From the 13 May – 2 June, 2023 QRAA Art For Life Award Winner, Lincoln Austin, exhibits a video projection artwork that displays a spectacle of modular forms, tessellating patterns and interlocking structures onto the Judith Façade. This projection coincides with Lincoln’s solo exhibition at the Judith Wright Art Centre foyer titled, I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing.

Lincoln Austin’s artworks reveal systems of making and codes of construction. Artworks are open invitations to experience relational sensorial fields of abstract colour and form and perceptively co-construct them – playfully following the logic of design, meeting material limits, and imagining infinite recurrent possibilities. From intricate miniature assemblages to expansive installations to integrated architectural expressions, Austin’s works play across scales and materials, energising space, light, and time.

In a creative contract with the viewer, Austin offers building blocks for perceptual experience, providing a common platform to meet, share and exchange, as well as allowing for myriad points of departure, where we can feel individual difference and singular perspective. There is a lot of joy and sensorial pleasure in these skillfully crafted immersive and speculative architectures.

Artworks escape their own frames while working to frame, contain and then release the viewing experience. Performance and poetry are intrinsic dimensions at play. In this immediacy, the works can softly connect to inner emotional states, enfolding the viewer, echoing the structural complexities of our own making, growing, adapting and senescing throughout our lives’ journeys. Experiences of struggle and resolution, vulnerability and strength, openness and protection, become apparent. Though working within a systemic logic and a disciplined truth to material, Austin’s works release rather than define the possibilities of form, expressing an intense optimism.

Based in south-east Queensland, Lincoln Austin has exhibited nationally and internationally, receiving numerous grants and prizes, and participating in forums, workshops, residencies, artist talks, cultural exchanges, university teaching, and mentorships. In 2021, a 20-year survey exhibition, Lincoln Austin: The Space Between Us, was curated for Ipswich Art Gallery by Samantha Littley, Curator, Australian Art, QAGOMA. Austin has produced 18 large-scale public projects and has been awarded two prizes for Art and Architecture by the Australian Institute of Architects. Austin’s works are held in many public and private collections, including Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

Artist biography written by Beth Jackson (2022).

2023 QRAA First Nations Art Award Winner, Clare Jaque Vasquez, showcases a striking textural projection work that conceptually weaves her heritage and personal narratives together. The facade artwork accompanies Clare’s solo exhibition Fibres and Vessels at the Judith Wright Art Centre.

Clare Jaque Vasquez is an emerging Aboriginal artist from Gomeroi/Kamilaroi nation. Clare grew up in both an urban environment in her younger years and then on her Grandmother’s Country in north west New South Wales in a small country town near the mission and station where her family lived. Clare’s art gently showcases unique memories and moments from being raised with three generations of Gomeroi/ Kamilaroi women under the one roof navigating the aftereffects of change.

Clare’s works capture stories and weaving practices in a raised textural form leveraging natural and contemporary art tools to apply texture. These tools include different natural brushes, fingertips, branches and sticks through to natural self-made art tools. Clare gently works in layers through a unique practice to apply acrylic paint and impasto textural mediums to create three dimensional fibres of paint. These appear to be etched, embedded and scarred onto the canvas.

2023 QRAA Digital Art Award Winner, Fiona Harding, exhibits an iteration of Night Body onto the Judith Façade from the 24 June – 21 July 2024.

Fiona’s work, titled Night Body Blooms, is a large scale projection collage comprised of watercolour paintings, photographs, neon line work, and a repeated self-portrait from the artist’s previous work, Night Body. Taking swatches from the natural world, the vivid, futuristic colourscape incorporates, the magenta of the hibiscus, the glow of the moon, and the neon green of the Mycena chlorophos mushroom, only visible at night. Night Body Blooms continues Fiona’s ongoing celebration of nature and her fascination for the expansive frontiers of the universe.

2023 QRAA Digital Art Award Finalist, Donna Davis, exhibited onto the Judith Façade from the 24 June – 21 July 2024.

Donna Davis is a multi-disciplinary artist who examines human and non-human relationships with respect to ecological health. Exploring the intersections between art and science, Donna’s work is often embedded within ecological research projects. Donna’s practice explores stories that examine science through a creative lens; examining imagined futures and constructing new ways of ‘seeing’ complex natural systems and our role within them.

2023 QRAA Environmental Art Award Winner, Michelle Le Plastrier, exhibits onto the Judith Façade from 22 July 2024.

Michelle Le Plastrier is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on hand built ceramics exploring identity, socio-political and environmental issues all in her signature candy coloured style.

Michelle teaches introductory ceramics across South-East Queensland. She has completed residencies, produced workshops and exhibited across Australia for businesses, galleries and councils such as Gold Coast Arts and Culture, Level Up Studio + Gallery, Pacific Fair, HOTA, Side Gallery and Honey Bones Gallery.

