Queensland Regional Art Awards

Artist statement

It is perhaps a familiar experience that the demands of everyday life can take precedence over what we might rather be doing. ‘A Change of Scenery’ is an exploration of what it means to change pace and allow ourselves to simply be present in a moment. The artwork’s title carries a dual meaning. The work represents a change within my own artistic practice, shifting from a predominant focus on digital, figure-based work into traditional mediums & landscape paintings. Simultaneously, the work is an invitation to experience scenery inspired by the Rockhampton Region and, through nature’s impressions, to allow oneself to part briefly with life’s often fast-paced obligations. This work acts as a reminder that a change of pace might only require us to slow down and appreciate what already surrounds us. This work intends to encourage a moment of pause for the viewer & to allow the scenery to provide an opportunity for reflection.

Artist statement

A Touch of Music is a striking, high contrast, monochromatic, oil painting rendition of an original photograph I look of my mum playing the piano. This painting encapsulates my love for the original photograph, while enhancing it visually.

As an artist, I paint things that speak to me creatively, as this image does. The original photograph wasn’t perfect, but it had potential to be, which is why I enhanced it through changes and edits traditionally on canvas.

For me as an artist, creating a piece of art that I am proud of, is not the only reason I paint. I create for the joy of creating. For me, art is a meditative process. I sing and dance when I paint. When I create, it is an explosion of expression.

Artist statement

The Wilhelm Scream is a famous and much loved 1950’s film industry sound effect that has become a recurring industry 'easter egg' in over 400 films including Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Toy Story.

In ‘Bitten', the full, unedited creative commons sound effect recording (SSE Vintage Voices) is a repeating soundtrack for a series of playful visualisations of male narrative fantasies and character stereotypes – jungle adventures, fashion obsessions and energency room horror.

I apply my unique generative AI content creation techniques, to create a series of fun, stylistically contrasting video vignettes that add a new dimension to the Wilhelm Scream tradition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-UX6OVFCc0

Use of AI Declaration:
I used a very similar method to the one I used to create 'Stars Align' – the winner of the Emerging Artist category in 2024. I used Midjourney to generate still images. I used photoshop to edit some of the images (but Photoshop's AI tools). I used Runway to add movement to the still images. I used Final Cut to edit the sequences together to the Creative Commons soundtrack and export as a video. My work makes use of generative AI elements but it is artist-created through concept development, prompting, selection, editing, sequencing and sound-image composition. I am accountable for the images, prompts, references, characters and contexts I create. I avoid presenting AI material as documentary truth, avoid imitating living artists without consent, and use the Creative Commons sound source openly and deliberately.

Artist statement

I live in Winton, far remote Queensland; the blue skies go on forever out here. I go painting out on the claypans which provides a sense of peace. When I’m tired from working, I lay down to watch the whistling kites and eagles circle above. Sometimes there’s a plane going over in a dimension higher up. In the quiet and isolation with arms outstretched I see my feet and become a mirror image to what’s above and although we never touch there is a collapsing of two states of being between earth and sky, mind and body. Uncaged under the blue sky generates a feeling of unlimited freedom and peace.

Blue Sky Mirror is the first of a series of works about vulnerability, the processing of trauma, regeneration, freedom. My process is time consuming and involves working between the inside and wide-open spaces and the adding and washing away of marks.

Artist statement

I am compelled to paint colourful, happy stories inspred by my extensive Outback travels .This is an allegory on what it means to be a Queenslander, and the inexorable connections between us all whether realised or not. The Brisbane CBD and Story Bridge nestle behind the Great Dividing Range which is in reality the Great Connecting Range, from the Cape to the Tweed and from the coast to the outback with a sky so big it swallows you. The native wildlife represents pre human occupation; the cool burns and countless footprints a millennia of first nations custodianship ; the camels, goats and cane toad unnitended consequences of recent arrivals ; the wringer in State of Origin kit state pride; the Muster Dogs the loyalty, teamwork and support of mateship; the Flying Doctor arrival the vital reassurance helping to defeat the remoteness. All this under the silent, everpresent guidance of the Southern Cross.

