(b. 1986, Gadigal/Sydney)

Anna is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on Gadigal, Wangal and Dharug land in Sydney, Australia. She engages with painting, drawing, photography, weaving and embroidery to explore complex social and political themes. Anna holds a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in painting (2021) and a Master of Fine Art (2023) from National Art School, Sydney. She has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize (2024) and the Dobell Drawing Prize (2021).

https://www.syrupcontemporary.com/anna-mould

Clara Joyce completed her undergraduate studies at the Victorian College of the Arts and went on to study her Honours in Fine Art at Monash University where she achieved the highest mark in studio practice. She is now completing her Masters in Fine art at Monash University. She has shown at Cache, Cathedral Cabinet in Narm (Melbourne) and Cool Change Contemporary in Boorloo (Perth).  Working primarily in painting, Clara Joyce’s practice considers the passage of light through water. Her approach involves a unique staining and layering technique, which generates complex and ethereal visual effects. Joyce’s work investigates elusive and alternate registers of perception, inviting the viewer to immerse themselves in a potent interplay of colours, textures and luminosity. The work brings to mind internal bodily images whilst simultaneously appearing cosmic in scale, generating a productive tension between the macro and micro. 

Shown as part of SYRUP 005; 'A tide is a very long wave'.

Elena Papanikolakis lives and works in Eora/Sydney, and works across painting, collage, drawing and text. Her practice examines both inner worlds and external experiences to explore aspects of psyche and connection. Characterised by an inherent plurality, her practice is underpinned by engagement with a breadth of source material, paying equal attention to personal, cultural, and found fragments; and utilising both abstraction and figuration to at once reveal and conceal. Her practice considers cognitive processes, and formats/media that give content shape; exploring their function and capacity to document, describe and imagine, and their narrative, poetic, and material potential. Concerned with materiality, her work often retains evidence of the artist’s hand through tactile works containing trace of studio practice, via irregularly shaped canvases and supports, cut/torn edges, and handling marks.

Shown as a part of SYRUP_019 Pigment Vision

Emily Ferretti is a Narmm/Melbourne based painter. Their lyrical abstractions draw on moments from memory and imagination with playful depictions of the everyday are depicted with confident and articulate applications utilising vibrant and inviting palette. They completed their Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours Victorian College of the Arts in 2006 and has exhibited extensively throughout Australia. They were awarded the prestigious residencies, the Greene Street Studio residency (awarded by the Australian Council of the Arts), the Cite des Arts Internationale in Paris (awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Wales).

Ferretti’s works are held in major collections including at Artbank, Monash University Museum of Art and the Macquarie Group Collection, as well as in private collections in Australia and the UK.

Shown as part of SYRUP 001 and SYRUP 007.

My name is Georgia Morgan (b. Eora Nation | Sydney 1992) and I am a Tamil Australian artist. My practice is devotional and aspirational. It is storytelling. I am in one place and longing for another (that may or may not exist).

My practice is multidisciplinary and includes large-scale site-specific installations, photographs, videos, paintings and ceramics. Materiality, play, intuition and imagining inform my process.

When I look at the work I have made, I repeatedly think of puja. Puja is a hindu act of worship that involves offering physical objects — such as gold, fruit or flowers — to an image of a god. Sometimes gold foil or plastic fruit or flowers are offered. This doesn’t detract from the value of worship, as it is the conviction of the action that matters.

This knowledge and use of material is consistent in my practice.

It is what I say it is. You believe cause I believe.

Shown as part of SYRUP_009.

I’m investigating a couple of things. One is flatness in painting, in relation to the pervasiveness of the digital screen. I’m influenced by 20th-century explorations of Cartesian space in art and in architecture, and I view the screen as a new framework for abstraction. Combining abstract geometry with references to the physical facilitates navigation between the tangible world and the virtual. I want to emphasise this growing divide. Another topic is history and its record. I’m intrigued by the long journey of an object from ‘buried rubble’ to ‘precious artefact’. In a 21st-century context, this is a journey towards digital immortality: many public museums have online databases of their collections, and when they don’t, this task is performed on social media. An object that was buried has its afterlife in ‘the cloud’. I think of this process as the translation of the physical and sculptural into the abstract and pictorial. I’m exploring how painting and photography can span or bridge this dichotomy.

