Sam Leach, Hens on Terrazza Sofa, 2025, oil on board, 40 × 30 cm
EDITOR’S LETTER
Notes on time
We hope this first issue of the year finds you well, having had a moment to pause, reflect on time passed, and ease gently into 2026. As ever,
Sullivan+Strumpf centres the conversations, practices, and questions that feel most compelling to us now, as articulated by our gallery artists. This issue brings together debut exhibitions, significant off-site projects, and a number of thoughtful joint presentations.
To begin in Singapore, we present Dawn Ng’s exhibition The Earth Laughs in Flowers, a monumental new body of work that extends her decade-long investigation into time, geology, and the ephemeral through a suite of twelve large-scale paintings. If you have the chance to experience the exhibition, it’s well worth it just to hear the incredible accompanying soundscape.
In Australia, we start the year strong with three exceptional Indigenous practices. For his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Alair Pambegan presents a suite of paintings that bring customary designs and sacred stories into dialogue with contemporary practice. Wayilkpa Maymuru introduces a new series of highly detailed bark paintings mapping relationships between time, ancestry, and universal order.
Marrnyula Munungurr presents works on bark grounded in the Yolŋu understanding of the afterlife, charting the architecture of immortality.
In Support Structures, Sanné Mestrom continues her ongoing inquiry into the ways bodies are constructed, perceived, and experienced. Much of this exhibition was shown at the National Gallery of Australia in mid-2025, making it a reward to see the work again in a new and expanded context.
Jess Cochrane makes her gallery debut with The Middle of the Flower, introduced by British art historian Verity Babbs. This body of work searches for identity through dialogue with tradition and a subtle, considered engagement with art-historical influence.
Ahead of our presentation at Melbourne Art Fair 2026, we highlight new work by Sam Leach and Alex Seton. Leach’s latest paintings continue his speculative imagining of a future in which artificial intelligence has optimised living conditions for all other species in the absence of humans, while Seton introduces The Tenderness Series, a new group of fleshy marble sculptures carved in Pietrasanta, Italy.
Elsewhere, Jemima Wyman presents a major survey exhibition, Deep Surface, at QUT Art Museum. Kirsten Coelho and Tiffany Loy speak with Chloe Borich ahead of their joint exhibition Between Line and Form, where repetition, mark-making, and line coalesce into subtle spectacle. We also catch up with Angela Tiatia following the unveiling of her powerful video portrait of the CommBank Matildas FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 squad, a major new commission for the National Portrait Gallery. In conversation with Stephen Jolson, we discuss his eponymous design studio’s approach to creating work that is both enduring and precise.
For The Last Word, art consultant Ivy Rose Ritchens shares her approach to building meaningful and considered art collections. As you read on, we hope the stories gathered here invite curiosity and contemplation and, as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts!
Jo + Urs
QUICK CURATE SHIREEN MARICAN
Communities are the heartbeat of creative ecosystems. I felt this deeply when I joined Sullivan + Strumpf Singapore late last year, amid intense preparation for a full January programme. Yet I found myself rewarded by incredible support of the team here and communities of patrons and friends. People and communities fuel the art ecosystem here; and the relationships and conversations between different players shape and power the ecosystem so that everyone benefits.
This edition’s Quick Curate is a focus on coming together. I selected these works because they remind me of the physical melding of cultures and identities embodied by intertwined fabrics, sweeping gestures and a combination of hues that capture shifting states of ‘being’, ‘becoming’ and ‘blending’. Some of the works draw upon inspiration from local surroundings, while some combine personal and cultural symbols and materials to tell compelling visual stories of tradition and memories.
Lindy Lee’s work provides a thoughtful counterpoint to complete this selection that parallels the circle of life — the core of any ecosystem.
These works are reminders that emphasise unity and cohesion in this fabric we’re weaving together along Yong Siak Street. Each thread, each connection, contributes to a richer tapestry and a shared collective memory for Sullivan + Strumpf’s history in Singapore. There’s so much to look forward to — exhibitions featuring creative new developments in the practices of established and emerging local and regional artists, alongside programmes that ground community-driven approaches and celebrate the sensibilities of Singapore’s art community.
Dhopiya Yunupiŋu Galiku, 2024 work on paper, 76 × 56 cm
With this monumental new body of work, Singaporean artist dawn ng expands upon her decade-long investigation into time, geology and the ephemeral, through twelve paintings.
Dawn Ng The Earth Laughs in Flowers
Words Jenn Ellis Photography Toni Cuhadi
Dawn Ng, June, 2025, acrylic paint, dye, ink, sand on wood, 234 × 174 × 5.5 cm
The Earth Laughs in Flowers is an ode to visual perspectives of the accumulated quotidian. The images we consume when walking through the streets, the newspaper headlines that flicker, that internet scroll, time with friends, the hint of a texture that catches our eye or an image sent by a loved one. In their infinite variety, there are two constants to these inputs: the month of the year, and oneself, the vessel of perception.
in the United States. Formed after the last glaciers scoured the earth’s surface about 15,000 years ago, these geysers and springs gurgle and swirl, viscerally connecting us — in all their tonal beauty — to a prehistoric time. Through the medium of ice, thus, Ng opens an investigation around deep time as articulated through our planet, connecting us back to an epoch before our warmer climates.
Articulating this observational and at times mundane data, and distilling them, is Dawn Ng, who has created a visually abundant diaristic response through twelve paintings, one pertaining to each month. Setting out on a Herculean task, Ng expresses in a confluence of colour the myriad of synaptic connections we experience. Set in Singapore’s Repertory Theatre, this solo show sets the stage for encounters with Ng’s inner mind, and the tributaries of our own subconscious.
The first time I encountered Dawn Ng’s oeuvre was during lockdown. Our lives, as we’d known them, had globally changed. A universal haltering, or slowing down. In this moment of suspension, Ng reflected on how time speeds up when you’re having fun, slows down when you're bored: she unravelled the intrinsic qualities to time as if it were a being, charged with emotion rather than simply numerology. Through this reflection stemmed a now near-decadelong investigation around the medium of ice. The most ephemeral material in Ng’s native Singapore, ice is charged with references to childhood — that lolly, or cubes in a drink. In a land of eternal summer, its variable existence is noted, and disappearance quickly acknowledged. In a sense, it's a foil for the nation’s spirit of renewal, in particular the swift replacement of older buildings, from homes to schools.
In temporal contrast to this rate of change, Ng investigates geology, formations – earth’s minute keeper over centuries. From earlier works over to the painting series of The Earth Laughs in Flowers, there are subliminal references to various natural formations. Consider for example the composition and tones of ‘July’ (2025). In its ochre to pale sakura, the presence of trailing tributaries and confluences of texture and tone, it seems to recall an aerial perspective of sulphur springs found, for example, at Yellowstone National Park
Ng also looks beyond our Earth. When gazing into ‘January’ (2025) there is an intrinsically cosmic quality, akin to casting our eyes on nebulae. As if collected from the Hubble telescope, the painting harbours clusters, ranging in tonality from trails of sage to hints of pastel orange. Following from Ng’s previous series, ‘Into Air’, the paintings are created, as a starting point, by assiduously layering blocks of frozen pigments: watercolours, acrylics, dyes. For the Earth Laughs in Flowers, however, there are several key differences. In a first instance, Ng introduces sediment of different kinds, freezing materials such as grit and sand amongst the layers. In a second instance, instead of having the bricks melt and capturing the process as in her ‘Clocks’ series, Ng breaks them on the wooden boards, forming masses. Through a combination of the artist's hand and ice’s inevitable fusion, the blocks melt, forming textured pools of agglomerated colour. Ng guides these, balancing formative chance with artistic intention. The result is one where the pools connect, and the in-between space is filled; in ‘January’, a near-black sea heightens our celestial feel, connecting the islands of colour, drawing parallels with dark matter: that which interconnects, in our universe, star-forming pillars of gas and dust.
The cosmic relation goes beyond visual association, though. It is a conceptual question, one that prompts us to consider micro to macro perspectives of our relationship with time and space but also value. Indeed, in conversation with Ng, we spoke of a key passage from ‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey: “The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and the cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife.” (p.g. 13). As such, Ng invites us, through her paintings, to look beyond our planet and universe, but also uses them as prompts for us to consider back
Dawn Ng, February, 2025, acrylic paint, dye, ink, sand on wood, 183.5 × 85.5 × 5.5 cm each (diptych)
what surrounds us. Each work, or month, is a widened gaze, a journey that stretches between light years and our mere present. They are also an exercise in looking as well as appreciation, for not only what is beyond, but what is right before us — our ordinary quotidian, which from a different perspective, is quite extraordinary.
This poetic contemplation of care and the commonplace is an intrinsic question of approaches to existence. Ng, through the cyclical nature of her practice and the medium of ice, is investigating that liminal and delicate space between birth, development, decay and death. Finding beauty in its process, reconciling it with the sadness; welcoming, exploring, accepting the spectrum of duality. In thinking of the journey of care, one can draw an analogy with ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine de St. Exupery “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” / “It is the time I have wasted for my rose —” said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.” Ng, much like this passage, draws us to consider how it's the time we’ve spent on stories or with persons or in places that makes it important, not so much the thing itself. With this in mind, each painting of each month is a rose from that period of time, from that particular ‘garden’ of people, passings and information we’ve retained and experienced.
