2025 SPONSORS Bryant McKinnon Lawyers Moving Art Andrew Peace Wines
STILL:
National Still Life Award
Presented by Yarrila Arts and Museum
STILL: National Still Life Award is Yarrila Arts and Museum’s biennial acquisitive art award, established in 2017 to support and showcase contemporary still life practice. The award aims to highlight the diversity, innovation and ongoing relevance of this genre across a wide range of media.
Open to artists at all stages of their careers, STILL welcomes work in painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, video, installation and more. In 2025, we are pleased to present the fifth iteration of the exhibition, featuring 70 finalists selected from across Australia.
We thank the selection panel for working together to select the 70 finalists:
Bridget Purtill, Curator, Glasshouse Port Macquarie
Sarah Mufford, Mid North Coast Artist
Carrie Kibbler, Service Leader, Gallery and Museum
Vanessa Jacob, Senior Curator
Ashleigh Frost, Curator
Our sincere thanks to the judges of STILL 2025: Dr Victoria Wareham, Australian Cinémathèque, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Cath Fogarty, Artist and Ceramics Teacher, TAFE NSW Coffs Harbour
Carrie Kibbler, Service Leader, Gallery and Museum
We gratefully acknowledge the sponsors of STILL 2025—Bryant McKinnon Lawyers, Moving Art and Andrew Peace Wines—for their continued support.
Congratulations to all of this year’s award winners and finalists.
image: Raelene Hall, A Thousand Plateaus 2025 (detail)
S.A.Adair
The objects collected were found on a beach holiday from a Christmas past and while I feel they were randomly selected they seemed to carry vestiges of the undercurrents from that family gathering. Underlying expectations, past resentments, new family members, cultural differences, acceptance, discoveries, disappointments all played a part.
because you are there, I am here speaks of connections and disconnections over distance. Memories and how they shift over time, the value and effect of our past and the fading relevance to the present are impressions reflected here. Some things are lost, some things gained.
because you are there, I am here 2025 photogravure prints, wood, string, cold wax 56 x 90 cm
Summer Aldis
A toppled chair, a coiled snake and a dollhouse stand poised in this narrative-driven still life. These commonplace objects, laden with domestic meaning, speak to themes of tension, melancholy, and the unseen dynamics within family life.
A faint human shadow lingers; a presence haunted by absence; a quiet witness to whatever unfolded here. Like the objects, it doesn’t shout—it waits quietly.
This work sits somewhere between observation and reflection. It’s an exploration of the stories we inherit, the weight of what’s left unsaid, and the emotional residue that can settle into familiar spaces. This is what remains after. This is what stays quietly in the room. Family Still Life
on paper
x 85 cm
Miguel Aquilizan
My art practice is concerned with breathing new life into discarded objects collected from deceased estates, thrift shops, and streets, transforming them through the lens of my Filipino heritage that emphasises repurposing.
My work Fever Dreams No.5 is created from components originally from a series of sculptures, that were developed in 2023 and coincided with my return to Brisbane after five years in the Philippines. I originally migrated to Australia in 2006. Reflecting my artistic philosophy, I have remade the sculpture
to incorporate newly discovered elements, infusing kitsch items and tropical souvenirs that evoke memories of home. Meticulously arranged, each component of the piece functions as a still life, capturing my exploration of sentimental and material values alongside the complexities of cultural identity and the conflicting material perspectives of the global north and south.
Fever Dreams No.5
2025
found objects, mixed media
235 x 52 x 45 cm
Svetlana Bailey
In my studio, I cast ice bodies of myself and those closest to me. I compose the forms in constellations— sawing, hammering, and allowing new combinations to fuse. I place the sculptures in direct sunlight and observe the still lifes as they dissolve in the heat. Their transformation mirrors a human life cycle sped up: creation, presence, disappearance. I rehearse loss and transformation without consequence, and wonder what might exist in a bodiless life. Still Lives
gelatin print
x 40.6
Katie Barron
I baked this cake as part of an ongoing project where I bake, photograph, and paint cakes from the Australian Women’s Weekly cake books. This one comes from ‘Party Cakes for all Occasions,’ a book that somehow made its way to my childhood home in Canada. As a relatively new resident in Australia, I’ve found these cakes to be a wonderful way to connect with born-and-bred Aussies through the universal medium of desserts and an iconic Australian cookbook.
Baking and sharing the cakes with my community brings back warm memories for all involved, and I love hearing everyone’s stories about cakes and birthdays past.
I wish cakes could last forever, but sadly, they are too delicious. By recreating my cakes through oil paint, they get to live on long after the washing up is done.
Teddy Bear Cake
Jason Barwick
My work explores the elusive nature of time, not as a linear progression but as an infinite ‘now.’ I seek to capture a singular moment within this ceaseless continuum—a stillness in the fleeting. Instead of focusing on historical grandeur or elevating the mundane, my art centres on time itself, unanchored by external markers like shadows; my objects serve as silent timekeepers.
Flowers are central to this exploration. Commonly discarded once their blooms begins to fade, they become compelling subjects for a time study. Their delicate transformation mirrors the inevitable shifts in our own lives, offering a visual metaphor for the passage of time and personal evolution. Now and Now and Now
coloured pencil on rag board 50 x 150 cm
Monika Behrens
This painting is from a new body of work I have been developing that combines my current thoughts about time with my understanding of still life painting. Still life painting has been associated with time for over 300 years, through symbolic imagery and metaphors of withering flowers and insects, as a reminder that life is cyclical. My paintings are introducing different modes of time, this work In Motion is about memory and rapid time.
Lee Bethel
My work is a contemporary response to the tradition of Australian still life laid down by Margaret Olley.
The study of Margaret Olley’s work shows her intense appreciation and investigation of the nuances of light, and her flattening of areas of the composition to enhance objects. These two aspects of her work parallel the technical concerns of my practice.