Artist statement

Google Maps tells me that my childhood home is only 19 hours and 10 minutes, or 1,719 kilometres away from my home where I live now. It seems close enough to reach, but distance is not measured only in kilometres.

I have made the journey before, but the homecoming wasn’t quite the heartwarming reunion with the house that I had imagined. The house seemed almost disappointed by my return. I can’t blame it; I had abandoned it many years ago. It is someone else’s home now, and I am an outsider to it.

This work assembles remnants and traces of thing partially remembered, misremembered, or altered by time. The work plots the seemingly random journey both to and away from home. Returning is no longer possible, but what remains is the memory of having once belonged there.

Artist statement

On the right tides, we go down to the beaches of Yarrabah to collect edible shells, a traditional food that is both fresh and delicious. This is something we do together as a family, sharing stories, laughter, and time on Country while gathering food from the shore. I have been doing this since I was a child, walking the beach with my parents and grandparents, learning where to look and when the tides are right. Now I take my grandchildren and the children in our family, so they can learn the same way we did. After collecting the shells, we come together for a big cook-up, enjoying the food we gathered with our own hands. For us, edible shells are more than a meal. They are part of our culture, our memories, and our connection to home.

Artist statement

'Equilibrium' explores the architecture of balance and space, examining structural interplay while redefining strength itself. The tightly woven form splits, expands, and rises, revealing its internal framework and external silhouette at once, and constructing a metaphorical structure in which vulnerability and fortitude are dynamically intertwined. This physical split is more than visual; it asks how openness, exposure, and even fragmentation can become unexpected sources of resilience. With tendrils pulling upward into mid-air, light, movement, and space animate the open organic form—blurring the distinction between object and environment. The piece leans deeply into liminality as an active space where inner and outer realities sustain each other. By exposing its intricately woven network, 'Equilibrium' captures a raw tension between fragile existence and a strengthened resolve. Ultimately, the work resists stasis, reframing resolve as an active, balanced, and generative process.

Artist statement

Grounded I: Banksia Robur investigates the relationship between my body, my wheelchair, the environment and the physical act of painting.

The work begins with wheelchair mark-making directly onto canvas laid on the ground. Moving across the surface, my wheelchair creates tracks, curves and points of movement that record the constant negotiation of living with disability. These marks become the foundation of the painting.

As I work back into the surface, banksia flowers and leaves emerge from the shapes created by the wheelchair. The botanical forms are not planned but develop through an intuitive response to the marks, colour and movement already present.

The wheelchair becomes an extension of my body, while the canvas becomes a site where physical movement is translated into visual language. The resulting work connects movement, landscape and adaptation.

Artist statement

The two interlinked rings are a metaphor for my brain and body and the constant negotiation required to keep them working in harmony while living with Functional Neurological Disorder. Clay gives me a place of calm and balance; however, this work pushed those limits as it was both a technical challenge and a careful experiment. Each ring had to shrink independently in the kiln without touching or cracking, yet remain permanently linked.

The marks on the surface emerged intuitively through carving and etching, while lyrics playing in the studio found their way onto the clay. These words became a record of longing, gratitude, uncertainty and hope. I am drawn to the natural colours and textures of unglazed clay, and to how the rough surfaces hold traces of memory and experience. Fragile yet resilient, independent yet connected, the two rings embody the precarious balance of ‘holding it together’.

Artist statement

Exploring the similarities in textures between humans and trees, IAMASYOUARE no.05, is a continuation of a photographic body of work. Captured as non-sexualised nude self portraits, this piece becomes a story of a meditation between photographer, camera, and nature, documenting a reality through a trained eye. Using a collage of images in an alternating pattern brings a rhythmic comfort to the potential discomfort of reality. The choice of using black and white is an intentional choice to bring forward the contrast of the two opposing forces, yet simplifies the ideology. Bodies and trees don't seem all that different up close, following grooves and skin folds, limbs and limbs, sags and bumps. We often give trees a positive outlook, stating their beauty or their large size, yet look down on (specifically female) bodies for the exact same reason. If trees can take up room to grow, so can you.

Artist statement

I seek personal resolution through my art, posing questions and speculating futures around the existential threat of climate change; ‘IMplant Incubator 001’ is one of my musings.