In this conceptual and procedural approach, Ng aligns herself with the world of process-driven abstract painters; ones for whom value is in the gesture, rather than the descriptive output. Even in the creation of negative space in these paintings, which brings Ng’s works into the realm of non-representational and biomorphic figuration, we can draw an analogy with Jackson Pollock, in particular his ‘Cut Out’ series. Crucially, for Ng, and further artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, emphasis is on fluidity and spontaneity: describing and articulating landscapes or biological life without directly representing them. One could say that in Ng’s affinity with the natural world, she treads in the field of Land Art, where natural material is used in the creation of the ‘canvas’, from rocks to soil and plants. In effect, each painting has the intrinsic qualities of this movement, including a focus on process and use of natural materials. And while each painting is not site-specific, The Earth Laughs in Flowers, as an exhibition, is. As a show and an installation, it responds to a particular site — that of an active theatre — and through lighting and display enters the realm of experience and encounter.
Ultimately, Ng’s work acts as a lyrical portal or thread between different worlds: a connector. Between deep historical times and our very present; our Earth and the wider celestial Cosmos; the myriad of information and inputs one might witness or experience on a given
Dawn Ng, December (close up), 2024, acrylic paint, dye, ink, sand on wood, 123 × 123 × 4 cm
Dawn Ng in the studio, 2025. Photography Toni Cuhadi
month; our physical presence to digital footprints; the realms of two major twentieth century art movements. It connects our minds and our instincts, the bodily and the emotive. In a world where the constant is change and movement, The Earth Laughs in Flowers leans into the temporal spectrum of shifts and highlights how we all have something that’s idiosyncratically ours: our time, how we use, and appreciate it. As a new body of work and exhibition, Ng presents but also leaves us with a question: what is the flower we’re each tending to?
EXHIBITION DATES
22 Jan — 1 Feb 26
Dawn Ng
The Earth Laughs in Flowers Singapore Repertory Theatre
Dawn NG April, 2025, acrylic paint, dye, ink, sand on wood, 123 × 123 × 4 cm
“And
while each painting is not site-specific, The Earth Laughs in Flowers, as an exhibition, is. As a show and an installation, it responds to a particular site — that of an active theatre — and through lighting and display enters the realm of experience and encounter.”
jenn ellis
Sullivan+Strumpf presents the gallery’s first solo exhibition of works by alair pambegan, Wik-Mungkan people, who lives and works in Aurukun, Far North Queensland.
Alair Pambegan A Flying Fox Legacy
Words Jack Wilkie-Jans, Portrait Wik and Kugu Arts Centre
Deeply grounded in the traditions passed down to him, pambegan carries forward Wik-Mungkan cultural knowledge through painting and sculpture. His practice spans abstract canvases and large-scale installations crafted from milkwood, ochre and charcoal, drawing inspiration from his father’s law poles and ancestral stories. This exhibition runs concurrently to his inclusion in the 5th National Indigenous Art Triennale at The National Gallery of Australia under tony albert’s Artistic Direction which continues until the 26th April 2026.
Alair Pambegan (b. 1966) is a Wik-Mungkan Loreman, artist and storyteller of pronounced skill and Eldership, from Aurukun, Queensland on the Western Cape of Cape York Peninsula. Paternally he hails from the Winchanam clan group (within Wik-Mungkan) and has connection to Chaa-Ngkoth (within Wik-Waya) through his paternal Grandmother. Since gaining prominence in the early 2000s, Alair’s practice and spirit has established him as an instrumental figure in expanding global recognition for Wik peoples and First Nations contemporary art from Cape York.
When those of us from the Cape, especially the Western Cape with ties to Aurukun, look to Alair, we see stars in our eyes — much as Alair himself sees stars in his own way. He’s a man who looks to the Milky Way for remembrance, significant cultural cues and inspiration. Alair is the Storykeeper for one of the galaxy’s most poignant tales: One about trials and lessons, the magic of the cosmos and its direct correlation with both his peoples and those who live or pass through under their skies. Kalben-aw is the Flying Fox story which holds sacred meaning to Wik peoples as it tells of the fate of two boys, almost at their Initiation maturity, who were carried into the great beyond by Flying Foxes, after disobeying their Elders’ instructions in their hunting of these unique creatures. The two boys, called Wuku and Mukam, now hold space in the Milky Way to forever look down as guardians; as Alair tells, they can now be seen as two black spots in amongst the glittering star belt. Their memories are etched into Winchanam Country, nestled between the Watson and Archer Rivers, east of Aurukun township. Here on Earth, Alair
is a man who many look to for Authority and Wisdom as he is also the Storykeeper of the important Walkaln-aw (Bonefish Story Place) knowledge. Alair is primary Traditional Owner of Walkaln-aw as entrusted to him through initiation and birthright from his late father, Arthur Koo-ekka Pambegan Jnr (1936–2010).
Throughout his decades-long practice, Alair has maintained the specificities of his peoples’ art making while redefining and expanding modes of storytelling in contemporary sculpture. He works at scale, meeting the present moment with the immensity of his family’s continuously vital stories. The responsibility Alair demonstrates through his arts and Cultural practices unanimously speaks to a more contemporary yesterday, today, as well as of legends from eons before.
As a master sculptor who searches, shows, carves, paints, threads, fabricates, and occasionally utilises found objects, Alair’s selection of materials is as important as the stories he tells. Each piece of timber which may become a Flying Fox or a Bonefish is selected from Wik Country and the mighty forests surrounding Aurukun. Alair chooses the wood with intention. Through spiritual meditation he listens and speaks to Country and its Spirits. Indispensable to this choice of material is a simple knowing and attuned recognition of the suitable qualities of the timber.
Customarily speaking, in pre-colonial times, carved objects, artefacts, instruments, or utensils were returned to Country, to feed into the soil to re-birth new trees. Although this practice still involves creating works that are traditionally ephemeral, their movement into
A master sculptor who searches, shows, carves, paints, threads, fabricates, and occasionally utilises found objects. Alair’s selection of materials is as important as the stories he tells.
EXHIBITION DATES
29 Jan — 21 Feb 26
Alair Pambegan
Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney
ageless, climate-controlled galleries, stockrooms, and homes marks a new form of transference, one that Alair is comfortable with. This is a momentous and modern shift in the legacy and preservation of Lore and Culture for Wik peoples.
Along with a select few artists before and beside him, Alair skilfully engages wider audiences in an understanding of Wik Lore and Culture, now also through “Western”/ European paradigms of ‘art’. Importantly, he carries the Authority to share and expand beyond these boundaries. He continues the ethos of his late father, “If you don’t do, you die away” (paraphrased). For his solo exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf, Alair shares a series of paintings on canvas. The compositions carry an almost Vorticist sense of entrancement drawing us into the rhythmic lines and angles that represent the traditional body-paint of Wik men. Each pattern is steeped in sacred meaning and signifiers. The red, black and white ochres are the colours to signal that the wearers of these are Wik. The difference between what contemporary art audiences may think of as ‘polka’ dots and striped lines, comparable to those familiar to Wik peoples, represent different clans. The diversity of patterns within Alair’s linework reflects the stories he’s telling, with subtle variations at times indicating distinct phases unfolding across several works.
Alair is one of the most innovative artists and Cultural Practitioners from Cape York Peninsula since the 1990s. From Grandfather to Father, to Son, to the world, Alair’s contribution to the arts, and the recognition he in turn receives, plays an indelible role in the continuation of what matters to his peoples. Through his practice he pays credence to Old Ways as he teaches younger generations with passion and urgency. His works also give inspiration to other artists to be brave and expand their arts practice in recording their own tales. As audiences, we are fortunate to behold Alair Pambegan’s magnificence and spiritual strength, as can be gleaned through his art and Cultural practices.
Jack Wilkie-Jans is a Waanji, Teppathiggi and Tjungundji man from Mapoon, Western Cape, Cape York Peninsula. An artist, arts worker, arts writer, and Aboriginal Affairs advocate, Jack’s familial connection to Aurukun is primarily through his late Great-Grand Uncles, brothers Grandad Denny Bowenda and Grandad Eric King (Jack’s Waanji namesake).
top: Alair Pambegan, Untitled #7, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 97 × 97 cm bottom: Alair Pambegan, Untitled #14, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 97 × 97 cm
top: Alair Pambegan, Untitled #9, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 97 × 97 cm
Bottom: Alair Pambegan, Untitled #12, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 97 × 97 cm
wayilkpa maymuru Hidden in the Stars
Words by Mayatilli Marika
Portrait courtesy of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre
ma ŋgalili art and the yol ŋ u cosmos: law, country, and ancestral continuity
The Maŋgalili Clan is a Yirritja moiety group within the Yolŋu Nation and cultural system of North-East Arnhem Land, in Australia’s Northern Territory. Within Yolŋu epistemology, visual art is not an autonomous or purely aesthetic practice, but a lawful and cosmological act through which ancestral authority, land tenure, and universal order are continually enacted. For the Maŋgalili clan, art functions as a medium that binds people, country, and cosmos into a single, indivisible system of meaning. Maŋgalili practice and identity articulates the notion that Yolŋu ontologies in which land, sea, sky, and ancestry are inextricably interconnected.
yol ŋ u ontology and the cosmic extension of country
Yolŋu understandings of existence reject the rigid Western constructs of ideological separation between the human, environmental, and celestial realms. Country is not confined to land and sea, but extends into the sky, forming a cosmic geography inhabited and activated by ancestral beings. Stars, constellations, tides, winds, kinship relations, and ceremonial cycles are all manifestations of a single ancestral order governed by Madayin (law).