My copying of Hawkesbury Wildflowers as a to-scale paper cut out, flattens the whole work and the watercolour applied to the back of the paper demonstrates the nuances of watercolour as it reacts with reflected light.
Ode to Margaret 2025 watercolour on hand cut paper 100 x 85 cm
Brenda Blackman
This work is composed of discarded drawings sewn together with red cotton thread. Initially this process was a way to combat the relentless build-up of stuff in our home. Ultimately, the fragility of the picture surface echoes the concerns I carry every day.
I have captured the precious artefacts that mark the mundane, fleeting moments of our lives. These things will disappear soon, back into the garden, the recycling, or into landfill. At this stage of our life, growth is rapid. Our babies disappeared into toddlers, and the toddlers are gone now too. This is the best possible trajectory. Heart exploding joy is tempered with incremental loss. I’d like to let go of it all and hold on forever.
The Thin Red Line 2025
mixed media on paper scraps sewn together, cotton thread 96 x 115 cm
Janine Brody
The paradox inherent in using diminishing resources to create objects that honour traditional labour and craftsmanship is represented in this work.
These ceramic reproductions of wood working tools were fired using wood fuel. The ash from the fire leaves a sheen of glaze on the surface. This patina parallels the oily deposit left on the wooden tools by our hands after years of use.
My use of limited natural resources to create artworks, which comment on the loss of skill and innate knowledge that come from working with natural materials, is difficult to reconcile. Redundancy
Jeremy Brook
A Day for Me is an artwork about selfcare and the many shapes and colours that self-care comes in.
As I worked through this piece I have connected with my past mental health struggles and this is helping me moving forward. This process has influenced the colours and the dynamic structure of the piece.
Day for Me 2025
80 x 100 cm
A
acrylic on canvas
Terri Butterworth
Material to immaterial. Light changes everything. This painting reflects the early morning light flooding this room as the sun rises over the Glenreagh ridge— my red dressing table determining the colours and composition of the work. There is more to seeing than I can see. I paint the feeling and emotion of the unseen world.
Light
2025 oil on canvas 95 x 85 cm
Morning
with Red
Fran Callen
Overburden explores the labour and terrifying love of mothering. The careful navigation of family change, grief and treading safely through that process. In the collaborative process of making, domestic routines mark evolving palimpsests across our tabletop on various surfaces over a period of time. Gathered moments, milestones and stages are caught in the mess and chaos of family life.
Household recycling is inherent in the work, shifting the hierarchy of residue. My children and sometimes others, participate, and spills are welcomed.
I’m interested in exploring connections between drawing and geology. Each hold histories. To these plaster casts of domestic recycling I have applied by hand interpretations of geological processes inspired by conversations with my geologist father. Layered with drawing these suggest narrative, and hold personal symbolism open to interpretation.
Overburden 2024
graphite, pencil, gesso, biro, tea, coffee, wine, eucalyptus sap
71 x 121 x 106.5 cm
Julie Cane
Tea? 1940s Tea and Biscuits is one from a series of works which advocates for a return to real-life social interactions. I employ the thought-provoking, diaristic and archival characteristics of still life to address the sociocultural anthropological effects and challenges of digital communication. The work is designed to foreground the healthier and emotionally fulfilling social experience of in-person communication, compared with the social impact of digital communication. Digital communication, while making access to distant connections easier, can also lead to isolation and loneliness.
2024
46
Tea? 1940s Tea and Biscuits
oil on linen
x 82 cm
Regi Cherini
Inspired by the contemporary needlecraft movement, my practice utilises the medium of embroidery to depict still life compositions, revelling in subverting the traditional domestic medium of embroidery to express seemingly incompatible subject matter. Approached with a post-modern sensibility, referencing and yet rejecting a traditional context, my practice demonstrates that embroidery can be an unconventional and subversive medium for examining and challenging issues of gender, equality, class and culture.
Such is Life is a provocative exploration of the complexities of Australian identity through the lens of ‘bogan’ culture. Challenging viewers to reconsider their understanding of Australian culture and identity, perceptions of class, nationalism, and cultural stereotypes, I ask viewers to examine the intersections of class and personal identity in contemporary Australia through intricate needlework and thoughtful still life curation.
Such is Life series
Dress Code (on floral)
Business Breakfast (on pinstripe)
Tradies Picnic (on gingham)
Servo Swag (on paisley)
2024
embroidery floss on printed cotton
74 x 74 cm
Jason Clark
My fifteen year old son found an old Apple iPod in a drawer at home recently. It got me thinking about the first portable audio player—the Sony Walkman. I still remember the excitement of receiving a Sony Walkman for Christmas as a kid in the 80s. One of my other favourite things from that time was LEGO. These two things brought me a lot of joy growing up.
My Favourite Things 2025
Kirsten Coelho
Inexact Silhouette meditates on the weight of absence—the shadow cast by what is no longer there—inviting reflection on shadow as a form of presence.
My practice continues to explore the interplay between form, glaze, and negative space, shaped by an enduring interest in the histories embedded in everyday objects.
Architectural references emerge through the repeated use of the column, while more intimate forms such as cup and bottle hope to evoke the quiet rhythms of domestic life.
The use of blue and white glazes suggests the very long history in ceramics of the use of cobalt in contrast to or alongside with white porcelain. At the heart of this process also is the physical, repetitive act of making pottery—almost Sisyphean in its nature.
Inexact Silhouette 2025 porcelain
30 x 60 x 30 cm
Olivia Cotovich
No Sudden Movements is a contemporary still life that reimagines the everyday chaos of a dog-owning household as a modern-day battlefield. Scattered across the floor are the defeated ‘soldiers’—halfdestroyed dog toys—captured in the quiet aftermath of play. The title hints at a humorous yet slightly ominous narrative: no sudden movements, or the attacker may strike again.