Exploring ideas around habitat loss, conservation, inter-species entanglements and genetic manipulation the work explores the idea of lab cultivated hybrid organisms, primed for human hosts. A prequel to my IMplant series; this work depicts the incubation stage of imagined biological flora-fungi-human implants. The work envisions an endangered flora species grafted onto a DNA-modified fungi-scaffold, suspended in an incubation chamber to cultivate and prime a new organism for stage 2: human integration.

I often ask myself what I am willing to give or give-up in order to alleviate some of the ecological pressure we are facing. These speculative works seek to resolve the issue of re-homing displaced organisms offering the human as landscape [host]; postulating an uncomfortable future to inspire an alternate resolution.

Artist statement

Infinite Feed explores the psychological tension between the dopamine-driven alter-reality of the digital world and the physical world we return to when the screen goes blank.

Informed by Johann Hari's writing on the crisis of attention, the work considers how digital systems designed to capture our focus, reshape our experience of reality and our capacity to inhabit the present.

The natural, cloud-like form is hand-built, embracing organic contours that emerge through the slow making process. Dark clay brings physical presence to the intangible digital ‘cloud’—an invisible repository of data and systems. While soft, digital code is pressed into the clay, creating a physical record of the systems behind our online lives—echoing the relentless rhythm of scrolling. The permanence of fired clay contrasts with the intangible digital space.

Infinite Feed questions what remains when we step outside this alter-reality and confront the stillness, uncertainty and immediacy of lived experience.

Artist statement

Infinite Vague and Yearning Thoughts grows from my lived experience as a regional Queensland farmer and emerging artist, and from the archival presence of my great-aunt Grace Jennings Carmichael, a nurse and published poet. Her late-nineteenth-century writing evokes the Australian bush as beautiful, uncanny and phantasmagorical, opening space to consider how landscape, memory and women’s creative histories continue to intersect. Through atmospheric light, digital glitches, poetic fragments and incidental field recordings, the work moves between stewardship, inheritance and imagination. Haunting, spectral imagery connects artist and ancestor across time, presenting landscape not as a passive backdrop, but as an active presence shaped by labour, endurance and change. The work reflects on colonial fears of the untamed bush, the obscuring of women’s voices, and the isolating effects of drought, flood, fire and environmental loss, inviting audiences to encounter regional landscapes as sites of resistance and longing.

https://youtube.com/shorts/FNJZXqHjoKc

Artist statement

My work ‘Light Consideration (Green)’, centres on the balancing of chaos and order. By manipulating the mechanics of vision through precise geometry and tonal gradients, I aim to conceptualize the sensation of a ruminating mind in flux. The painting acts as a visual catalyst—interfering with spatial planes to engage the viewers’ subconscious and evoke a deep, emotive response that bridges the gap between strict mathematical structure and the fluid nature of human existence. Contrasting hard-edge geometric forms alongside soft, translucent, painterly gradients, infuse the static canvas with a kinetic energy, producing a reverberating hum of light, space, and colour.

Artist statement

Korea bears a painful history marked by aggression and massacres. It has had to struggle for a long time to overcome a bloody past in which countless innocent lives were sacrificed and language, culture, and identity were suppressed. Those who survived remain haunted by memories of ceaseless suffering. Even today, cruel realities that no one desires are unfolding all around us. This sphere, shaped like a black flower, symbolizes lives rendered powerless amidst violent upheaval; its carved patterns and glass covering represent the blood and tears of the countless innocent victims claimed by the horrors of war.

Artist statement

Nothing changes. Kata Tjuta has stood tall in Australia’s ‘dead heart’ for 500 million years, and virtually unchanged throughout the course of human existence.

Everything changes. The crepuscular rays and clouds soften the face of Kata Tjuta, a constrast to the harsh light of the baking outback sun, or a glowing ironstone sunset.

Cloud and rain are rare visitors to Central Australia in winter. Photographing Kata Tjuta beneath a sky alive with passing weather felt like witnessing a conversation between deep time and a fleeting moment. Often termed the ‘dead heart’ of Australia, the Central Desert feels alive in a way a city isn’t. The panorama format draws on the tradition of Australian landscape photography to capture the ever changing face and vast scale of the country.