For the Maŋgalili, familial Clan estates (homelands) such as Djarrakpi (saltwater) and Wayawupuy (freshwater) are embedded within this larger cosmological framework. These places are connected both horizontally and vertically. These are ancestral pathways that traverse land and water, and continue into the heavens. Art emerges from this worldview as a means of encoding and renewing cosmic relationships, rather than depicting discrete environments in a representational sense.
mil ŋ iyawuy (river of stars) and the celestial ancestral network
A central celestial reference in Maŋgalili art is Milŋiyawuy, the Milky Way. In Yolŋu cosmology, Milŋiyawuy is understood as an ancestral river or pathway, along which ancestral beings travelled, carrying law, knowledge, and life. This celestial river is conceptually aligned with waterways on Maŋgalili country, particularly saltwater routes connected to Djarrakpi, reinforcing Yolŋu understandings of continuity between sky and earth.
Maŋgalili artists invoke Milŋiyawuy through fine, repetitive line-work, rhythmic sequencing, and expansive compositional fields that suggest movement, flow, and ancestral presence. These visual strategies do not illustrate the Milky Way in a literal sense; rather, they activate its cosmic significance. The shimmering optical effects produced by layered lines recall both starlight and reflected light on water, unifying celestial and marine realms.
constellations, time, and yol ŋ u law
Beyond the Milky Way, Yolŋu cosmology understands stars and constellations as ancestral entities whose movements regulate seasonal cycles, ceremonial timing, and ecological activity. A deep and ancient comprehension in which celestial phenomena function as lawful indicators of balance and order. For the Maŋgalili, the sky is therefore not a backdrop, but an active participant in governance, guiding social and ceremonial life and existence.
In Maŋgalili art, this cosmic regulation is reflected through compositional discipline, repetition, and restraint. Balance and rhythm within artworks mirror the ordered movement of celestial bodies, reinforcing adherence to Madayin (Law) rather than individual aesthetic preference. The artwork itself becomes a cosmogram, mapping relationships between time, ancestry, and universal order without disclosing restricted narrative content.
wayilkpa maymuru: visual aesthetic and cosmic responsibility
The artistic practice of Wayilkpa Maymuru, a senior Maŋgalili Clan artist of the Yirritja moiety, exemplifies how Maŋgalili cosmological knowledge is articulated through present visual form. Her work is grounded in inherited responsibility to Maŋgalili country, particularly Djarrakpi homeland, and to the ancestral narratives that extend across land, sea, and sky.
Wayilkpa Maymuru’s visual aesthetic is distinguished by a rigorous formal discipline centred on dense, finely controlled linear structures. These lines
Left Page
Wayilkpa Maymuru,
Maŋgalili Origins, 2025, Bark painting, 55 × 34 cm
generate a shimmering optical field across the surface of the painting, producing a sense of vibration and movement. Far from decorative, this line-work functions as a carrier of ancestral knowledge, structuring the painting according to authorised Maŋgalili design systems.
Repetition and rhythmic sequencing are central to Wayilkpa’s practice. Lines are layered in parallel or subtly oscillating formations, evoking the flow of Milŋiyawuy as an ancestral pathway, while simultaneously recalling the movement of saltwater currents. Through this aesthetic strategy, Wayilkpa collapses distinctions between sky and sea, reinforcing Yolŋu cosmological principles of continuity and relationality.
Her palette is typically restrained and deliberate, favouring natural ochres, whites, blacks, and muted earth tones. Tonal variation is used not for expressive excess but to establish depth, luminosity, and balance. Subtle shifts in density allow the surface to appear animated, as though imbued with ancestral presence. This restraint underscores the lawful nature of her work, aligning aesthetic control with cultural authority.
Spatially, Wayilkpa’s compositions resist Western perspectival depth. Rather than foreground and background, her paintings operate as all-over fields, reflecting Yolŋu non-linear understandings of time and space. Viewers are invited not to look into the painting as an image, but to experience it as an immersive surface, an encounter with country and cosmos rather than a representation of them.
While her works may appear abstract within Western art discourse, they are, within Yolŋu epistemology, precisely referential and indexical. Abstraction here functions as a lawful mode of disclosure, allowing cosmological knowledge to be made present without revealing restricted secret sacred information. As a Yolŋu female artist, Wayilkpa Maymuru’s practice also affirms women’s roles in holding and transmitting cosmological knowledge, demonstrating that artistic authority derives from inherited responsibility rather than individual innovation.
Maymuru, Maŋgalili Origins, 2025, Bark painting, 86 × 36 cm
ancestral beings across land, sea, and sky
Ancestral figures associated with Maŋgalili country, such as Guwak (the Eastern Koel), further illustrate Yolŋu understandings of multidimensional ancestral movement. While Guwak’s travels across land establish Maŋgalili ownership of country, Yolŋu ontology recognises that ancestral action and connectedness reverberates across land, sea, and sky. This exemplifies the constant reinforcement of the ancient and deep knowledge systems encoded in Yolŋu visual practice.
art, mortuary practice, and cosmic continuity
Celestial interconnection is particularly evident in Maŋgalili mortuary contexts, especially through larrakitj (painted hollow log coffins). In Yolŋu cosmology, death is understood as transformation rather than cessation. Mortuary artworks situate the deceased within an ongoing ancestral system that encompasses country and cosmos, reaffirming Yolŋu understandings of renewal and continuity.
Wayilkpa’s art articulates a Yolŋu worldview in which humans, country, and cosmos are inextricably interconnected. Through celestial references to Milŋiyawuy, disciplined visual systems, and lawful artistic practice, Wayilkpa and her Kinspeople enact ancestral authority across land, sea, and sky. The work of Wayilkpa Maymuru exemplifies how this cosmological knowledge continues to be expressed, affirming Yolŋu sovereignty, continuity, and responsibility. Wayilkpa’s practice demonstrates that Yolŋu art functions simultaneously as law, cosmology, and cultural memory, challenging Western frameworks that seek to separate these complex domains.
EXHIBITION DATES 05 Feb — 28 Feb 26
Wayilkpa Maymuru: Hidden in the Stars Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne
“Repetition and rhythmic sequencing are central to Wayilkpa’s practice. Lines are layered in parallel or subtly oscillating formations, evoking the flow of Milŋiyawuy as an ancestral pathway, while simultaneously recalling the movement of saltwater currents.”
mayatilli marika
Right Wayilkpa Maymuru, Maŋgalili Origins, 2025, Bark painting, 92 × 53.5 cm Next Spread
In Support Structures, Sanné Mestrom continues her ongoing investigation into the ways bodies are constructed, perceived and experienced.
Support Structures
Words by Natalie Zimmer
Portrait by Phillip Huynh
Sanné Mestrom
Geometric curves, angled planes, profiles assembled from minimal cues, eyes rendered as discrete yet confrontational elements. These pared-back forms in Sanné Mestrom’s works do not so much depict a body, most often a feminized one, as they evoke it. They highlight how we create meaning from limited visual cues, reminding us that bodies are shaped as much by what we notice as by what we overlook.
In Support Structures, Sanné continues her ongoing investigation into the ways bodies are constructed, perceived and experienced. Her works encourage sustained looking, movement around their sculptural forms, and the awareness that meaning emerges through collaboration between object, space, and viewer. These are not passive objects awaiting a single interpretation, but structures that embody what Sanné calls “new ways of seeing that honour multiplicity, embody diversity, and transform our understanding of what it means to truly see.” Viewers become integral participants in meaning-making, their role shifting from tactile engagement to sustained visual attention and physical navigation.
Sanné’s works are strongly grounded in her investigation of modernism’s visual languages and the role of the female body. In response to the exhibition “Cézanne to Giacometti: Masterpieces from Museum Berggruen” at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, she created the interactive installation “The Whole is Greater than the Sum of Her Parts” which directly engaged with these frameworks — particularly Picasso’s Cubist fragmentation. Through its viewing devices and interactive tables, the installation invited visitors to experience firsthand how shifting perspectives and composite viewpoints can produce a fuller, more nuanced understanding than any single vantage point alone. At the same time it critiqued the power traditionally afforded to the male gaze when constructing and fragmenting the female body.
