffiti—the collages fuse local and global codes: Orthodox Christian holidays, echoes of the 2004 Orange Revolution, beach nightclub kitsch, underground gambling, oligarchs in tinted BMWs, all-consuming love, and yearning hopes for sunrise.
Vika is a Ukrainian artist originally from Odesa, living in Kyiv until 2022. She creates mixed-media works using epoxy resin, combining digital art, semi-precious stones, metal, toys, clothing, natural objects, and anything сool she can get her hands on.
Vika’s artistic research is mainly focused on longing, loneliness, laughter through tears, nostalgia for things that never existed, timeless safe worlds, hope, and humble love. Sometimes she regrets being let go from the court system — she could already be enjoying a prosecutor’s pension... now it's just a dream.
@adidas.kitten
Underneath, Payne’s Hosts (2025) is found scattered across the floor like confetti, petals, debris. His communion wafers speak to both the sacred and the surplus. They are ritual without solemnity. Eucharist becomes a choreography of desire and erasure — enacting the intimacy ofconsumption and the brutality of devotion.
Like a slit across the back wall Joyce’s Volitans (2025) draws a breath into the winded room like an air vent or a vacuum. Magnetised, the laced twin axes reach and repel simultaneously. Like wings caught mid beat, or her breath on the roof. In the slipstream, the triptych hovers, puncturing the room’s air pressure —like an intake before speech.
Documentation by Claudia Saballa-Hobbs
Clara Joyce’s practice explores painting as a speculative medium to consider the relations between the seen and felt. Paintings are treated as a site of inquiry, holding space for a delicate ambiguity that resists capture. Techniques of stain painting and layering are key to her process generating complex material accumulations.
Marcus Payne’s practice explores online depictions of masculinity through an examination of his own memories and cultural identity. He explores the commodification of stoic ideals within motivational media in an attempt to expose the absurdity of relentless cycles of productivity and self-surveillance. His practice aims to unveil the voices that perpetuate these ideals.
Eli Flavell lives and works in Naarm Melbourne and is a student at the VCA. Spanning sculpture, mixed-media and olfactory installation, his work explores the function of materials and the tensions that may arise when they are pushed.
Working with cast concrete, reclaimed stone, foam offcuts, fallen timber, and the remnants of consumer audio technology, these pieces challenge the visual expectations of sound equipment. Speakers are assembled from foam, towels, logs, boxboard and scrap metal—improvised structures that echo histories of use, decay, and reassembly.
Embracing raw and collagic methodologies, the series invites a slower listening and a more tactile, precarious relationship to technology while antagonising cliches of “black box” hifi design.
In these works, material dictates form. The sonic and sculptural outcomes are inseparable from the stuff of their making. 3 Channel Speakers bolted into a foam carcass, A Bluetooth amp embedded in a stone encasing. A subwoofer buried in a cypress log. A tweeter horn cast into a draped cloth soaked in concrete. Enclosures stages a brutal collision of unexpected materials with sound technology, unafraid to pose the naive question, “can these materials speak?”
Documentation by Claudia Saballa-Hobbs
Dylan Marelić is a Melbourne-based artist working across sound, video, sculpture, electronics and installation. He holds an MFA from RMIT (2023). Recent exhibitions include solo shows at BLINDSIDE and Hair Ari (2024), and group shows at BLINDSIDE and CAVES (2024), exploring materiality and public interaction through interdisciplinary practice.
Charlie White is a Melbourne-based artist and designer whose work transforms everyday materials into somber, gothic forms. With backgrounds in Fine Art, Philosophy, and Architecture, his practice blurs boundaries between art and utility. Recent shows include Melbourne Now (NGV, 2024) and solo exhibitions Warmer & Opus Vincula at Backwods Gallery.