Artist statement

The Pama is searching for Country gathering and hunting as he's moving through. He's hitting the drums to sing the animals to him. My Uncle told me this story. It's important to know cultural stories so I can pass it on to my four children and grandchildren.

I created this mono print in Speewah, North QLD. I have been making new works with Master Printmaker Theo Tremblay. I received the Than Coupie Bursary this year to make art and rebuild my career. As a young woman I was part of the Lockhart River Art Gang, I now have more time as my kids are all grown up.

Artist statement

Parrotician is a politician who recite the rhetoric of the Party. They have had to leave their committments promises and follow the Party's agendas. The work is from real world politician who have shated this with me.

Artist statement

This work reflects memories from my time working as a stockman on a station near Georgetown in Far North Queensland. On our days off, we would often go fishing or hunting for magpie geese and plain turkey. After returning to the outstation, we would clean up and prepare the plain turkey for the camp cook.

The bird was cooked in a camp oven over the fire, and when it was ready, it tasted like bush Kentucky Fried Chicken—only better. Through this painting, I share a memory of station life, hunting, cooking, and the simple pleasures of food prepared on Country.

Artist statement

Emerging through sustained dialogue, field inquiry and iterative studio exchange, Relic of Care considers making as an act of reciprocity, reflection and human connection. Working across saggar-fired porcelain and eco-dyed cloth, the artists combine foraged botanicals, domestic residues and found materials to explore how care is embedded in everyday rituals and creative practice.

The saggar-fired bowl, formed from a compressed slab slumped over a domestic mixing bowl, embraces imperfection, allowing its edges to shift and settle organically. Through heat, pressure, time and attentive placement, materials become active participants, leaving traces of absorption, resistance and transformation.

Together, the bowl and cloth become symbols of gathering, holding, protecting and offering. Material processes record memories of touch, labour and care, where human memory meets material memory. Positioned between domestic and creative life, the work asks: where does the impulse to care originate, and what remains as its relic?

*Cloth fits inside bowl for transport- installation height may reduce/increase.

Artist statement

"Second Spring (Ver.6.1)” is part of “ Second Spring” – a powerful and uplifting body of work redefining how Western society views menopause. Rejecting the limiting symbolism that is so often attached to ageing women in Western culture, de Jager draws inspiration from traditional Chinese medicine, where menopause is understood as a “second spring”, a period of renewal, wisdom and concentrated power.

Through a printmaking process in which etching plates are cut apart and reconfigured into new compositions, her works reflect the fragmentation and transformation of this life stage. "Second Spring (Ver.6.1)” is the 6th version of the original printing plates being cut and then printed together again to create a new composition. Figures depicted from behind become universal representations of womanhood, inviting viewers to see their own experiences reflected. 

Second Spring is both deeply personal and collectively resonant, celebrating menopause as an evolution to a higher state.

Artist statement

Since I became interested in the work of Samuel Palmer and the Ancients in the mid 80’s I have made many works that pay homage to their interest in landscape and its quiet numinous presence. I am continually challenged and inspired by it in the work I make.

This pen, ink and watercolour started out as a simple cloud over sea study of the Cumberland Islands (that have often been the subject of my work) but as I continued to draw, the clouds became more ribbon like reminding me of some complex overlaid jet streams I once observed floating high above me on a windless day. As I worked and developed the sky with it’s intersecting ribbons of lines upon the initial watercolour, I played music about flying into the unknown; Joni Mitchells, “Amelia” and Leonard Cohen’s “Masters Song” came to mind.

Artist statement

'The Distance Water Holds' depicts a flooded causeway, the threshold to my property and a temporary boundary between arrival and return. Rendered in blue ink, the work explores the quiet tension between connection and separation as rising water creates distance, slows movement and invites observation. While flooding can be disruptive, it is also a natural and necessary force within the Australian rural landscape. The water acts as both barrier and cleanser, reshaping the land, restoring balance and sustaining the environment. Rather than representing disruption alone, the flooded crossing becomes a moment within a larger cycle of renewal, reflecting the enduring rhythm of rural life. Through the flow of water, the work considers the transformative relationship between landscape and natural forces, and the distance that water can simultaneously create, hold and ultimately dissolve.