A subtle clue to the unseen aggressor appears in the top corner of the painting—just a pair of paws, calm but foreboding. Through careful composition, the viewer is led to piece together what has unfolded on this domestic battleground. Relatable to many dog owners, the work blends humour and tension in a uniquely imaginative perspective.
No Sudden Movements
2025 oil on canvas
76.2 x 61 x 38 cm
Lucinda Crimson
There are traces and crumbs of my old active life everywhere around my house. Party clothes fill my wardrobe, strewn like streamers. Fancy glasses and platters fill my cupboards. I have more chairs than I can sit on.
My house is now a still, quiet, empty nest. Living with ME/CFS, I am housebound and isolated.
I miss my past life, especially the lustre of the 70s and 80s. The patterns and colours and rituals that shaped me. Everything was shiny and exciting.
Setting up and photographing this party from my childhood was a negotiation with my limited energy. I painted it digitally because I’m too fatigued to hold brushes up and work with oils. That limitation shaped the process and is part of the work itself.
Traces of joy remain, and there is beauty in the fragments, but exhaustion replaces celebration.
Simone Darcy
Autumn Flesh was created during my residency at the Squatters Cottage, The Foundations in Portland NSW.
Made using the phytogram process, this cameraless image was created by exposing seasonal fruit on 4x5 sheet film to sunlight over several hours. The work uses slow, non-toxic photographic methods developed from plants, highlighting the sensory qualities of the materials and the rhythms of gathering, decay, and regeneration.
Rooted in ritual and place, the work speaks to cycles of care, resistance, and ecological connection.
Autumn Flesh
2025
chromogenic print
130 x 104cm
Penelope Davis
This is a photograph from the series Afterimage, produced using photographic techniques, but without a camera. The image is made, not taken.
Contemporary objects of a type common in 17th century still life paintings—such as vases, cups, glasses and fruit—are selected. The objects are moulded and cast in pigmented resin, creating translucent replicas. These are placed onto photographic paper in a colour darkroom, exposed to coloured light and become photograms. I then flatbed scan and digitally arrange selected photograms as a still life.
Still life paintings frequently originate from direct observation, but my works are highly mediated. Employing sculpture, analogue photography and digital techniques these photographs examine the poetics of looking and recording inherent in producing still lifes. The final images are mimetic and recognisable, but a ghostly apparition beyond the capacities of the simple camera lens.
Afterimage Pear/Grapes
2025 pigment inkjet print
84 x 84 cm
Marian Drew
My work engages with the still life tradition by using photographic and sculptural techniques to explore how everyday materials, like rocks, can be recontextualised through composition and perspective. Blending sculptural form with photographic blur, these compositions suspend time and scale, evoking the contemplative nature of still life while disrupting its conventions.
Referencing the ‘Chinese Scholar Rock’, the images operate as meditative arrangements, where spatial illusion and physical presence coexist. Blurred grounds invite viewers into an embodied encounter with the material world.
Although still, rock is not static; it is charged with deep time, weather, and myth. In an age shaped by digital technologies and shifting cosmologies, I reimagine still life as a site of relationality and wonder, where perception bends, and familiar objects, like time worn stones, shimmer with unexpected clarity and meaning.
dye sublimation on aluminium 160 x 80 cm
Christine Druitt-Preston
Continuing my investigation of the symbolic power that cultures have attributed to flowers, this work is a series of three still life prints that explore the evolving ideals of female beauty— Chastity, Felicity and Audacity, and the societal value placed on them by using the established time-honoured hierarchical order of gold, silver and bronze.
Historically women were idealised for chastity, modesty, and perfection, with felicity, eloquence and joy considered prized attributes. More recently a belief in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes saw women
valuing qualities of audacity, bravery, and ambition. Chastity and Felicity have long been female gendered names and now Audacity has entered the lexicon, signifying the formerly masculine gendered traits of boldness and daring, both historically unconventional for women.
The Fair Sex - Chastity
The Fair Sex - Felicity
The Fair Sex - Audacity
2025
stitched linocut on Stonehenge paper, all ed 2/3
Editioned by Brenda Tye
112 x 234 cm
Blair Garland
My multidisciplinary practice approaches the domestic suburban experience, often incorporating traditionally female craft methodologies in honour of too-long overlooked narratives.
To the working parent, the Golden Arches once presented a sanctuary. To nutritionists, the ‘Maccas’ phenomenon is synonymous with saturated fats, salt and sugar; to environmentalists, excessive packaging and industrial meat production; to economists, rampant globalisation.
Before McDonalds crossed the seas and infiltrated Australian culture and diets, Lantana camara was introduced by colonists without care. The large flowering shrub quickly became a noxious pest, smothering and killing native vegetation. In this unusual coupling of phenomena, The Lantana McHappy Meal confronts the audience with a composite of invasive forces.
The Lantana McHappy Meal 2023
embroidery mesh, wool and cotton 25 x 42 x 29 cm
Guy Gilmour
I confess that our dining table can sometimes be like this for days, even weeks but I’m always intrigued by the sculptural effect the indirect light has on the papers and the table top.
Phil Greed
My work explores the quiet intimacy of still life through the lens of material transformation, with a focus on calcium and calcium carbonate—substances that bridge the biological and the geological. These works are meditations on aging, loss, and the emotional weight of the inanimate.
Ceramics, with their fragility and permanence, become vessels of reflection—holding space for my mother, for memory, for the golden years slipping into silence. Each piece carries a poignant echo of the body, a quiet homage to the maternal and the mortal.
