Council

Sun-Kissed Chestnut (2025) Rachel South

Artist statement

Rachel South is an Elimbah-based visual artist whose practice centres on painting. Her work explores connections between nature, the body, and emotion, inviting viewers to pause within layered experiences of identity, memory, and place. Recognised nationally through multiple art prizes, her work is known for its bold use of colour, textural depth, and evocative symbolism. Her practice spans intimate pieces through to large-scale murals, each reflecting an immersive and sensory engagement with surface and form. Inspired by the natural environments of the Moreton Bay and Sunshine Coast regions, Rachel’s work balances contemplation with vibrancy. Through her use of colour, movement, and materiality, she creates spaces that encourage reflection and emotional connection. Her paintings seek to draw viewers into a heightened awareness of both inner and outer landscapes, where the personal and the environmental intersect.

Artwork statement

This work is part of an ongoing series exploring hair as both intimate trace and expansive landscape. Drawn from digitally and reconstructed imagery, the painting magnifies a fleeting, often overlooked detail until it becomes immersive and monumental. Strands sweep and fold like shifting terrain. Rendered in warm chestnut and copper tones, the surface holds a tension between hyperreal precision and painterly distortion. Light moves across the form, catching and dissolving edges, inviting a slow, sensory reading. The work draws on the language of ASMR, softness, repetition, and close attention. To create a space of stillness and heightened awareness. Here, the body becomes a site of contemplation. What is usually peripheral is brought forward, asking the viewer to pause within subtle sensations of movement, memory, and presence where the familiar transforms into something vast, meditative, and quietly disorienting.

Judge's comments

This work elevates an intimate, everyday subject into the monumental, drawing on the language of ASMR to propose a slower, more sensory mode of looking that feels countercultural. There is a technical mastery in the painting of light, texture, and movement across an almost architectural surface. This work shows how everyday routines can become a source for profound artistic encounters.

The Dance of Compassion (2026) Lucie Verhelst

Artist statement

Deriving inspiration from both traditional craftsmanship and contemporary approaches, Lucie Verhelst regularly experiments with diverse textile materials and techniques, allowing each project to evolve organically. By inviting viewers to pause and engage with the intimate and tactile qualities of her art, Lucie encourages a deeper appreciation for the stories embedded into each piece.

Artwork statement

Although we may appear strong and unwavering on the outside, everyone has unseen vulnerabilities hidden within. Yet, when we come together and start to let our guard down, empathy quietly emerges. This is the joy of tuning in; we allow genuine care to move between us. In that safe space, we realise how much we have in common. Because beneath all those cautiously folded layers, there’s a gentleness we share—a quiet strength found not in solitude but in connection.

Judge's comments

This work reminds us that compassion is something that we must practise through touch and action. Through an inventive two-part structure that dismantles the usual barriers between viewer and artwork, here we are invited to physically touch the cloth forms. Handling the delicate work reminds us that this act of handling becomes inseparable from its meaning. Empathy is in our hands.

Greetings from Redcliffe (2025) Blair Garland

Artist statement

I am a multidisciplinary artist based in Redcliffe, Queensland, whose work explores the domestic suburban experience with insight, playfulness, and wit. My practice is deeply informed by feminism and art history, balanced by a commitment to maintaining a low-carbon footprint. I hold no loyalty to specific materials or processes; instead, I am loyal to the idea. The concept dictates the medium and final form of each work. While my pieces emerge from personal experiences at specific moments in time, they are intentionally non-didactic. By fostering a dialogue between material and form, I invite viewers to bring their own associations and interpretations to the work, ultimately seeking to expose new ways of thinking.

Artwork statement

Greetings from Redcliffe takes the form of a vintage photograph album with an embroidered cover, housing nineteen painted portraits of local homes. These houses were selected for their quirkiness and the nostalgic stirrings they evoke, capturing a specific sense of place within the Redcliffe community. The local landscape is in a state of dramatic transition. As these homes rapidly disappear, their unique charm is being replaced by formulaic structures that lack individual character. Having lived in this community for 25 years, I have documented this shifting face of the landscape and the steady march of gentrification. By celebrating a bygone era of architecture and lifestyle, Greetings from Redcliffe provides a quiet space for critique and reflection on the changing character of our suburbs and what is lost in the name of progress.

Judge's comments

A handmade album of nineteen painted portraits of disappearing local homes shows how form and content reinforce each other. The album format recalls photo albums, where we keep them so as not to forget. The embroidery, painting, and mixed-media construction show a sustained weaving together of the domestic and the political, turning what could be discounted as nostalgia into a sharp critique of gentrification.