For centuries, this gaze has been treated as if it were neutral, natural, and universal. Attached to it are long-standing assumptions: the myth of artistic genius as innately male; the reduction of the female body to a site of possession and examination; the relegation of women to passive protagonists whether as muses, models, spouses or sexual objects. Depictions of the female body are omnipresent in the collection of the Museum Berggruen, which only holds works by male artists — a snapshot of very common twentieth-century collecting practices — and offer a concentrated view of these historical hierarchies.
The female figure appears in countless variations across the works of Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Cézanne, and
Opposite, clockwise from top left
Sanné Mestrom,
The Weight of Connection #2, 2025, Bronze, 42 × 35.5 × 3 cm
The Weight of Connection #7, 2025, gouache, oxidised bronze, acrylic on linen, 80 × 62 cm
The Weight of Connection #6, 2025, gouache, oxidised bronze, acrylic on linen, 80 × 62 cm
The Weight of Connection # 10, 2025, Bronze, 42 × 35.5 × 5.5 cm
Henri Matisse. Whether it is an oil portrait of the artist Dora Maar, Cézanne’s portrait of his partner Hortense Fiquet, or the model Lorette’s twisted naked body captured in a chalk drawing by Matisse. The way women are represented across the museum’s collection varies starkly: they are nude, they are clothed, they twist and turn, they look at us self-confidently, they are reduced to geometric shapes, split faces, regally posed, recklessly fragmented. What unites them is that they were captured through the eyes of the male artist.
Sanné’s work troubles the canon of these perhaps most famous artists of the twentieth century. By using the works in the Museum Berggruen as a starting point of her participatory, feminist practice she draws attention to ingrained ways of seeing that still shape everyday life. Her practice insists that the act of looking is never neutral: it is conditioned by historical narratives and power asymmetry, but can also be reoriented through awareness and agency, where meaning emerges through collaboration rather than the mastery of one single person. By fracturing viewpoints and inviting the viewer to move, touch, assemble, or reconfigure, her work rejects the idea of a single, authoritative perspective. In this environment, viewers become aware of their own role in constructing visual knowledge. They are no longer passive recipients of a male-authored image but active participants in meaning-making.
In reworking the visual languages of modernism, Sanné does not simply critique the canon — she expands the conditions under which it can be encountered and creates a form of sisterhood with the depicted women. Her sculptures and installations create spaces where perception becomes dialogical rather than unilateral. They ask viewers not only to recognise the structures that have shaped their gaze but to actively unlearn it. Ultimately, Sanné proposes a visual world in which bodies — especially those historically objectified — are approached with multiplicity and openness.
Natalie Zimmer is Curator at Museum Berggruen and co-curator of the exhibition Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen/ Neue Nationalgalerie held at the National Gallery of Australia.
EXHIBITION DATES
26 Feb — 21 Mar 26
Sanné Mestrom: Support Structures Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney
Sanné Mestrom, The Fractured Gaze #2, 2025, Terrazzo concrete with brass inlay and patinated bronze, 60cm × 60cm × 50 cm
Sanné Mestrom, The Fractured Gaze #6, 2025, Terrazzo concrete with brass inlay, 33 × 45.5 × 16.5 cm
Marrnyula Munuŋgurr
Weaving Beauty
Manikay or Songlines of Banumbirr the Morning Star
In the thicket of the rainforest looking for food; sitting among the buttress roots under the banyan tree with the aerial roots dangling down.
Inside here I cry while I create the bones of my identity, the feathered morning star — from the birds around me.
I cry for my creation. I cry for my soul,I am weaving beauty, life and possibility like a flower.
Once it was sent into the sky they cried, seeing it rise, Forgive me if I cry again, for I have sent it. I no longer have it with me. Now I am nothing. My soul has gone. Forgive me if I cry.
text and images courtesy of buku-larrŋgay mulka centre
This piece of poetry is from the manikay or songlines of Baṉumbirr the Morning Star. This ceremony is depicted in Marrnyula’s large black and white work Baṉumbirr — Morning Star Ceremony. She shows the dancers waving the feathered ḏaŋ’ḏaŋ or ceremonial dance wands in the air, which represent the stars. Each evening, Baṉumbirr (Venus) is released from Burralku — an island in another dimension, akin to heaven — and retrieved before dawn. Other works in the show reference a different epic; detailing the tortured journey of Mana the shark after being mortally speared. She strikes the fish trap made from woven, braided branches and is momentarily restrained. Until her supreme power smashes the trap and allows her spirit to continue its journey to the next dimension.
Although these are two separate, unconnected epic song cycles, there are many commonalities. Both songlines are Dhuwa moiety and they each connect to Marrnyula’s inland homeland of Waṉḏawuy. Each of them are rooted in the Yolŋu view of the afterlife and chart the architecture of immortality. The Dhanbul spirit who weaves the feathered flower, and the two old Djapu men who weave the fishtrap at Wandawuy, are engaged in sacred work, as is Marrnyula in this show. Through this body of work, she weaves these narratives together in paint to explicate our place in existence through beauty.
The Middle of The Flower is London based Australian artist Jess Cochrane’s debut solo exhibition with Sullivan+Strumpf. Art historian Verity Babbs introduces us to this new body of work, exploring Cochrane’s dialogue with her Hungarian heritage, engagement with art-historical influences, and nods to contemporary life. Informed by her personal photographic archive, these intricate works fuse a narrative visual history with the complex textures of our digital era.
Jess Cochrane
Words Verity Babbs Portrait Tim Salisbury
Creating Home in History
Jess Cochrane is most at home in her studio. As evermore obligations and opportunities draw her outside, the sanctuary of the studio offers her a restorative refuge. It is a place where painting sessions that stretch through the night are as creatively re-energising as they are gruelling, where new ideas and materials are battled with and gently coaxed into compliance. It is here that she is able to piece together another home, one from which she has been severed.
Hung on the studio wall, among a cacophony of canvases that fill the room like a 18th century Parisian Salon, is a large self-portrait. Donning a two-piece suit, Cochrane is sat with her legs crossed, feet weighed down with heavy black leather loafers. She is making a phone call. There is a heavy masculine energy in this portrait reminiscent of Nicole Kidman’s 2024 photoshoot with Robert Longo on the rooftops of New York. Albeit one that exudes power: this outfit is a costume.
I Just Called to Say I Love You is a diptych, and hung to the side of Cochrane’s self-portrait is a second, much smaller portrait, which seems caught in a lunar orbit of the larger work. In it, a monochromatic male figure is also making a phone call, sitting cross-legged, in a suit of his own. Tibi, Cochrane’s grandfather, fled to Australia from Budapest during Soviet occupation, landing in the large city of Bendigo, which was made rich by the 19th century gold rush book. He soon married, and he and Carmel began their family. Tragically, when Cochrane’s mother was just 12 years old, Carmel was killed on impact during a catastrophic car crash.
Tibi told his children little about his homeland while he struggled to keep his family afloat following the tragedy, and he passed away just six months before Cochrane was born.
The artist, now living in London, is forced to wrestle with her Hungarian identity and the ancestral knowledge her family has lost, without the guidance of her grandfather. Until she began on this body of work, neither she, nor her mother, had ever visited Tibi’s homeland. It is no wonder
that Cochrane has chosen to wear a suit made by the Hungarian brand Nanushka, or to sit in an iconic ‘Wassily’ chair designed by Pécs-born Marcel Breuer, to capture herself taking her fictional phone call with her grandfather. With this new collection of work, Cochrane is grasping for history, clutching for a sense of belonging which has become unfastened from her as a third generation migrant without a living link to Hungary. Her signature Post Impressionist-inspired mark making is the perfect approach for this mission: just as her knowledge of her grandfather’s life before immigrating is hazy, so are her brushstrokes blurred, unfixed, individual marks that swirl together, yearning to create a solid image. These marks are her medium: both in the definition of a method of creation, and as a conjurer of spirits.
Jess Cochrane, I just called to say I love you, 2025, oil on canvas, 2 elements, 36 × 47 cm and 150 × 120 cm
The way she applies her paint leaves strokes which feel as if they could be in constant, crawling motion. Like they could be moving, imperceptibly slowly, swirling around her images at a pace you could never catch with the naked eye, but if you came back to look at the works another day they would be subtly but detectably changed. Hungary, Cochrane believes, similarly defies definition: neither Slavic nor Yugoslavian, its language unique (and infamously difficult to learn) because it doesn’t derive from any of Europe’s most common linguistic roots.
As part of her mission to reconnect with her Hungarian heritage, Cochrane traveled to Budapest for the first time in 2023, bringing along her mother and her young daughter. Several works in ‘The Middle of the Flower’ feature objects photographed or purchased from Budapest’s markets, or are recreations of selfies taken by the artist in the changing rooms of Hungarian boutiques (which have something of the self-portrait of Velazquez peeking around his canvas in Las Meninas about them). One of Cochrane’s purchases from the market is a black embroidered lace doily, painted in Tourist on a mammoth scale. Doily-making is an endangered traditional craft in Hungary, almost exclusively made by a hoard of grandmothers in one Northern region, with younger
Jess Cochrane, Self Portrait /
Jess Cochrane, A Symbolic Bowl of Peppers, 2025, oil on canvas, 120 × 120 cm
generations dragging their feet to ensure the skill outlives its current practitioners. Cochrane was told in the market that her doily was rare, given that it was made from black lace — a difficult material for ageing eyes to crochet. It is likely that the piece was specifically made for the tourist trade; a souvenir parading itself as an acme of the art form. It is now one of Cochrane’s prized possessions. Like her, it dances with Hungarian “authenticity”, just outside of the remit of the truly “local”.