Through tactile surfaces and organic forms, I invite viewers to pause and consider how time etches itself into matter. In this way, my work becomes a slow, tender archaeology of life lived, lost, and remembered.
calx _what goes around 2025
wheelthrown porcelain, satin white glazes, gold lustre, calcined calcite, coral 13 x 122 x 122 cm
Melissa Grisancich
This still life centres around a 60-yearold musical jewellery box, gifted to me by an elderly Italian friend. The box and its delicate dancers, paused mid-waltz, reflect the soft winter sunlight in which the scene was painted. Surrounding them are vibrant poppies in yellow, orange, and pink, set against patterned vintage fabric from my personal collection. The composition brings together sentimental objects, theatrical framing, and inherited beauty—capturing a still, reflective moment suspended in time.
Winter Waltz
Raelean Hall
This still life pays homage to the 1000s of nomads taking up temporary residency alongside anonymous neighbours. A Thousand Plateaus reminds us how natural adaptation comes with creative presence, growth and expansion. It’s the nomadic (sometimes invasive) arrangement that plays well with Deleuze’s & Guattari’s rhizomic theory of toing-and-froing, of casually milling about in open-plan living. This transitory free-for-all movement is flexible and carefree—no fences, borders or reservations, just a few essential items to joyfully lose track of time.
Beachgoing has a spirited skin-in-thegame appeal. We embrace this fleeting transitory mode to escape the rigid structures and norms of our busy worlds, to enjoy the flux and freedom of natural surrounds as we bask unabashedly alongside sun-loving strangers.
Thousand Plateaus 2025 oil on board
92 x 92 cm
A
Nazila Jahangir
Immigration - Still Life is part of a series exploring my journey of immigrating to Australia. This piece features two items I brought from my homeland, Iran: an antique copper vessel from my father and a smooth, cow-shaped stone from the Sefid-Rud River. Together, these objects symbolise Iran’s rich history and civilization. However, amidst this stillness, there is a sense of unrest. From the mouth of the copper vessel, a cascade of wild black hair spills out, disrupting the order—a silent rebellion against the past.
Immigration - Still life
2024 oil on canvas
60 x 60 cm
Freya Jobbins
Self-serve—acquiring goods or services by themselves.
Assemblages using plastic doll pieces on second-hand handbags, keys and mobile phone, all on an antique dumb waiter with a functional turntable.
Throughout history the handbag has had many roles; they have carried our important personal possessions, showed our status, and were a symbol of freedom, especially for women. The handbag symbolised increased emancipation for women after the First World War, holding not only their own cash and bank accounts but also keys to their own cars and properties. Women were proud of this and wanted the world to know that they did not have to rely on their husbands. Today, we just want deep functional pockets in all our clothes.
Self-serve 2025
found objects assemblage 38 x 40 x 40 cm
Alun Rhys Jones
Rainbow Sport continues my ongoing exploration of the complex intersection between Queer identity and the world of sport—a space where masculinity, nationalism, and performance often collide with deeply ingrained stereotypes and tropes.
In this work, sixteen rainbow-coloured balls are overlaid with skull motifs, drawing attention to the brutal realities many LGBTQIA+ athletes face. The skulls speak to both literal and symbolic threats—representing the daily death threats some receive simply for coming out, and the broader systemic violence that exists when major sporting events, such as the World Cup, are hosted in countries where homosexuality remains punishable by death. The work sits at
the uncomfortable edge of pride and danger, visibility and vulnerability. I’m interested in how sport—a domain so often associated with strength and unity—can also be a site of exclusion, fear, and erasure for queer bodies. This piece invites reflection on who is allowed to play, and at what cost.
Sport
2025
spray paint, stickers, soccer balls
200 x 300 x 30 cm
Rainbow
Brittany Jones
After nearly one year with my infant son, I looked around our home, and things appeared quite different; breast pumps and spit rags and bibs and pacifiers, Baby Björn potties and nose suckers and thermometers and little chewed-up bits of cardboard all littered the landscape.
I wanted to take a few of these noweveryday objects and elevate them to the status of still life subject. As my son is now lord of the manor, a cheeky title was in order.
The Feast: Morning’s Harvest & Formal Attire
2025 oil on panel
46 x 69 cm
Nicole Kelly
White Jonquils reflects a tenderness in everyday experience and a means of exploring my own life. I’m interested in how we are shaped by the places we inhabit and in turn how we shape our interiors to reflect ourselves. The painting is about an internal space and a constant attempt to portray reality in a way that is not tied to a purely diagrammatic or literal representation, but feeling.
The painting was created from life, a table of cluttered plates, glasses and a small bunch of white jonquils picked from our garden. Combining traditions of figurative painting through a play of form and colour, the painting is a result of painting directly over an abstracted ground of multiple colours and shapes. I’m interested in weaving familiar
representations into a field of colour and mark, with the distinction between abstraction and representation subtly blurred. Abstract shapes of coloured ground are at times left exposed, at times working to form imagery.
2025 oil on polyester
86 x 71 cm
White Jonquils
Suzanne Knight
This series of woven tapestries reflects on the pervasive presence of plastic in our oceans. Drawing on the tradition of still life, it captures an arrangement of vessels which highlight the human impact of plastic pollution.
Human and marine elements merge in forms that are at once comforting and unsettling. Woven fish scales shimmer, buttons safely enclose, and fishermen’s cable knits evoke warmth and safety—yet sharp edges, protruding eyes and open mouths suggest deeper undercurrents. These creatures echo the complex beauty and fragility of ecosystems under pressure, where plastics leave our supermarket shelves, seep into our waterways, food webs and, ultimately, our own bodies. Rather than offering despair,
this work invites reflection—asking us to consider our role as consumers, and to take greater global responsibility in managing plastic waste.