Garland of Beads (2025) Belinda Krumm

Artist statement

Belinda Krumm is a sculptural ceramic artist based in Brisbane, working on the traditional lands of the Turrbal and Kabi Kabi people. Her hand-built ceramic vessels explore the interplay between form and grouping, often revealing raw clay bodies complemented by carefully considered glaze detailing. Working predominantly with muted and monochromatic palettes, Belinda’s practice is quietly expressive, inviting reflection on repetition, balance, and texture. Her works encourage a slower, more contemplative engagement, where subtle relationships between forms gradually unfold. Her current practice investigates how communities respond to her sculptural forms and the interconnections that emerge through this engagement. By incorporating contributions from others, Belinda brings collective experience to the forefront, expanding the dialogue between maker, object, and audience. In 2026, she is further developing component-based forms, including further large-scale works such as “Garland of Beads”, as well as continuing her exploration of embedding community involvement within her work.

Artwork statement

Garland of Beads is a large-scale, community-focused work that explores collective mindfulness through shared participation and reflection. The work is shaped not only by the artist, but by the voices and intentions of the community that contributed to it. Central to the installation are 108 wishes for our collective future, written by members of the community across a broad range of ages, backgrounds, and lived experiences. Each wish was scribed onto hand-printed paper, rolled, tied, and placed inside an individual ceramic bead. These hidden texts transform the garland into a vessel for shared hopes, embedding personal contributions within a collective form. The tassel, constructed from ephemera, reflects the fleeting nature of time and thought. Its flowing presence connects and extends the wishes held within the beads into the surrounding space. Garland of Beads invites viewers to pause, reflect, and consider how individual intentions can come together to shape a shared future.

Narratives We Wear (2026) Shan Michaels

Artists statement

Shan Michaels is a queer textile artist based in the Moreton Bay region. Working with reclaimed fabrics and stitched language, her practice transforms domestic and everyday materials into tactile artworks that invite participation, reflection, and dialogue. Grounded in accessibility, sustainability, and community connection, her work reframes textiles as both sites of intimacy and tools for protest. Shan’s work has been recognised as a finalist in multiple national art prizes, including receiving Second Place in the Moreton Bay Art Prize (2022), and has been exhibited nationally, most recently at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. She regularly facilitates workshops and participatory installations that make visible the unseen threads of connection that bind communities together. Through a practice that is both tender and radical, Shan creates sensory and socially engaged artworks that celebrate textile traditions as acts of care, resilience, and collective imagination.

Artwork statement

What if connection is not destiny, but design? In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes tells a myth about the origins of love. Humans were once whole, round beings with four arms, four legs, and two faces. There were three sexes: male (from the sun), female (from the earth), and androgynous (from the moon). Powerful and complete, they challenged the gods. Zeus split them in half, and ever since, each person has searched for the part they lost. Love, in this telling, is not simply desire but a deep ache for reunion—an attempt to heal the wound of separation and return to wholeness. My work suggests that connection is something we construct, undo, and remake. Like this myth—and many creation stories—it reminds us that the narratives we inherit about bodies, relationships, and belonging are themselves constructs.

Grasp the sparrow's tail (2026) Mel Brady

Artist statement

Mel Brady is a painter, sculptor and installation artist living on Gubbi Gubbi land who works with paint, fabric and acrylic to create symbolic still life, murals and site-specific, immersive installations. A lifelong collector of old things, Mel’s love of vintage patterns and textiles continues to inform her practice. Her work has been described as dreamy, kaleidoscopic and nostalgic. An abiding interest in the intersection between a spirited creative life and underrated domestic arts has informed her art and craft workshops in galleries, libraries and museums in Southeast Queensland since 2017, and interstate since 2022.

Artwork statement

Grasp the sparrow’s tail is an ink, acrylic and tempera work on calico. Seven irregular graphic forms hover in nebulous space, both nestled together yet separate from each other, boxed within the limits of the canvas. Following the passing of my father, I was given his collection of seven wooden walking sticks. This painting represents the difficulty of reconciling the loss of agency and physical power, the strength and resilience of life surrendering to the inevitable. The title is also a Tai Chi movement, a slow, flowing sweep of the arms as weight shifts onto the back foot. My father taught me this movement as a child, and I now find myself reflecting on the core principle of distinguishing between substantial and insubstantial, the binary oppositions of light and dark, life and death, here and gone.

People's Choice

Girraween Flowers (2025) Kevin Marriage

Artist statement

Artwork statement