When painting the doily for Tourist, Cochrane found she had condensed it. While, in reality, it is symmetrically decorated with floral embroidery, in her final design, some of these flowers had gone astray. The work became a metaphor for how she interprets her Hungarianess, and the way in which some of her ancestral inheritance will always be morphed if not lost in translation.
Cochrane has found that much of her engagement with her Hungarian roots has had to be in the role of a consumer. Nowhere is this more literally exemplified in her work than in her paintings of meals photographed at Corner 75,
Jess Cochrane, Dinner at Corner 75, 2025, oil on canvas, 70 × 70 cm
Sydney’s premier Hungarian restaurant. With no Hungarian recipes passed down to her by her grandfather (the only exception being stuffed peppers, which feature several times in ‘The Middle of the Flower’), the restaurant, nestled away in the suburbs of Randwick, gives her access to these traditional tastes. Her culinary compositions of small plates enjoyed at Corner 75 are aggrandised by their large scale, lending the modern, clean, minimalist meals the majesty of a banquet painted by Abraham van Beyeren. Consumption (including media consumption) and how we connect with one another is central to Cochrane’s practice. It is no surprise to find an errant iPhone or designer purse sat down alongside the more traditional objects in her still lifes. After all, it’s her own iPhone that she uses to capture the images that will become paintings in her studio, using the mobile like Johannes Vermeer with his camera obscura. Her paintings have a compositional grandeur best associated with Dutch Golden Age still lifes and Renaissance portraits of the great and the good. Cochrane’s magpie eye finds its prey - no matter how mundane — and paints it with a dignity and majesty reserved just a couple of hundred years ago for only the most highbrow of subjects.
One can see the branches of an art historical family tree stretching out within Cochrane’s work. Her paintings are the direct descendant of the masters who have come before her, and they each leave their mark: her floral still lifes are painted with the solemnity of a 17th century Dutch master (sunflowers feature prominently in these compositions as one of Hungary’s largest exports and an intentional reference to Van Gogh); her Pointillist application of paint inherited from Seurat.
A number of works in ‘The Middle of the Flower’ feature what the artist calls “the Cool S”, a symbol immediately recognisable to anyone born between 1985 and 2000, doodled hundreds of times over inside school notebooks and on the casts of friends’ broken arms. This S, and the presence of her iPhone, are contemporary artefacts: the latest generation in the geographical and
Jess Cochrane in her London studio, 2025. Photography Ben Ash.
historical bloodline that runs through Cochrane’s work. Her practice is an amalgamation of innumerable visual experiences and legacies. She is unembarrassed to be associated with her art historical heroes. This work is not derivative, it is the heir to a legacy. Just as some people look a little like their grandfathers, so these paintings look like theirs: Vermeer, Van Gogh, Velazquez.
An immense level of craftsmanship has been poured into this series, beyond the execution of the paintings themselves. For a number of works, Cochrane has created free-hand glue-gun frames, painted with silver leaf, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the gilded frames that proclaim masterpieces in museums. In others, the star of the painting is a piece of pottery created by the artist herself, inspired by a traditional Hungarian water jug she bought on a visit to New York’s Hungarian House. Cochrane is creating her history with her own hands, reimagining craft processes and traditions that her family were cut off from somewhere across the Pacific Ocean. She decides what is placed in the spotlight, what is worthy of framing. She is making her own relics.
In these works, Cochrane tussles with identity, showing us how cultural pride and imposter syndrome wrestle with each other when one searches for ancestral belonging. But these paintings speak to another kind of kinship: that within the art historical canon. “I Just Called to Say I Love You” is as much a message to the artists who have come before her, as it is to her grandfather, Hungary, and herself.
EXHIBITION DATES
26 Feb — 21 Mar 2026
Jess Cochrane
The Middle of The Flower Sullivan+Strumpf
Gadigal/Sydney
Sam Leach
A bull on a couch
Words Stephan Balleux,
Photography Phillip Huynh
Featured in Sullivan+Strumpf’s Melbourne Art Fair presentation for 2026 is a new series of paintings by Sam Leach. The works explore his vision of a utopian world in which animals live leisurely within a post-scarcity society.
Sam Leach, Sheep on Chromeo chair, 2025, oil on board, 40 × 30 cm
Sam Leach in the studio, 2025. Photography Phillip Huynh
We are talking about the future, about a future exhibition, and also about a possible future for humanity, nothing less. When Samuel Leach tells me about his new series and shares the images with me, I can immediately picture these ten small paintings, each 40 × 30 cm, hung in a quiet grid amid the usual noise of an art fair. Nothing spectacular at first glance: no immersive screens, no engineered installation, no real furniture in the space even though it fills every image. Only these modest rectangles insisting softly, each repeating the same premise, an animal perfectly relaxed on a designer chair or sofa, framed by a landscape that shifts between eighteenth century painting, wallpaper and theatrical backdrop.
What strikes me first is how directly these works speak. They do not behave like isolated pieces scrambling for novelty. Together they form a compact and coherent constellation, a language rather than a collection of effects. And that language, paradoxically, speaks about something other than what we literally see. Behind these contented
Sit tight and enjoy the Ride.
animals inhabiting luxury interiors, as if they had finally found custom made comfort, another space opens, one that exceeds anecdote. It is almost impossible not to smile: a horse belly up, an ox proud and serene, two pigs draped across a sofa. One imagines a glass of whisky just out of frame, the hum of a kitchen, a residue of domestic triumph.
It is funny, yes, but also revealing. These images carry the visual economy of 20th century posters, advertising and idealised lifestyle photography. Sam does not use those codes nostalgically. He uses them to expose the present, an era in which everything is recycled, including images. And in a time when artificial intelligence loops thousands of pre existing motifs, his work feels like a gentle resistance. It is not an attempt to invent
a new iconography, but a demonstration that recycling can still produce meaning, if one knows what one is handling. Leach was the first painter I know to work both with and on algorithms. Early on, he understood the stakes of generative systems and their global impact on the construction of contemporary ways of seeing, many of which are subtly imposed by image-driven systems that shape our perception in order to regulate, orient or even control it. He uses these tools critically, not to produce images mechanically but because they raise fundamental questions of value, production and ethics. His work also engages the idea of latent space, understood with Chatonsky as an accumulation of digital cultural traces forming an a chronological archive. While AI moves through this archive statistically, producing averages or atmospheres, Leach navigates it intentionally. He reads and orients this space rather than treating it as raw data, creating images that arise from the same cultural sediment yet pursue a distinctly critical reflection on the technology itself. All that with birds and bears.
Leach summarises the narrative succinctly: “I imagine non humans happy in a world where humans have disappeared, eliminated by a catastrophic alignment problem with artificial intelligence. The intelligence then optimises conditions for all other species.” It sounds like science fiction, but the paintings radiate calm. The mood belongs as much to the 1950s cigar portrait as to the utopian architecture of the 1970s, those Superstudio like environments where everything seems solved and life becomes an eternal lounge. Except here the contentment is post human. The world continues, only without us.
These paintings do not announce artificial intelligence at first sight. Leach uses it in his process, but as one tool
Sam Leach, Bull on daybed with skull, 2025, oil on board, 40 × 30 cm
among many. He begins with photographs of animals and landscapes, manipulates them with AI models, collages the fragments digitally, then translates the result into paint. The images are not the melting hybrids of early AI. They are controlled and sometimes too smooth, and that is precisely where painting brings back friction. Sam even says that generated images often bore him now. It is in the act of painting them that representation regains life.
This raises a crucial question. What changes when a painter translates an AI derived image instead of a conventional photograph? Sam describes the moment when the work on canvas begins to feel alive, a vitality absent in the digital file. Painting becomes the site of animation, of something happening, regardless of the origin of the source. That sensation is what keeps him returning to the medium despite, or because of, the proliferation of images.
The parameters of the project are intentionally limited: same scale, same support, same spacing, the same structural composition. One could read echoes of Robert Ryman or serial practices of the 1960s. But for Leach it is also a response to the velocity of AI. Where models reinvent themselves constantly, he holds the frame still. If everything is constant, the smallest deviation becomes significant, a slightly altered armrest, a shift in the animal’s posture, a background turning into grisaille. Variation becomes an event.
The choice of animals is deliberate. Sam moves from exotic or wild species to domesticated ones: horses, oxen, pigs. These are the animals of folk art, sentimental paintings and kitsch posters. Sam knows the risk of cliché. He walks that line carefully, inviting the viewer in with
softness and humour before the darker narrative returns to mind. That combination of seduction and unease is the quiet engine of the series.
Talking with him, I see how protective he is of painting as a medium. He does not enjoy merging it with other media in the same physical space. Painting keeps its territory. He may adjust the environment, the wall colour or the rhythm of the installation, but the painting itself remains sovereign. The small scale is essential. Like a book, it creates a mental entry point. Beyond a certain size, he says, the room begins to speak. Below that threshold, the painting absorbs you.