She recently won the Environmental Art Award at the Queensland Regional Art Awards and was a finalist in the 2022 North QLD Ceramic Awards at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery. Her recent body of work Dopamine Days is on exhibit at Home of the Arts on the Gold Coast until April 2024. Michelle graduated from a Bachelor of Visual Media from the Queensland College of Art. Michelle was an artist-in-residence through HOTA’s inaugural ArtKeeper program in 2021-22.

Georgie Pinn is an interactive creative technologist who makes large-scale multi-sensory art experiences in public space using projection mapping and interactive generative animation. Her creative process is driven by a long term research into how immersive tech and intimate storytelling can be used to connect people, dissolving prejudice, bias and fear through empathy. She has over two decades of experience working as an audiovisual content creator, developing ideas for festivals, cultural institutions, AR and VR experiences, music videos and sets for theater and fashion.

Georgie explores new creative forms of expression by triggering electronic sound and real-time animation with motion capture gestural devices, experimenting creatively in the physical space, the augmented dimension and the virtual world. The audience can embed themselves into her artwork, their movement and imagery manifesting audiovisual layers in real time and blurring the line between artist and audience.

Her artwork has been presented internationally at venues such as the Barbican in London, Drive in Berlin,ISEA in S. Africa, the Powerhouse in Sydney and a lead commission at the recent Music and Arts Festival, Now or Never in Melbourne and Brisbane Festival. She won an honorary mention at the world’s biggest art and technology festival,’ Ars Electronica’ in Austria and picked up the ‘Best Interactive Experience award” at the prestigious Sheffield documentary festival in the UK in 2020.

Georgie’s work is intimate, she is personalizing and personifying technology, giving it a story, harnessing emotional intelligence and inviting the audience to express and connect. Her interactive audiovisual systems also feature in the public education sector, where she facilitates all ages workshops at major international and national festivals such as Melbourne Knowledge Week, The World Science Festival, Robotronica and the Albany in London.

Originating from the Gold Coast, Nikolas Kiriakos is a Meanjin-based digital artist whose work explores the sensorial living magic of the natural world. In his generative video Mutualisms (2024), Kiriakos digitally transfigures native Water Ferns (Azolla Filiculoides) found near the Nerang River into undulating patterns that gently oscillate and flow in hues of light to deep blue.

In contrast, radiant silhouettes of native Rosellas glow softly as they weave through the ever-changing composition. This work is a poetic response to the notion of listening to the environment. This practice is also described as deep listening in First Nations philosophy and is aquiet and respectful engagement with the rhythms of the natural world.

Through Mutualisms, Kiriakos explores the symbiotic dance between local Rosellas and the river ecosystem. By engaging deeply with his craft, he attempts to visually manifest the intricate, unseen relationships that sustain life as an elemental animation.

Raised in Far North Queensland and now studying Visual Arts at QUT, emerging multimedia artist Kelsey Woods explores the intricate relationship between healthcare and the female body, describing her investigation as the Medicalised Feminine. In the slow-moving, intimate video Residual (2024), collected objects serve as visual metaphors, delicately drawing from experiences of disability and chronic illness.

Fluid, transparent shades of dye within opaque liquid creates a nuanced and moving composition. This video reflects the clinical experiences of post-surgical patients, with objects such as fingers, an ID wristband, empty medication packets, and non-slip socks hidden in an alluring, sumptuous, opaque vision.

Through a game of conceal and reveal Residual quietly critiques the systemic and gendered neglect in the medical industry, underscoring the insufficient research that has long shadowed women’s health. The work subtly weaves together broader dynamics of identity, health, and socio-political structures through a feminist lens.

Moreton Bay based multimedia artist Lauren Edmonds creates work as social commentary encouraging conversation and contemplation regarding everyday experience. Their new work, Rising Crises (2024), is born from a larger hand-drawn animated project titled Dark Forebodings (2023-24).

Rising Crises (2024) is a 2D graphically illustrated animation depicting slow-moving panels of blue, an empty bottle, a TV, a burning match and a band-aid. Together these elements are composed into an evolving scene that alludes to a pervasive sense of unease, one, the artist suggests, is a reflection of living in this, the era of compound crisis.

The blue becomes rising water – the rising strain of everyday pressures related to flooding, climate crisis and cost of living. The work is a playful, pastel-coloured comic style image inviting viewers to find shared experiences and mutual understanding in the face of the challenges of the everyday.

Based in Ipswich, mixed media artist Kylie Stevens works in direct response to her local rivers, in this work looking at flooding and climate change of South East Queensland using maps and river water.

This image is taken from a series that addresses the misconception of the ‘one in 200 years flood scale’, exploring the impact of a 10-meter flood on Maiwar (Brisbane River) and Urarra (Bremmer River) floodplains. As climate change intensifies, the frequency of such extreme events increases, requiring us to prepare for bigger floods, more often.

The original work was made using flood waters, natural ochres, acrylic, copperleaf and charcoal on canvas. Now as a large-scale illuminated image Kylie aims to illustrate the potential damage and urgent need for adaptive strategies around this frightening reality.