Lost at Sea 2024-2025
tapestry weaving (raw spun wool, repurposed wool, found haberdashery, metal stands)
38 x 88 x 8 cm
Isaac Kozlovskis
My work recounts my memory of the first time I was given an adenosine challenge—a drug administered for diagnosing cardiac arrhythmias. The challenge slows the heart down to a stop to assess whether an additional electrical pathway is active. When the heart is artificially stopped, people say they feel like they’re slipping away, like their life is flashing before their eyes.
My storytelling is punctuated with a collage of video from my personal archive. These memories are altered in innumerable ways as they are remembered and recounted.
The Challenge 2025 single channel video with sound 2:44 mins
Michael Langley
That which we love; what a complex thing. We can sometimes want to hold it too tight. Wrap it up and secrete it safely away to keep for ourselves. We can even perhaps pretend that we don’t love it to ensure we don’t face disappointment. At times we will even put it in a vase and watch it wither. Be Careful What You Do With What You Love.
Justin Enrico Legaspi
I resonate with the mundane: faux marble finishes, second-hand wooden furniture, novelty memorabilia. Some carry memory, others are ordinary yet strangely reminiscent. I think of these household objects as negotiations—whether as an exchange between different diasporic communities, an adaptation of Western aesthetics, or an inheritance of culture. Tradition is both shared and ‘mistranslated’. The spaces they occupy hold both comfort and isolation—part of both worlds, at times disconnected from both, and yet uniquely their own. I find myself suspended in this space too— identifying, discovering new, alternative and unconventional forms of attachment.
Bahay (House) is an ongoing body of work constructed from 3D scans of household objects in my FilipinoAustralian suburban home. As a secondgeneration immigrant, I’m interested in exploring liminal space, and the influence of the internet to return to questions of longing and collective idealisation.
Bahay (house) 2025 single channel video 24:00mins
Susan Lemke
WAVING, NOT DROWNING (fragments of modern motherhood) is a visual nod to the hidden stories of modern parenthood. In a culture that praises solitary coping, a mother’s subtle plea often masquerades as composure, her unspoken need for care quietly overlooked.
Inspired by Stevie Smith’s poem ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, this image speaks to the silent weight carried by many mothers today—navigating motherhood amid economic strain, fragmented support systems, and the unrelenting pressure to juggle work, mortgages, school demands, and relationships.
Gone are the generational villages of shared caregiving, replaced by individualised and often invisible struggle. In this era of overwork and digital disconnection, we are craving a new form of village—not rooted in nostalgia, but reinvented: co-care, community rituals, emotional labour shared not silently, but visibly.
WAVING NOT DROWNING (fragments of modern motherhood)
2024 photographic print from 35mm film 77 x 52 cm
Rosalind Lemoh
Cast from the welcome mat of the entry way to St Brigid’s historic house and gallery, this work transforms this welcome mat through solid cast brass to reflect on both the overlooked histories of women and transformation of material.
2025 cast bronze
4 x 120 x 45 cm
St Brigid’s Cloak
Donna Marcus
Tyrian Purple is an ancient pigment derived from the mucus of murex sea snails. The collection of extraordinary numbers of snails was required to produce tiny quantities of dye. Unsurprisingly this rarity made purple the colour of Kings and Clerics, its price once exceeding (weight for weight) precious metals. Almost miraculously, the ancient cloth became more intense with use and weathering. Its mythical discovery is captured in Rubens’ 1636 painting Hercules’ Dog Discovers Purple Dye.
Tyrian (Triptych) comes from an ongoing series of chromatic studies. Its ‘pigments’ are anodised aluminium cups, the obsolete kind stacked into sets of six in leatherette cases.
These objects have been coloured by time and use—the rarest are the worldworn, a patina that can only be achieved through years of use, highlighting the strange contradictions, and changing values of materials. The high and the low, the ancient and contemporary, converge in a new still life.
Tyrian (Triptych)
2024
aluminium, adhesive, stainless steel
119 x 225 x 19 cm
Kiata Mason
This work is part of my body of work The New Wave Luddite—a contemporary response to the age of AI. With this work, I hope to celebrate the art of creating, the process of creation and the time and study that it takes to create.
I have referenced the use of my greatgrandmother’s sewing machine several times. The sewing machine seems quaint and antiquated now, but this machine revolutionised the world in myriad ways when it was invented. For me, it symbolised the great disruption of the age of machines. And yet it is still just a tool. AI is an unknown entity. If a sewing machine can forever change the world, what impact can AI have?
Surrounded by Art
73 x 90 cm
acrylic on board
Sarah McGrath
My art practice predominately revolves around the art of still life. I have always been drawn to sentimental objects that evoke feelings of nostalgia.
This painting is a quiet celebration of everyday beauty, memory and the richly layered stories held within domestic objects. Each jug comes from a different time and place, bringing with it a distinctive voice, character and sense of history.
The juxtaposition of styles, patterns and colours create an invisible thread that connects them to the hands that once used them, the shelves that they once may have rested on or the conversations they were once witness too. The floral tablecloth and embroidered linen add a sense of warmth, domestic ritual, comfort and feelings of nostalgia.
Tully Moore
This painting is part of my project Smoko Studio. It is an ongoing exploration of classic two-ingredient combinations. This iteration is inspired by the iconic French dish, ‘Duck à l’Orange’.
For an entire year the paintings were developed during my ‘smoko break’ while working at a fruit and vegetable distributor. Influenced by the packaging I come across in this job, I aimed to use and animate the visual language found on the packaging.
This painting invites viewers to engage in the delightful and absurd undertaking of exploring the combination of ducks and oranges for a whole year. The resulting work offers a playful reflection on the information overload we face in daily life, where clashing imagery and messages collide in our physical and digital environments.
Duck a l’Orange, “Wet Duck” 2024
oil on board, faux oranges, and mini bar attachments
65 x 49 cm
Kendal Murray
Scout Out, Shout Out, Hang About is inspired by creative imaginings formed through play and the memory of places in the natural world that hold onto your imagination and become intrinsic to creating an environmental identity and a sense of well-being.