I recognise that instinct. Painting is not simply another image among images. It is slow, tactile, resistant. A practice shaped by material insistence. It refuses the fluid logic of screens and continuous feeds. And this is precisely where
Sam’s work becomes striking. It uses painting to reflect on a world deeply restructured by artificial intelligence. In a visual field saturated to the point of becoming mush, he chooses a tiny rectangle, a few layers of paint, an animal on a couch, and condenses humour, drama, utopia and anxiety into that minimum.
From my perspective as a painter, these works carry a strange form of politeness. They welcome you, relax you, allow you to enjoy the whisky and velvet atmosphere of their infinite 20th century lounge. Then they gently remind you that this comfort has a cost, that it may no longer be ours, and that the story could continue perfectly well without humans.
The animals seem entirely at peace with that thought.
EXHIBITION DATES
19 Feb — 22 Feb 26
Melbourne Art Fair
Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre
Sam Leach, Pigs on Marble Sofa with flooded landscape, 2025, oil on board, 40 × 30 cm
The Tenderness Series
Alex Seton
Images 1, 3, 4 Alex Seton working in the studio, 2025, Pietrasanta, Italy.
Photography Lorenzo Montanelli.
Alex Seton, A Kind of Human Paste, 2025, Rosa Portugal Marble, Unique Ed. 2/3, 42 × 50 × 55 cm
Deep Surface is Jemima Wyman’s major survey exhibition at QUT Art Museum, marking a significant return to the university gallery where her artistic practice first began. Curator Katherine Dionysius introduces us to this exhibition which traces the evolution of her work from the mid-1990s, through to the present.
Deep Surface Jemima Wyman
Teeming with dizzying colour and intricate pattern, Jemima Wyman’s practice is a visually and politically charged exploration of camouflage, collective organising, democracy and dissent. In recent years, Wyman has become well known for creating vivid, kaleidoscopic collages composed of imagery of masked activists, coloured smoke and other recurring visual motifs drawn from her extensive archive of found photographs documenting global protests.
These hand-cut photographs engulf the picture plane with varied — and at times, opposing — imagery and ideologies, all converging in unexpected, rhythmic harmony upon the work’s tactile surface. Borrowed from Wyman’s 2018 body of work, the term ‘deep surface’ has been used to describe Wyman’s treatment of patterns and surface design as powerful political devices.1 The phrase also alludes to camouflage’s capacity to disrupt and confuse depth perception by collapsing the distinction between figure and ground. Moreover, and rather conveniently, it offers a useful curatorial framework for an artist’s career survey: it suggests digging beneath the surface, uncovering the layers and tracing the roots to arrive at a greater understanding of the practice as a whole.
When we trace the roots of Wyman’s recent collages, we find patchwork textiles from the 2010s — riotous mosaics of various fabrics, juxtaposing paisley, tie-dye, military camouflage and other ideologically coded patterns. Going back to the 2000s, we find paintings with densely poured pigment, where colour and line strobe and vibrate on the canvas to blur boundaries between figure and ground, individual and collective. These works developed from Wyman’s earlier experimentations with video, performance and installation, each of which explore the porous boundaries between bodily interiority and exteriority. Digging further into the archives, we encounter drawings, collages and sculptures that Wyman created as a visual arts student at QUT in the mid1990s. These preliminary works demonstrate the artist’s bourgeoning interest in patterns and perception. Very few have been shown publicly. Yet, within the context of Wyman’s more recent works, they emerge as foundational to the optical, political, and phenomenological questions that have steadily shaped
her practice over the past three decades. When we are afforded the opportunity to experience many of these works alongside one another, the incredible depth and richness of Wyman’s practice is brought to light.
Marking 30 years since Wyman began her undergraduate studies at QUT, Deep Surface reveals the visual and conceptual complexity that has defined the artist’s diverse output and traces the evolution of her practice from the mid-1990s to today. Through her work, she contends that patterns function as agents of resistance, with the power to reclaim both visibility and anonymity in the face of government surveillance and civic unrest. Drawing from feminist theory, protest culture, and pataphysical logic, Wyman invites viewers to consider camouflage as a way of knowing — a visual strategy for bearing witness, acquiring an expanded consciousness, and imagining new political possibilities.
1 Vivian Ziherl, ‘Embrace without Capture: Haze, Clouds and Smoke in Jemima Wyman’s “Deep Surface”’, in Jemima Wyman: Crisis Patterns, ex. cat. (Mackay: Artspace Mackay, 2024), 8.
EXHIBITION DATES
16 Feb – 31 May 26
QUT Art Museum, Meanjin/Brisbane
26 Feb – 18 Sep 26
Samstag Museum of Art, Tarntanya/Adelaide
22 Jan – 25 Apr 27
UNSW Galleries, Gadigal/Sydney
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Portrait Jemima Wyman, 2025. Photography Vamani Landon Millhouse Jemima Wyman, Declassified 66, 2023, hand cut digital photographs, 28.5 × 30.5 cm
Jemima Wyman, Crowd Crystal, 2016/17, textile, 235 × 247 cm
Glimmer
Lynda Draper
DRAWING from years of sustained inquiry into the expressive potential of clay, the landmark exhibition Lynda Draper Glimmer offers a rare opportunity to consider the full breadth of her practice, a moment Sullivan+Strumpf is proud to share. Presented at Campbelltown Arts Centre from 6 December 2025 – 22 February 2026, the survey brings together key works from the past four decades, creating a contemplative space where recollection and wonder intertwine. Realised with design by Youssofzay Hart, the exhibition immerses visitors in Draper’s world, a space where light, shadow, and form highlight the material presence and conceptual resonance of her works.
Across her career, Draper has forged a practice where material, memory, and imagination converge, giving rise to forms that feel simultaneously grounded and ethereal. She pushes clay into unfamiliar, dreamlike compositions that appear as though made from materials far more fragile than their fired reality — wax, pearl, paper, bubble gum. This interplay between material fact and poetic illusion, along with the alchemy, surprise, and delicate unpredictability integral to her process, continues to define her work and reveal new possibilities for what clay can hold and evoke.
Memory, domestic space, and the quiet atmospheres of everyday life thread through Draper’s sculptural language. Her forms emerge from an intuitive process shaped by lived experience, from family histories and objects carried from home to home, to the shifting environments around her. She maintains a deep interest in material culture and the psychological resonance embedded in things, showing how objects accumulate emotion, meaning, and narrative over time.
Curated by Emily Rolfe, Glimmer brings together significant works from public and private collections alongside new commissions that introduce glass and bronze into Draper’s practice for the first time. These additions expand her
Lynda Draper, Glimmer, installation view, 2025, Campbelltown Arts Centre. Photography Silversalt photography
sculptural vocabulary, offering new dimensions of translucency, reflection, and weight that deepen the exhibition’s exploration of transformation and perception.
For Draper, a “glimmer” is a luminous moment of hope, possibility, magic or clarity. It appears in a glaze that shifts, a lustre that catches the light, or the moment when what seems soft and ephemeral reveals its true solidity. Glimmer invites viewers to tune into these subtle transformations, welcoming the space between perception and understanding.
EXHIBITION DATES
Lynda Draper: Glimmer 06 Dec — 22 Feb 26 Campbelltown Arts Centre
Lynda Draper, Glimmer, installation view, 2025, Campbelltown Arts Centre. Photography Silversalt photography
TIFFANY LOY and KIRSTEN COELHO
in conversation with Chloe Borich
Between Line and Form
Sullivan+Strumpf is pleased to present a joint exhibition with Australian artist Kirsten Coelho and Singaporean artist Tiffany Loy. Inspired by the varied histories of textiles and ceramics, Coelho and Loy breathe new life and form into their respective mediums.
Through their work, each artist proposes a delicate tension between strength and vulnerability, where line, repetition and mark making coalesce in subtle spectacle. Here, COELHO and LOY speak to notions of gesture, finding comfort in uncomfortable moments of the creative process, and the ways architecture is honoured through the intimacy of their work.
CB: I wanted to begin by asking you both what the idea of ‘gesture’ means to you?
KC: I think gesture can have so many meanings. In terms of my work, I feel it refers to mark making and also the manipulation of the ceramic form perhaps on the potter’s wheel or afterwards. Many of my pieces — for example MEND — have repeated marks that have a repeated sense of control to them, whereas the idea of gesture perhaps suggests something more spontaneous or less controlled. When I paint iron oxide onto the rims of my work there’s a controlled uncontrol to the outcome of those pieces. I never know how they will turn out … the heat of the kiln completes the gestural mark making within that series.
TL: I think of gesture as intentional movement, one that may serve the purpose of communication.
CB: Repetition is an inherent part of each of your practices. Viewing your works, they’re marked by meticulous attention to detail, honouring a creative process rooted in focus, diligence and care. Can you describe to me the ideal state of mind you’re in to create your work?