Artist statement

I have been reimagining life as a journey through landscape, using coloured clay strips and applied repetitive texture to immerse the viewer in a visual journey.

There are rough and smooth patches, mountains to climb, rivers to cross, vegetation to sit with, and paths to follow.

I live in the shadow of Manjal Dimbi. In Kuku Yalanji that means “mountain holding back”. Its protective presence visually, and physically, dominates the landscape.

And the prolonged cloud cover leaves me feeling fatigued and restless.

But occasionally, the clouds clear, the mountain is revealed and the world is awash with light.

I am chasing that sunlight. And that feeling of wonder when my mood uplifts and everything, just seems to be, so much better.

On a day, like this.
Of late, too few.
When the sun lights up.
And the sky’s clear blue
I find, the light.
And sit, with it.
Remember this.
Remember it.

Artist statement

This painting captures the quiet freedom that is associated with travelling late at night. From behind the wheel, the familiar world fades into darkness, leaving only the road, the hum of the vehicle, and a sense of peaceful solitude. These moments hold a deep personal connection for me, offering space to reflect, escape, and simply exist.

The experience also reflects a distinctly Australian relationship with travel, where long road trips connect cities, coastlines, and communities across vast distances. For many Australians, the open road represents adventure and independence. Through this painting, I celebrate the calm and freedom found between destinations.

Seth Green is an emerging Brisbane based artist, aged 19 he explores contemporary themes of self in relation with our surrounding world. Currently studying Industrial Design at the Queensland University of Technology, he aspires to establish a career within Australia’s creative industries, building on his previous achievements.

Artist statement

Tigers on Turbot St draws on the Queensland history of the Higgins Menagerie and its spectacular display of animals at the corner of Turbot and George Streets in Meanjin/Brisbane from 1887-1889. Tigers, a Russian bear, a panther, leopard, dingoes, monkeys and exotic snakes became part of the city’s public spectacle.

The work brings this history into dialogue with my region, Logan. A hand-painted 3D-printed flying mouse references Logan resident Isaac Nash, who donated ‘a flying mouse’ (an assumed sugar glider) to the menagerie, connecting Logan and Meanjin/Brisbane through the movement of people, animals and narratives.

At the centre, a hand-coloured lithograph brings tigers, rodents and snakes together in an imagined Queensland menagerie, installed against bespoke Python Parade wallpaper.

Drawing on my ongoing interest in natural history, human-animal relationships and local storytelling, the installation examines how animals are classified, exhibited and transformed through narrative, blurring the boundaries between specimen and spectacle.

Artist statement

Stitching and collaging onto painted canvas is how I bring together the threads of memory, landscape and connection that run through my work. Growing up in Western Queensland gave me a deep, enduring bond with the bush, one inseparable from family and memory. I have been fortunate to pass this onto my children, especially my son, who now leads me back. His expeditions demand resilience and courage, offering rare chances to meet the Australian landscape in its rawest form. Sleeping in a swag beneath the stillness of the night sky gives me space to reflect on how time loses meaning on trips like this, and how this vast country has shaped my identity and belonging. Coming from a family of makers, I find that the physical process of layering and stitching mirrors the way I piece these thoughts together. My work attempts to hold this inheritance: land, memory and lineage, stitched into one surface.

Artist statement

You with your stoic gaze weathering whatever life throws your way.
Now you find yourself here just existing, surviving in your Jurassic world you have just created for yourself.
Are you just an imamate object ? Do you think?
Do you feel?
Off course this is subjective!
Time is not your enemy!
Growing just 4cm a year you tower above me can I ask you please?
Would you walk this world with me?

Artist statement

After moving from Cairns to Ipswich, I wasn’t sure how to draw inspiration from my new environment. Blending new local clay with the clay previously worked with, I pushed the boundaries of a form I was used to making to collapse, holding it in my hand to reform it back together again. The displacement I feel changes my perspective and experimenting begins the journey of something new.

Layers of colour and texture are applied as I reflect of where I have been and where I am now. How can I capture what I see as I focus on what is in front of me now. This is a tactile work to be held in your hands for exploration or position on the different the surfaces so the light can catch the different angles. A tribute to my journey and the changing landscape as I embrace where I now live.