HSC Major Works Showcase 2025
Splinters Splashes Sounds Stage Snaps and Stories
John Badger-Rahme
My artwork explores the psychological shift from the mundane to the extraordinary, where video games have become sanctuaries for adrenaline, identity, and emotional intensity. It reflects the growing appeal of digital escapism as players seek, not just entertainment, but a heightened sense of self through immersive storytelling. The game romanticises dramatised virtual life, drawing players into absurd landscapes shaped by core human desires such as romance, belonging, power, and wealth. These desires are abruptly withdrawn when players reject social norms, offering a dopamine laced alternative to reality’s routine. Free from real world consequences, players face in-game repercussions, immoral choices lead to hollow endings, prompting reflection and replay. The game enforces freedom of action while confronting players with the weight of consequence, challenging their ethical compass. This work questions how constant stimulation and narrative control reshape our sense of fulfillment, revealing a deeper human longing, not just to escape, but to be more than what society, routine, and reality allow us to become.
Growing Pains
Painting
Nelson Elliot
My work explores both familiar and emerging expressions of adolescent behaviour, focusing on group dynamics, rebellion, and the search for identity in a world shaped by social media. Teenagers increasingly turn to peers— rather than parents—for values, forming tribes that define belonging. This pursuit of boldness and individuality reflects a belief in youth’s invincibility. Through imagery of vaping, drinking, and exaggerated displays of maturity, I highlight how social pressures can accelerate adolescence, prompting behaviours beyond emotional readiness. These premature transitions often feel unnatural and can distort personal growth. My work reflects on the tension between the desire for freedom and the absence of maturity, questioning what is lost when youth is fast-tracked in a world that rewards appearance over authenticity, and speed over self-awareness.
Second Culture Kid
Painting
Lucas Halim
As a second culture kid, my work explores the tension between inherited identity and the pressure to assimilate. I investigate the complexity of cultural displacement and how first-generation migrants often sacrifice some of their heritage to try to belong, while subsequent generations, like mine, drift further from ancestral roots. My art reflects the fragmentation of identity shaped by multiple environments, where cultural norms are neither fully ours nor fully abandoned. I interrogate what it means to be perceived as “other”.
Inspired by Gordon Bennett’s self-portrait, I reflect on the confusion of inherited memory and lived experience, where the self becomes a collage of what is kept, lost, and reimagined. My practice questions the permanence of identity, foregrounding hybridity, loss, and adaptation. Through this, I seek to reclaim narratives often erased in the effort to fit in, allowing for a fluid sense of self that embraces contradiction and cultural layering.
What Happened to the Australian Dream?
Painting
My artwork explores the evolution of the Australian Dream, from owning a large block of land to simply securing a place to call home. Once defined by spacious suburban properties, the dream has shifted for newer generations who, due to rising costs, now settle for smaller dwellings in urban areas. For some, proximity to the city and opportunity outweighs space, leading to minimalist lifestyles and increased isolation driven by demanding work. Others, particularly young families, pursue the original dream by relocating outside the city, often sacrificing convenience and struggling to find space for their belongings. The work also reflects the growing issue of homelessness, where the dream of homeownership is entirely out of reach for many. Through visual contrasts between cramped urban living and sprawling rural landscapes, my artworks captures the tension between aspiration and reality, and the shifting values that define what “home” means in contemporary Australia.
Often Unnoticed Painting
Finn McLean
In my work ‘Often unnoticed’ I’ve tried to encapsulate the perspective of people with invisible disabilities such as ADHD, autism and dyslexia. Taking inspiration from Chuck Close, and Yayoi Kasuma I used patterns to imitate the perspective of these individuals, and vibrant shapes that create a psychedelic visual. This is coupled with writing which contains phrases often replaying in the mind of people who have these invisible disabilities to communicate their struggles. This creates an illusion that from a distance they may look like an average individual, but once you get close with the work, there truth comes to light, and you see them for who they are and what they go through. Overall the subtle layers bring to light the people that often go unnoticed in society, and communicates to the world that there are people who struggle in silence, despite looking unaffected from a distance.
The Cost of Greatness
Sculpture
Lucas McNally
My artwork explores the dramatic tension between physical strength and fragility within the bodies of modern athletes. Inspired by the dynamic energy of the Baroque period, this sculptural series captures explosive moments from football, basketball, and baseball, sports defined by movement, power, and spectacle. Crafted entirely from cardboard, the medium itself becomes metaphor: its rigid structure suggests muscular strength, while its inherent vulnerability mirrors the athlete’s susceptibility to injury. This contradiction is central to elite sport, where a career can be built or broken on a single movement. Furthermore, prominent use of branded logos such as Nike and Adidas emphasises the commodification of the athlete’s body, highlighting how corporations assign commercial value to specific limbs. Whether it be a pitcher’s arm, a striker’s leg. My work invites viewers to reflect on the human cost of performance and the fleeting nature of physical supremacy in a profit driven sports culture.
The Great Zoo-Society
Drawing
Jordan Moore
My artwork is a portrayal of human behaviour through zoomorphism, to comment on instinctual patterns that emerge in structured environments like parliament, workplaces, and schools. By likening people to animals, I highlight how power dynamics, territorialism, conformity, and hierarchy often mirror primal instincts. Using parody and irony, I exaggerate familiar settings and behaviours to reveal the absurdity and predictability of these social systems. The work is presented in the style of a fantastical children’s book illustration, blending whimsy with critique. Characters engage in exaggerated recognisable actions, debating, competing, scheming within familiar environments that reflect the emotional undercurrents of these spaces. This playful aesthetic invites reflection on serious themes through a lens of humour and imagination. Ultimately, my work challenges the idea of human society, suggesting that beneath our routines and institutions, we remain deeply influenced by instinct, survival, and the need to belong.
In the Waiting Painting
George Stewart
The human mind, restless and uncertain, weaves countless possibilities in the space between expectation and reality, crafting parallel fates before the truth is ever revealed. Anticipation, anxiety, worrying, mixed emotions, awaiting results that may or may not be what you expect, elation, disappointment, frustration are the emotions I seek to capture in my artworks that explore this aspect that is universally experienced no matter your age or gender. My body of work aims to examine this deeply personal yet relatable psychological experience and portray its commonplace within everyday life. The intention is to capture that moment of elation or disappointment, represent connection between psychological state and the physiological action within anticipation. My art is defined by its ability to visually manifest the unseen turbulence of the mind, inviting viewers to reflect on their own experiences of anticipation and the fragile space between hope and apprehension.
Under the Microscope
Painting
Sergio Vincenzo
My artwork explores the emotional and physical journey of living with type two diabetes. Through the metaphor of snakes and ladders, I represent the moments of progress and setbacks. The use of gummy bears, jellybeans, and snakes references both the sugary treatments used to manage hypoglycaemia and their visual similarity to cellular structures, dissolving into the bloodstream as if part of the body’s biology. Each artwork in the series captures a distinct stage of this experience: the initial diagnosis and confusion, the ongoing sorrow and exhaustion of long-term management, and ultimately, the symbolic “death” of a life once free from the condition. This final stage reflects entering an unknown future shaped by resilience and adaptation. My intention is to provide a deeply personal yet universal visual narrative, offering insight into the layered reality of chronic illness and the body’s internal world.
VISUAL ARTS
John Badger-Rahme
Nelson Elliot
Lucas Halim
Ryan Horan
Finn McLean
Lucas McNally
Jordan Moore
George Stewart
Sergio Vincenzo
Front cover artwork: Jordan Moore
Back cover artwork: Sergio Vincenzo