KC: I prefer to be in a quiet environment when I make my work. I used to listen to a lot of music and podcasts in the background, but now I find these a bit distracting. If I’m throwing on the wheel, even though it appears a quick process, I need to really slow it down and focus to be able to control the porcelain and shape the forms I have been thinking of. Later, I might listen to an audio book. I’m a huge fan of Australian Fictional Crime writers and the way they weave the power of the landscape into their writing.
TL: Focus is definitely an essential part of it, but there are different types, the type that occupies and freezes the mind (like when you do mental arithmetic) and the type that allows the mind to feel and multi-task (like when you play a musical instrument). Weaving feels like the latter. It’s the stage in the process where I already have a plan, and am essentially executing it
carefully. Most of the thinking and exploration happens prior to weaving the final piece. I make colour and weave tests in different forms in the process of exploring a project, and most of the decisions are made then. So while weaving I feel quite relaxed, with a tinge of excitement as the artwork slowly appears.
CB: Kirsten, your work is informed by Greek mythology and literature, where ancient stories are retold through delicate porcelain reimagined by a contemporary perspective. How did the story of Daphne influence this new series exhibited in the show?
KC: I started to think a lot about the story of Daphne and Apollo as yet another powerful allegory of the plight of women. Although what the pieces in this exhibition point to more, perhaps in an ambiguous way, is the history of the domestic within the architectural. Hence, I’ve decided to exhibit works in vignettes of three objects using the column as the central form. The column denotes the architectural and the surrounding objects respond to the domestic story within, while still utilising early Greek forms as starting points for some of those vessels, such as Skyphos. Architecture is often grander and these objects tell the more intimate stories from within.
Kirsten Coelho Mend, 2024, Porcelain, matt glaze, iron oxide, 32 × 21 cm
Tiffany Loy in the studio, 2025. Photo Astrini Alias.
CB: Tiffany, your work plays with an unexpected approach to weaving, where industrial and textile languages meet. In this series, you continue to explore a waffle pattern that weaves geometric shapes that play on the eye, dancing between illusions. How do you like to utilise this weave?
TL: To me the waffle weave is one of the fundamental structures that has the potential to be augmented into endless variations. It’s not so much a style as an elemental building block, and in the case of my work, its soft lattice structure is most suitable for exploring compression and distortion of pockets of space and colour. Its inherent faceted topology allows me to explore varying lighting and viewing perspectives which adds a new dimension to my observation of colour in flux.
CB: The presence of your hand is essential in the work that each of you make. While your works on display look flawless, embodying a kind of version of perfection, I imagine you have to face many losses to attain that. How do the virtues of success and failure play into your process?
KC: This notion of failure keeps shifting and changing in my practice. I often reject a lot of my work, then have to live it with it for a while before I feel happy to exhibit it. Often when I first open the kiln after a firing, I’m disappointed as the ideas in my mind don’t align with outcomes, but this is also because I haven’t seen the outcome before — so I have to really look at it for a while to understand its potential. Alongside this is the difficult nature of working with porcelain, pieces often crack and distort and I’m still learning to understand and embrace some of those more obvious ‘flaws’.
TL: I’m constantly confronted by the fact that a soft form of material such as thread (or any pliable line) can never be controlled to ‘perfection’. It doesn’t have a fixed form. Rather than dictating its exact shape, I’m figuring out parameters within which it can find its own
equilibrium and drape. I’m constantly humbled by the material, learning that it does not always flow the way I expect, and negotiating with it to find a balance.
CB: What is a creative reference you’ve found yourself returning to while making the works for the show?
KC: Literature plays a huge role in my work. This year, I’ve been working a lot from one particular poem by Wallace Stevens, The World As Meditation. It’s a powerfully metaphoric poem that talks about Penelope waiting for Odysseus to return from the Trojan wars, coincidentally, weaving by day and unravelling the weaving by night to keep would-be suitors at bay.
TL: I find myself very much drawn to colour theory and Josef Albers’ interaction of colour, but I’m always reminding myself that those observations were mostly made in the context of 2-dimensional spaces and mediums. I like to question how these observations would change in a 3-dimensional space, where colour exists on the rounded surface of the thread. I think that’s what keeps me engaged in using the medium of the pliable line to explore colour and spatial depth.
EXHIBITION DATES 05 Mar — 11 Apr 26
Tiffany Loy + Kirsten Coehlo Between Line and Form Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore
Tiffany Loy in the studio, 2025.
Photo Astrini Alias.
Kirsten Coelho in the studio, 2023. Photography Daniel Noone.
(1 & 3) Kirsten Coelho in the studio, 2024. Photography Daniel Noone
Sullivan+Strumpf is delighted to congratulate Angela Tiatia on the unveiling of her moving-image portrait of the CommBank Matildas FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™ Squad, a major new commission for the National Portrait Gallery. Filmed across 3 continents, 5 cities and 7 shoots, this ambitious project brings together all 23 players from the historic 2023 squad that captivated the nation. Tiatia’s video portrait series recognises the Matildas as a powerful cultural force, capturing both their collective strength and their distinctive individual presence.
AK: The National Portrait Gallery has described your portrait of the CommBank Matildas FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™ Squad as the most ambitious portrait commission in the history of their institution. How would you describe your approach to making the portrait and what you wanted it say?
AT: I spent a lot of time in the development stage working through what this portrait was going to reveal about the Matildas. Portraiture has long served as a powerful means of capturing not only individuals, but the spirit of a society. It reveals the values, tensions, and aspirations that shape a nation’s identity at a particular moment in time.
The Matildas embody such a moment. Their record-breaking run in the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup captured national attention — not just for their athletic excellence, but for the unity, resilience and authenticity they brought to the field. They challenged outdated ideas about who represents Australia and opened space for new definitions of heroism, leadership and belonging. The portrait is not simply a record of achievement, but a reflection on how the Matildas have helped reimagine Australian identity itself.
AK: What was your approach to the challenge of capturing not only the collective spirit of the team, but also the individuality of each of the athletes? And how did you balance this dynamic?
AT: I wanted the audience to experience the Matildas like never before - both as a team and as individuals. The film moves back and forth between two distinct emotional layers: it climbs the heights of celebrating them as heroes; and then catches glimpses of private intimate moments that invites us to connect with their humanity. We feel their determination and resilience; but we also share their joy and vulnerability.
By moving between these two spheres– the hero and the human — it allows the work to resist simple narratives. These women can be both amazing athletes at the top of their game, while also feeling relatable and familiar.
AK: The Matildas’ World Cup 2023 campaign united Australia in a unique way. What moments or emotions from your time filming across three continents stood out to you as essential to telling their story?
AT: There were so many moments on set that give me chills. These women are incredible. Being around them, I really felt like they are the best of us. There are different types of shots that recur throughout the portrait, and they each deliver different emotional payloads. When Steph Catley leads half a dozen other players out of the darkness and into the light, it evokes a feeling of awe. When Mary Fowler stares straight out of the screen into the audience, you are held by her strength and dignity. When Sam Kerr puts on the captain’s band, you feel her pride and excitement in playing for the Matildas. And when you see teammates laugh and gently tease each other, the mood lightens and you’re reminded that these elite athletes are also downto-earth Australians, that span generations and backgrounds.
AK: Your work often explores power, gender, and representation. How do these themes feature in this portrait?
AT: My work has always tried to show women as having agency and power: that beauty doesn’t mean objectification; that femininity doesn’t mean weakness. The Matildas are the embodiment of this. They have reached the highest levels of excellence but are also humble and generous.
AK: The Matildas represent a diverse group of people with a wide range of cultural backgrounds and life experiences — much like the sociocultural landscape of Australia. What was your approach to capturing and celebrating that diversity?
AT: I was really led by the athletes themselves. Throughout the portrait, there are intimate glimpses of pregame rituals. These came from the athletes themselves, and often had deep personal meaning, for example Raso tying a
I prefer to not be too suggestive about my own intentions, as I worry it could shepherd people’s experience.
EXHIBITION DATES
Angela Tiatia
The Matildas 2025 Now on view at the National Portrait Gallery
ribbon in her hair; or Kyah draping the Aboriginal flag over her shoulders. When we were on set, I would also leave as much space as I could for spontaneity — so we could catch authentic moments of players being themselves.
I was very mindful to not editorialise too much — I didn’t want to suggest things that weren’t there. This was about the Matildas and the relationship they have with Australia.
AK: Since its unveiling in December 2025 at the National Portrait Gallery, this work has and will become part of the nation’s visual memory. What do you hope audiences will feel or understand when they encounter the work for the first time? What elements do you hope they’ll keep returning to?
AT: I hope that when audience members experience the portrait, it rekindles the pride and love they have for the Matildas, what they have achieved and what they have taught us.
Generally speaking, I prefer to not be too suggestive about my own intentions, as I worry it could shepherd people’s experience. And I prefer to hear what people take from the work.
However, there are several themes that I hope resonate with the audience. Central to the work is the idea of excellence — and the powerful tension between heroism and humanity. It celebrates and honours the strength to shine both as individuals and as a team, and the courage it takes to inspire and carry the hopes of a nation.