We were awakened to the wonder and delight of nature by the promise of adventure, with tall trees that beckoned us to climb and lush and textured ferns that were the perfect hiding place for hide and seek.
We collected fascinating specimens, investigated tiny, intriguing insects and their habitats, and let our imaginations run wild.
Opportunities to develop connective and interactive relationships with the natural world were forged in our hearts, creating pleasurable memories and interactions with nature that influence our valuing and protection of the environment.
Scout Out, Shout Out, Hang About
2024
mixed media sculpture
39 x 24 x 28 cm
Adam Oste
Knowing personally some young people who steal cars, I’m pained by the harm and destruction they cause. Yet, I’m conflicted. Pained also by their brokenness. They are a deeply angry youth, possessed by an incessant sense of powerlessness. For many, the darkness of the streets is often far kinder than the darkness in their homes. When speaking candidly with me about the details of a night stealing cars, their bodies become animated by a confidence afforded to them by this momentary agency and freedom. One boy described himself and his peers as being ‘addicted to chaos’. It strikes me that perhaps chaos is all they have known.
Observing the co-mingled fragility and violence of these youth, I’m fascinated by the paradoxical stillness of their abandoned cars. These once feverishly violent objects of speed now dormant. Each dumped car signposting a deeper wreckage, soon engulfed in lantana and silence.
Wreck Study III
Denise Pepper
The phrase ‘sit on it’, in the context of global warming, means to delay or avoid taking action to address the issue, essentially ignoring the problem. This can manifest in various ways, from inaction by individuals to inaction by governments and corporations. A charred, burnt cityscape positioned on a chair echoes this statement.
Trapped Heat
timber
Tamasin Pepper
A meandering line threads through this arrangement of softly thrown cylinders, echoing the Gumbaynggirr Country, winding along river systems from the Great Dividing Range to their closest point to the sea at Coffs Harbour. The surfaces allude to the glow of sunset skies, birds in flight, and warm autumnal hues, creating a composition where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
This work reflects the landscape as seen from a car—views dipping in and out of sight, intermittently obscured by signs, verges, or its fences. The piece shares the joy found in rows of pots, presenting an undulating rhythm through the interplay of negative space between the forms.
glazes, engobes and oxides (fired to 1265°C)
25 x 150 x 24 cm
Meander 2025
stoneware,
Jasmine Poole & Chris Sewell
The words left unsaid, moments that sit heavy in the silence of thought. Fragments of light that seep through the cracks, slowly fading as the day descends.
I Have More to Say is the second chapter to the previous series I Have Something to Tell You. Like the last, there are no figures in any of the works. Instead, objects communicate a human presence—taps left running, cigarettes left burning, a tea cup overflowing. The audience is both a voyeur and a participant. They are invited to weave their own narrative.
Who are they, what has been left unsaid and where do we go from here?
I Have More to Say
2024 pigment print on etching rag 158 x 216 cm
Sherry Quiambao
Stress-head plays with still life conventions to reflect the absurdity of internal pressure. A bright yellow melon becomes the head, its surface pierced with lotus stems straining in all directions, caught mid-bloom. A lone shuttlecock, pinned like a nose or third eye, adds a playful tension. It’s a humorous but pointed take on the emotional load we carry and the cultural layers we juggle.
Stress-head
archival pigment print on Hahnemühle hemp
x 80 cm
Matthew Quick
Inspired by the most banal social media posts, historical figures break their classical poses to strut for the camera; shining a spotlight on the trend of fabulous nobodies who curate a digital version of themselves built on a foundation of smoke and mirrors. This reconstructed fairytale visualises the drive to document a ‘best life’ for an imagined audience—while failing to grasp the reality of authentically living in the moment.
#fitspo
Victoria Reichelt
Bored & Tired is a two panelled work I have made focusing on the idea of failure and how when mediated through photography and painting, these perceived ‘failures’ might be redeemed. This work featuring the words ‘bored’ and ‘tired’ spelt out in alphabet spaghetti, embraces a moment of parental failure and asks the viewer to consider disappointments in their own lives and the aesthetic possibilities of embracing them.
Bored & Tired
Bruce Reynolds
The shelf lining of the butler’s pantry in a large historic house is presented here in one surface, reconfigured with an abstract formality responding to the butler’s formal role in the house over several decades. Its interiors were once a sequence of table presentations.
congoleum and paint on plywood 120 x 87 cm
Butler’s Pantry
linoleum,
Elvis Richardson
An Unsolved Study #1 (detail) draws on the symbolism of memento mori within the traditions of still life to meditate on unresolved loss and violence. The work revisits the unsolved 1965 murders of Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt at Wanda Beach, Sydney, reflecting on the persistent fascination and popularity with true crime, especially among women, and its unsettling proximity to the ongoing reality of violence against women in Australia.
Each ceramic figure is modelled on archival media photographs, transforming fleeting news imagery into enduring, hand crafted objects. Arranged atop a custom table and illuminated by a swing-arm lamp, the four sculptural figures—Marianne and Christine, the
Search Party, and the Detectives—invite the viewer to look down into a staged, motionless yet moving world that I hope evokes the contemplative nature of still life and prompts viewers to reflect on memory, media representation, and the unresolved weight of history.
An Unsolved Study #1 (detail)
2024
installation - glazed ceramic figures, metal table and swing arm lamp
150 x 100 x 100 cm
Elizabeth Ryan
In small towns like Coffs, lesbian romance is a secret garden hidden in plain sight—cracked concrete and wildflowers pushing through. This still life is about the queer feminine experience, where lipstick and soft hearts meet gravel and grit. Inspired by Chappell Roan’s ‘The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess’, it explores how gay women craft tiny, coded kingdoms out of everyday objects—a carabiner, a charm, a wink—subtle signals of love and survival.