Shown as part of SYRUP 001

Gigi Malherbe’s practice predominantly focuses on fragmented vision, aspects of her cultural heritage and ways of seeing. Drawing from her experience of living with a vision impairment that impacts light perception, Malherbe uses recurring motifs of light fixtures, fires and spotlit or concealed portraits to convey her relationship with light and darkness. Sourcing images from her own photos, sometimes using flash, infrared or torches in dark spaces to create scenes, Malherbe builds intimate and personal glimpses of her experience through rendering these compositions in high contrasting or blurred acrylic palettes.

Shown as a part of SYRUP_019 Pigment Vision

Izabela Pluta is an artist with an interest in expanded photographic practice. Born in Warsaw, Poland, she currently lives and works between the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi in Awabakal country (Newcastle, NSW) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal (Paddington, Sydney). Grounded in the effects of globalisation and Izabela’s personal experience as a migrant to Australia, her work explores a fluid way of moving through and being in the world. She examines the role of photography in highlighting the impermanence and mutability of geographic boundaries, while also considering the broader cultural, political, and environmental impacts of such fluidity. She holds a PhD from The University of Wollongong, is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Art and Design Sydney, and is the current Artistic Associate at the Powerhouse Museum.

Izabela Pluta is represented by Gallery Sally Dan Cuthbert, Sydney.

Shown as part of SYRUP 005; 'A tide is a very long wave'.

Joshua Edward is Co-Founder & Editor (fine art) for publisher no more poetry, and recently appointed Vice-Chair of Blindside Gallery, Melbourne. They exhibit actively in the medium of sculpture following formal studies at Victorian College of the Arts (2018). Joshua has exhibited broadly both within Australia and internationally, and is held in the numerous private collections. Joshua’s practice largely concerns itself with the drudgery of everyday life as inoculation against the miasma of The Modern Condition. They use creativity—their numerous projects and frequent collaborations—as a reminder of fulfilment within, and explanation of, the reality of early adulthood. Allowing creativity to form both the product, and outlet, of living. This amalgamation, alloys of imagined worlds, domestic shapes, familiar forms and figments of popular iconography, create a visual language which depends on the known to form new modes of seeing.

Shown as part of SYRUP 005; 'A tide is a very long wave'.

Born in 1976 in Australia. Lives and works in Sydney. Combining history and anthropology, Kurt Sorensen's photographic practice echoes a colonial history, invoking the antagonistic encounter between early European settlers and the Australian landscape. Sorensen connects with his subject matter through in-camera and darkroom processes that allude to the precarious and uneasy relationship of colonial Europeans with the antipodean environment.

Sorensen's photographs have been included in several nationally recognised prizes and has been shown extensively both nationally and internationally. His work is held in several public and private collections in Australia and overseas.

Shown as part of SYRUP 004

Katrin Koenning (b.1978) is an artist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne, on unceded Wurundjeri Boon wurrung Country.

Shown as part of SYRUP 004

Kuba Dorabialski is an artist, writer and educator originally from Wrocław, Poland. He works primarily in video installation. He's interested in mysticism, political history and the personal poetic; his tools are geography, language and cinema history.

Kuba's work has been exhibited in the US, Europe and Australia and several of his videos are in the Artbank collection. In 2017, he won the John Fries Award with the video installation Floor Dance of Lenin's Resurrection. In 2019, his work Glasses on My Nosetip won the Open category in the Fisher's Ghost Art Award. In 2021, his Invocation Trilogy was exhibited at Carriageworks, Sydney, curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham. In 2023, the feature length Connection of the Sticks had its theatrical premiere at the Sydney Film Festival, programmed by Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd.

He is a lecturer at UNSW, Art and Design. Kuba lives in Sydney, Australia.