The theme of visibility also runs strongly through the piece. In a cultural landscape where women in sport have often been overlooked, this portrait affirms the importance of representation — not as tokenism, but as a reshaping of the national gaze.
The portrait also explores emotional memory, giving space to unfiltered responses that anchor the squad’s success in something more human than statistics or headlines. In doing so, reveals the emotional infrastructure behind public triumph.
Finally, the work touches on identity and cultural belonging. These athletes — diverse in background, united in purpose — speak to a broader shift in Australia’s understanding of who it is and who it includes. The portrait, through its layered construction, allows the viewer to engage with that shift in a direct and reflective way.
Angela Tiatia Matildas 2025, single channel high-definition video 16:9, colour, 23 mins. Commissioned with funds provided by Tim Fairfax and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
by Verity Babbs
THE HISTORY OF ART IN ONE SENTENCE
Verity Babbs journeys through 50 key art movements across history, answering ten questions for each in just one sentence at a time.
Within these fascinating, and sometimes hilarious, nuggets of art wisdom, Verity covers everything from who inspired the movement and its impact on history, to the key artists and artworks for each. Spanning 500 years — from the Renaissance to the Young British Artists — this wonderfully illustrated book is for anyone who wants to learn more about art and also have a laugh along the way.
View Online to purchase your copy of the book, please scan the QR code
by David Flack
FLACK STUDIO
INTERIORS
From highly expressive residential spaces to chic commercial environments, this debut book presents interiors that reflect a harmonious fusion of bold style and bohemian spirit.
The arrival, in 2019, of Australian global pop star Troye Sivan's richly layered Melbourne home introduced the world to Flack Studio, a wildly creative, multidisciplinary practice of designers and architects well established in Australia. Launched in 2014, the studio is driven by an adventurous sensibility that embraces historical research and contemporary innovation.
View Online to purchase your copy of the book, please scan the QR code
As recently featured in Vogue Living, House of Light is a groundbreaking residential project by Jolson Architecture and Interiors. Designed by Stephen Jolson, Jaclyn Lee and Mat Wright, the project marks a defining moment in the studio’s 25th anniversary.
STEPHEN JOLSON
AT THE CORE OF JOLSON'S design philosophy is the seamless integration of art into living spaces. In collaboration with art consultant Swee Lim, the home showcases works by Sullivan+Strumpf artists including Yang Yongliang’s Sitting Alone by a Stream (2019), displayed in the dining room, and Alex Seton’s Ache for an Epilogue (2024), featured in the entry forecourt. We had the pleasure of speaking with Stephen Jolson for this interview, where we explored his approach to creating timeless, enduring design.
Interview by Elsa Bryant
Photography Anson Smart, Styling Claire Delmar
EB: Architecture in your hands feels deeply entwined with artistic inquiry through consideration of form, perception and meaning. How does art theory inform your design process, and what does it offer to the architectural imagination?
SJ: For us, architecture is an act of interpretation that is not dissimilar to art. Both disciplines begin with inquiry: how form, light and space can evoke emotion or shift perception. Our process often starts conceptually, with ideas drawn from the language of art theory, to consider proportion, composition, contrast and rhythm and how these can be expressed spatially.
Much of our architecture is sculptural in nature. In House of Light, the experience is not about walking around an object, but moving through it, engaging with light, texture and shadow as part of the composition itself. Art is often an interpretation of context, and House of Light is precisely that — a sculptural form that responds to its robust surroundings and creates a moment for pause and contemplation. Like a work of art, it’s a building conceived to heighten awareness, to invite mindfulness and make you stop and think.
EB: Crafting a sensorial experience seems central to the ethos of your studio. How do you translate sensory perception into a design language that remains both rigorous and poetic?
SJ: Our work begins with the sensory from the way light moves, to the texture underfoot, and the sound a material absorbs or reflects. These are not decorative gestures;
they’re the architecture itself. By observing how people intuitively respond to space, we translate those sensory cues into form and material.
In House of Light, this dialogue is constant. The shifting tone of natural light across curved plaster, the cool touch of stone underfoot, and the softened acoustics of layered surfaces all work together to create a deeply emotive experience. Rigour underpins the poetry so that every junction and transition is meticulously resolved for the experience to feel effortless.
EB: While design trends shift rapidly, your work maintains a sense of timelessness and emotional depth. What do you see as the key elements for creating enduring architecture that continues to resonate with its inhabitants over time?
SJ: Timeless architecture is not defined by style, but by how it makes you feel. For us, enduring design comes from emotional resonance — the way design shapes the human experience.
Our work is layered with experience, it is shaped by travel, observation, and history. Journeying through cultures where light and texture are woven into daily street life has deepened our understanding of how natural light can be both ephemeral and grounding. History, too, offers profound lessons in scale, form and human connection, in how people live, move and interact within space. Looking back affords us the ability to look forward with fresh eyes — creating architecture that feels timeless because it is born of lived experience, curiosity and intuition.
THE LAST WORD IVY ROSE RITCHENS
Friend of the gallery and art consultant ivy rose ritchens joins us for the last word to share her approach to building meaningful art collections, explore current market trends, and discuss how people are living with art today.
As the Founder and Director of Ivy Rose Consulting (IVY RC.), Ivy provides tailored advisory services that empower clients to build distinctive collections shaped by personal expression, market understanding, and
cultural resonance. In 2025, she launched PROJECT 02 , a digital platform designed to connect a new wave of online art collectors with emerging creative practitioners from Australia and New Zealand.
Interview by Oliver Todd
Portrait Nat Lanyon
OT: The art world can sometimes feel steeped in tradition. As part of a younger generation of consultants, how do you see your role in shaping how people collect today?
IR: I see my role as helping shift the culture of collecting from something exclusive and opaque into something more accessible. Through IVY RC. and PROJECT 02 I focus on demystifying the process and opening pathways that feel inviting rather than intimidating.
The collectors I work with want guidance that honours their taste, values and lifestyle not a top-down model telling them what they “should” buy. My aim is to empower a new generation of collectors to build meaningful, enduring collections that genuinely reflect who they are.
OT: Do you think the younger generation of collectors are approaching art differently from previous generations?
IR: Absolutely. Younger collectors want to know what they are buying into. Who makes the work, what it stands for and whether their purchase actively supports the artist. There is a clear ethical and relational dimension to their decision-making. They care deeply about context, narrative and cultural relevance rather than pedigree for pedigree’s sake. They are also digitally literate, which opens them to online platforms like PROJECT 02, my emerging arts platform. Young collectors have been the primary client base for the site and it has been incredible to see works by early-career Australian and New Zealand artists shipped to new homes across the country.
OT: What kind of art do you think speaks most strongly to this moment?
IR: Art that feels loose, unpolished and imperfect. Work grounded in lived experience where you can sense the artist’s touch through brushstrokes, material experimentation, intimacy, humour and honesty. People crave authenticity and human connection, particularly in an overstimulated digital culture. Perfectly polished work does not always reflect this need.
OT: What first drew you to art consulting, and what keeps you energised by it?
IR: I have always been fascinated by the relationship between people, objects and spaces. Art consulting felt like a natural path. It allows me to work closely with artists while also fostering my own creativity by curating environments that tell a story through the art. What energises me is the sense of possibility. Every client, project and artwork is different. I never know what is around the corner. I get to champion artists, support
collectors and enhance environments. No two days are the same and that sense of discovery keeps the work deeply fulfilling.
OT: What trends or sensibilities are emerging in the way people live with art now?
IR: People increasingly want art integrated into everyday life, not as something precious or separate but as something lived with. Many young collectors are not waiting for their “forever home” to start buying art. They are purchasing now, often choosing pieces that will fit into their current and future spaces. Smaller-scale works, tabletop sculptures and artisanal objects can move with them from home to home and decorate walls, be nestled on bookshelves or tucked into corners. I love seeing this approach where art is woven into daily life rather than displayed solely for formality or perfection.
OT: How do you curate your own art collection?
IR: My collection began the way I think most people’s do, driven by aesthetics. When I was first discovering my taste I bought works simply because they caught my eye. That instinctual pull became its own compass. It was not the most sophisticated curatorial framework but it taught me something essential; buying what you genuinely love is always the right decision. Over time my collecting has evolved. I am drawn to works that capture an experience, a relationship or a sense of place. Pieces that hold memory or mark a moment. Emotional resonance is as important as formal qualities. My collection is still developing but that balance of instinct and connection remains at its core.
Angus Gardner, Appear, 2024, Glazed earthenware, 45 × 40 × 24 cm. Included in the exhibition In My Prime, 2025, Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne.
UP NEXT
Eko Bintang
16 Apr – 16 May 2026
Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore
eX de Medici
21 May – 13 Jun 2026
Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney
Natalya Hughes
23 Apr – 16 Mar 2026
Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney
03
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran
7 May – 6 Jun 2026
Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne
05
Emerging Artist Group Exhibition
21 May – 04 Jul 2026
Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore
06
Glenn Barkley 11 Jun – 11 Jul 2026
Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne
07
Marion Abraham
25 Jun – 15 Aug 2026
Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney
5th National Indigenous Art Triennial: After the Rain exhibition identity by Aretha Brown