Here, queer love blooms in unexpected places. We rely on music, art, and thriftstore treasures to drop hints about the lives we live. Our stories are as deep, messy, and meaningful as anyone’s—but sometimes the best bits stay hidden.
When you’re a princess in a place that pretends there’s no castle for you, you build your own from pop songs and rhinestones. I made this to feel seen—I hope you do too.
The Rise and Fall of a Mid North Coast Princess 2025
mixed media, found objects and heartbreak 65 x 40 x 30 cm
Cass Samms
Extinction has been a constant on our continent. There is evidence that many species of megafauna once roamed the landscape, now only a few remain.
The CSIRO states the official tally of Australian endemic plant and animal species that are listed as extinct since 1788 is 100. Australia’s extinction rate has not slowed down in the past 200 years, and is as fast as anywhere else on the planet. There are currently 1770 species listed as threatened or endangered.1
What will we do, other than commemorate extinct species, and try to preserve memories of them in the hope of an afterlife?
With this precious Azure Kingfisher, laying still in it’s eternal dwelling, I hope to bring to the fore the issue of extinction and bring attention to the impacts that humankind is having on the threatened species of this continent.
1. CSIRO, Invasive Species are Australia’s number one extinction threat, 10 May 2019.
copper, timber, acrylic and avian taxidermy
17 x 26.5 x 16.5 cm
The Eternal Dwelling: Azure Kingfisher II 2025
Joshua Shrubb
These three images depict the progression of time, from breakfast through tea to dinner, and also an artistic progression from realistic detail through simplification towards abstraction. In all three images, the objects emerge from darkness, echoing the creative process, in which the images were created mostly by burnishing light areas back out of a dark plate. Through my work I hope to cast some light on the beauty of the everyday.
Consuming Time Triptych 2024
copper plate etching 36 x 105 cm
Anne Smerdon
I’ve long admired Giorgio Morandi’s ability to elevate humble objects into meditations on space and stillness. In this work, I echo that language while layering my own story. These bottles may seem quiet, but for me they hold the weight of interdependence and a private history of enduring despite chronic illness.
The four brown bottles were once filled with tinctures, medicines and lotions. Though utilitarian, they’ve become symbols of my silent struggle.
The cumquats were gifted from a neighbour’s tree. They offer warmth and brightness to the otherwise subdued palette, much as moments of vitality sometimes punctuate the long, isolating burden of ill health.
I hope this work invites viewers to see beyond the stillness, to consider what is held in these containers—physically, emotionally, and metaphorically—and to reflect on the ways that despair and vitality can often coexist in the quiet corners of our lives.
2025 oil on canvas
37 x 37 x 20 cm
Medicine Bottles and Cumquats
Ken Smith
Ocean Edge 1 combines an image of sea and sky in the background with the representation of natural and man-made forms in the foreground, put together to attempt to evoke some of the complex mysteries of the maritime environment. This painting contrasts the implied movement of the fugitive background elements with the inherent stasis of the foreground constructed forms, each pictorial component intensifying the qualities of the other.
Ocean Edge 1
Filthy the Bear
Travelling through Korea and then Europe I found myself entranced by altar art, the use of background paintings with a statue figure in the foreground. The narratives and movement in these static shapes was amazing. I started making sketches of the various altars and their statues and eventually turned these sketches into a sort of still life collage, substituting toys and my own figure creations for the characters of religion and myth. Based on the look of many of the altar statues, I then created my own ‘statue’ in an attempt to bring altar art into the modern era.
The Sect of Kenneth 2025 acrylic on wood, latex skin and fabric over foam with PVC and metal core
122 x 84 x 42 cm
Emma Thorp
One of Each is an assemblage of every type of sock my family wears and serves to illustrate the time dedicated to the mundane and repetitive jobs that are necessary to support a family. It also documents a fleeting moment where my home is full of childhood energy, a time to be relished.
One of Each
acrylic and pencil on shaped plywood 122 x 244 cm
John Van Der Kolk
The sculpture reflects my own fading ability to sculpt.
It speaks of movement remembered in material now at rest.
The still life tradition captures a moment of paused existence, inviting contemplation on the passage of time.
This piece presents a once active form now stilled and exposed. The corroded machinery within alludes to a life of motion and purpose now decayed by time.
A Memory of Movement 2025 silver ash, found objects and stainless steel 30 x 70 x 30 cm
Emma Varga
Still life represents an elusive moment in time. There is always some action before and after that may or may not affect the stillness.
There are some accidental actors hidden behind the curtain, sometimes. This one actor (my hyperactive white cat) definitely disturbed the stillness.
Still Life includes two parts: Prelude and Epilogue. It is a glass installation showing the (almost) same scene before and after the cat’s action.
Still Life – Prologue – Epilogue
glass
x 120 x 22 cm
LeAnne Vincent
Something Blue draws parallels between the mating rituals of the Satin Bowerbird males who collect and display blue objects to attract a mate, and humans who have adapted to online dating and use images to attract a mate. Instead of using images of our physical appearance, what if we only use images of our belongings that reflect our identity, beliefs, and emotions.
If you were to use a dating app, instead of using a photo of your face, what one object would you choose to represent you? This is the question I asked the online community in an anonymous survey. I selected 25 responses and interpreted, sourced and photographed the items to use in the video, together with 25 items that I selected.
Each image is a response to another in these hypothetical conversations that explore how we interact and seek tactile connections in an increasingly nontactile dating world, and questions what our possessions express about us.
Something Blue 2024
single channel video with sound, cyanotype photograms
video 5:18 min
Liz Walker
When will we ever learn that littering is never ok? Each plastic wrapper that slips from our hands becomes part of a much bigger problem. Blown by the wind, these small bits of rubbish end up in drains, rivers and finally the ocean— where they harm marine life and damage ecosystems.