Shown as part of SYRUP 004

Maya Stocks is a PhD student at the University of Sydney based in Sydney College of the Arts, where she has been researching the history of Earthworks Poster Collective which operated out of the Tin Sheds at the University between 1972-79. In her practice as an artist, curator and researcher she works within the mediums of sculpture, print and painting to examine the ways in which capitalist infrastructures, geared towards extraction and efficiencies, performance and ‘outputs’, have shaped the everyday world around us. Her studio work connects with anti-technicist approaches in written research exploring industrialised systems of the streamlined, efficacious, and functionalist versus the human, tactile, organic and anomalous. She is the twice recipient of the David Harold Tribe Fellowhship for Sculpture, the Fauvette Loureiro Travel Scholarship and the Arthur Macquarie Travel Fellowship which enabled her to spend time researching her PhD at the British School in Rome in 2023. In 2022, she curated the show Sydney Buries its Past at the Tin Sheds Gallery at the School of Architecure and Design at the University of Sydney. The show brought together key poster works and ephemera from the archive alongside new commissioned works from Sydney College of the Arts cohort made in response.

Shown as part of SYRUP 003 and SYRUP 006

Salote Tawale works with performance, moving image, painting and installation to probe ideas of self-representation. Humorously challenging stereotypes, Tawale presents nuanced articulations of the complex negotiations around identity as a queer Fijian woman with settler-colonial heritage living in Australia. Tawale’s recent works expand these concerns, acknowledging the growing significance of indigenous knowledge systems to individuals living in the diaspora and navigating this particular time and space. Tawale has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the 8th Yokohama Triennial, the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Carriageworks, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Para-Site Gallery, Hong Kong. Tawale undertook an Australia Council residency in London in 2018 and an Indigenous Visual and Digital residency at the Banff Centre, Canada in 2016. She is currently Associate Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

Shown as part of SYRUP 005; 'A tide is a very long wave'.

Sadie Whelan (b.1999 in Aotearoa) is an artist living and working on Gadigal Land. Whelan has a cross-disciplinary practice with a playful and disobedient attitude. She is interested in building stories from scraps; things that are ad-hoc and off-kilter as opposed to tight, packaged or palatable. She has a magpie thing going on for trashy, dishevelled, and femme materiality; think Kmart, fake eyelashes, council clean up, and being tragic. The deviant and gurlesque nature of her work frustrates rigid regimens of taste and investigates unfixed and ungovernable bodies, femme rituals of self-display, and the tension between covering up versus revealing all.

Shown as a part of SYRUP_019 Pigment Vision

Saskia Haalebos is a neurodiverse, multidisciplinary artist who works with text, film, code, performance, audio,

printmaking—whatever the idea calls for around themes of time, mortality, empathy and mis/communication.

She lives on unceded Ngunnawal Country in the ACT region of Australia.

Shown as part of SYRUP 004

Shan Turner-Carroll a Queer, Australian artist of Burmese descent. Deeply fascinated with unearthing tacit knowledge, his practice integrates mediums including photography, sculpture, performance and film. The artist’s practice interrogates both human and non-human nature, alternative forms of social exchange and interactions between art, artist and viewer: sending and receiving signals. His work can sing to snakes, serenade and signal with aliens, and barter with islands, rivers, and oceans. Looking towards the multiplicity of connections between body and landscape, site-specificity is key to his practice, not only in making, but rather in how an embodied methodology of making emerges upon each site and location. Turner-Carroll sees art-making as ritualistic and transformative, using play, humor and experimentation as key elements within his current practice. His work is in the collections of The Art Gallery of New South Wales, ArtBank Australia, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, The Macquarie Group collection and The University of Newcastle.

Shan is represented by COMA Gallery, Sydney.

Shown as part of SYRUP 005; 'A tide is a very long wave'.

Yvette James explores the symbiotic exchange of matter between bodies and their environments. Through entangling materials such as engine oil, honey, silver, steel, and vapour, James’ sculptural installations critique the principle of purity. Leakages between architectures, bodies, and digital realms are studied throughout James’ sculptural installations. The human body is an amalgamation of familiar and foreign substances: bacteria, bone, chemicals, sinew, plastics, and neurons. To be a body is to leak in perpetuity.

Shown as part of SYRUP 005; 'A tide is a very long wave'.

Zara June Williams is a Gadigal/Sydney-based artist working between collage and painting. Drawing from a personal archive of both found and made materials, her practice explores memory, time, and the cyclical nature of matter through the repurposing of accumulated fragments. Her work considers the fragmentary and non-linear nature of perception and lived experience, where images and materials carry traces of multiple temporalities at once.

Shown as a part of SYRUP_019 Pigment Vision