The convenience of single-use plastic has come at a huge cost. It’s time we hold ourselves, manufacturers and retailers accountable. We need options that are biodegradable or reusable and made with care for the planet. Paper bags, for example, are sturdy, compostable and recyclable.
But changing packaging alone isn’t enough. Real change comes with a shift in mindset. Every small action matters— from picking up stray rubbish to choosing products with less waste. The health of our planet depends on it. Let’s stop the waste before it starts.
Gerry Wedd
This work is a response to recent catastrophic algae bloom on our coast which decimated populations of sea life as well as other animals. The work refers to the idea of memento mori and to a colonial idea of us being ‘in control’ of nature.
26 x 25 x 10 cm
Blue Tide Pool 2025 porcelain
Cleo Wilkinson
I love nursing the life of an image out of its pitch black womb into hope—in the form of light—the process has a primordial spiritual magic. The mezzotint print technique has remained unchanged for the last 300 years. The process achieves tonality by roughening the metal plate with a rocker. The rocked areas will produce a rich black print, areas that have been burnished will hold less ink, producing lighter values.
Pears
Cat Wilson
Filmed underwater over many months at the same location in Narooma, NSW, the work captures the quiet rhythms of seaweed suspended in its environment. Drifting, pausing, hovering—these gestures speak to a different kind of stillness: one that is dynamic yet meditative. This slow, observational practice became a personal ritual, a way of surrendering to the ebb and flow of the tides and, by extension, to the deeper currents of life.
Through repetition and symmetry I explore how human experiences of the natural world shape our spiritual and symbolic understanding. Looping seamlessly, Just Hanging becomes a slow breath, a continual inhale and exhale, echoing the cyclical patterns of tide
and time. Through gentle motion and sustained focus, the work invites viewers to inhabit a contemplative space, one that echoes traditional still life’s attention to fragility, presence, and impermanence, rendered through time, tide, and breath.
Just Hanging 2024 single channel video with sound 2:00min
Paul Yore
Recuperating the traditional craft technique of mosaic, Big M (Strawberry) uncannily appropriates a nostalgic artefact of Australian popular culture, transforming it into an intricately crafted object of camp celebration. Seeking beauty, mystery, and humour in the familiar, this decorative sculpture playfully examines the socio-historical conditions underpinning massmedia consumerism and national identity, opening up a diversity of new interpretative possibilities. Engaging memory and collective experience, Big M (Strawberry) reimagines an overlooked cultural symbol, transforming it into a monumental form imbued with sincerity and gravity.
2025
mixed media assemblage on board comprising plastic, glass, wood, synthetic polymer, adhesive, fixtures
128 x 54 x 54 cm
Big M (Strawberry)
Christopher Zanko
When I was a young child there was an old picket fence dividing our house with the neighbours. The girls who lived there would dress the pickets up in a variety of clothes and paint faces on them. I’ve never been able to pass a picket fence without looking out for these characters, or imagining them waiting to be painted and dressed up. Recreating this for me is a way of storing and putting a memory that has grown softer over the years into something tangible and tactile.
My life’s mantra: keep moving or decay. A code that has always driven me forward as an artist and as a human. But now I wonder if it’s run out of road?
Handmade throughout, this work is a crossroads, one we all face sooner or later. Ageing. Changing. Starting again. Staying put.
The playful dice are symbolic of risk, youth, adventure and that part of me that still wants to roll and run, gambling it all for some unknown horizon.
The mirror reflects the past, the imagined road, the future... and you, looking in the mirror—the present. Wanting to be seen. When do you move forward, and when do you stay? What do you risk in rolling the dice to take that chance?
I ask the same of you, viewer. When have you stood at the crossroads, when every option felt risky? What did you do? Did you roll the dice?
Stand STILL And Rot
2025
tempered mirror, polyeythylene foam, wool, hand painted glazed ceramic, wood, acrylic, hand made wooden beads, cotton rope, acrylic rope
260 x 225 x 50 cm
STILL 2025: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The City of Coffs Harbour acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, the Gumbaynggirr people, who have cared for this land since time immemorial. We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging, and commit ourselves to a future with reconciliation and renewal at its heart. 2025 Award Sponsors
Yarrila Arts and Museum
Service Leader: Carrie Kibbler
Senior Curator: Vanessa Jacob
Curator: Ashleigh Frost
Support Officer: Jo Elliott
Cultural Collections Officers: Shana Satyanand, Madison Borgman (digital)
Exhibition Technician: Lyndon Jarman
Visitor Experience Officers:
Deaneet Atwal, Fiona McPherson, Linda Ravlich, Annette Rogers
Local Studies Officer: Belinda Lancey
Programs Facilitators: Toni Southwell, Emma Aspden (Education)
Installers: Cher Breeze, Juan Cosgayon, Darren Freelander, Dan Sala
2025 Award sponsors: Bryant McKinnon Lawyers, Moving Art, Andrew Peace Wines
T: (02) 6648 4700
E: yam@chcc.nsw.gov.au
ISBN: 978-0-6459560-3-0
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia
Catalogue design: Naomi Stewart Image detail credits: p 4 Raelene Hall, A Thousand Plateaus, 2025 (detail); pp 26-27 Summer Aldis, Family Still Life, 2025 (detail); pp 48-49 Jason Barwick, Now and Now and Now, 2025 (detail); pp 70-71 Melissa Grisancich, Winter Waltz, 2025 (detail); pp 92-93 Suzanne Knight, Lost at Sea, 2024-2025 (detail); pp 116-117 Sarah McGrath, Kindred, 2025 (detail); pp 138-139 Guy Gilmour, Home Office, 2025 (detail); p 158 Gerry Wedd, Blue Tide Pool, 2025 (detail)
