Arini Byng makes body-based work. Born on Gadigal land, she is a multidisciplinary artist of Black American and Anglo-Celtic descent. Trained as a photographer, Byng’s work comprises video, performance, photography, sculpture, painting and installation. Byng works with the affective qualities of materials, gestures and settings; undertaking exercises in image, movement and form to negotiate political scenes.

Byng’s videos and performances are complex, intimate studies in gesture and action. Her practice endeavours to illustrate a haptic or tactile phenomenology of the body as it encounters the physical world. In her work to date, Byng has used the body in motion as a means of unpacking familial ties and histories; physical intimacy between friends; the interrelation of performance and the screen; the potential generated by structural collapse and our means of experiencing and holding space in the world.

Her work has been presented nationally including Blak Dot Gallery, Gertrude Glasshouse, Darren Knight Gallery, CAVES, FUTURES, The Centre for Contemporary Photography, TCB, Bus Projects, Neon Parc Project Space, Margaret Lawrence Gallery and Blindside. Selected works have been published by Perimeter Editions, Higher Arc, Le Roy and Photofile; with work held in the publication collections of V&A, MoMA, MOCA and Tate Modern.

Arini lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne) on the unceded sovereign lands and waterways of the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung (Wurundjeri) people of the Kulin Nation.

Caeylen Fenelon-Norris (b. 1995) is an artist currently living and working in Narrm/Melbourne.

Caeylen’s multidisciplinary practice explores the ideas and concepts of material and object-related performance. Looking deeper to how certain moments can react and collide together in complete harmony, regardless of the individual properties of each object. Through the process of painting and sculpture, these narratives and complexities are presented. The objects produced are a meditation on the progressively blurred line between the digital, physical, and imagined.

Drawing on pre-existing sources, collaging images in disparate ways, the works explore the repercussions of recontextualizing. Signs and symbols in mass culture are questioned as meanings are rewritten.

Caeylen received a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) from Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne (2019) and is currently working to complete his honours at VCA (2022).

Recent exhibitions include Wardens, WG Gallery, Sydney (2022), Elephant in the Room, EMP Gallery, Melbourne, (2021), MaterialiZm, Missing Persons, Melbourne (2021), For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning, MEJIA, Melbourne (2022), David is Dead, DAVID, Melbourne, (2019).

Matlok Griffiths (b. 1983 in Perth,) employs a wide-range of materials and media across his practice, including painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking.

Selected solo and group exhibitions include,  The Natural Years, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney (2022), The Colour of Time (Spring), ReadingRoom at Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne (2022), Hole of Mirrors, ReadingRoom, Melborne (2018), hold tight to your silence and wait, ReadingRoom, Melbourne (2018), Norminal, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney (2017), Drawing and Double A-Side, Darren Knight Gallery (2017), Buffoon Seeks Pleasure, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney (2016), Group Show – Second Iteration, Arts Project, Melbourne (2016), Export Quality Paintings, NKN Gallery, Melbourne (2015), New Thoughts on Luxury, Blockprojects, Melbourne (2013) and Out of Touch, Chapter House Lane, Melbourne (2013).

A suite of 44 monotypes, Mumbles & Clunks (2018), was recently acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria Collection, Melbourne (2021).

Three publications document his practice, Mumbles & Clunks, Co-published by Darren Knight Gallery and ReadingRoom (2019), Buffoon Seeks Pleasure, Darren Knight Gallery, Australia (2016) and Comfort Room Forms, PubPublishing, Australia (2015).

Sammy Harkham (b. 1980 in Los Angeles) is an award-winning cartoonist and editor, born and raised in Los Angeles. He created the ongoing comics anthology Kramers Ergot, considered to be one of the most influential publications of its kind in the twenty-first century. His first collection of short comics stories, Everything Together, won the Los Angeles Book Prize for “Graphic Novel of the Year” in 2012. His work has been published in Best American Comics, The New York Times, Vice, and McSweeney’s among many other publications. His Graphic Novel, Blood of the Virgin, will be published next year.

Ruth Howard (b. 1968, Melbourne) is a multi-disciplinary artist working in small scale in the mediums of painting and ceramics. Howard’s minimalist paintings often portray a single object on a flat plane, while her sculptures depict wild animals or organic matter in abstract form – from amphibians to insects, elephants and porcupines. Her dedication to this theme has enabled her to refine her idiosyncratic, bold style to quirky levels of elegance and beauty.

   
 
Her ceramic creatures and sculptures appear as if newly formed directly from the earth or sea. The detailed surface texture and glaze combination further add to the dynamic nature of these works.

   
 
Ruth Howard has worked in the Arts Project studio since 1998 and held her first solo show at Arts Project Australia in 2015. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Spring 1883, The Establishment, Sydney; Turning the Page, Gallery 101, Ontario; Hybrid Making – new work from Australia, Canada and Scotland, Project Ability Gallery, Scotland; and Face-Up, Idiom Studio, Wellington.

Emma Phillips (b. 1989, Sorrento) received a BA from RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia (2010) and an MFA from Hartford Art School, Hartford, Connecticut, USA (2017).

   
 
Revealing a slightly skewed, soft and feminine gaze in her subjects of young women and men, as well as the domestic and interior spaces they engage with, the photographs made by Emma present as traditional, documentary-style recordings.

   
 
From this position within the documentary canon the photographs — largely quotidian moments under the guise of the snapshot — continually turn inward and look at themselves, exposing a grander curiosity about collapsing and expanding ideas around seeing.

Jim Roche (b. 1989 Gold Coast, Queensland) is a Naarm / Melbourne based artist, working predominantly in painting and sculpture.

   
 
Recent solo exhibitions include Smile, Savage Garden, Melbourne (2022) and Scrambler, Cathedral Cabinet (2022). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Daine Singer Gallery, Melbourne; Haydens Gallery, Melbourne and Melbourne’s Living Museum of The West.

   
 
Roche’s works have appeared in Russh Magazine, Teeth Magazine and he has contributed artworks for Hoddle Skateboard company. Roche was commissioned by the University of Melbourne to create new work for the 757 Art Project (2019).

Sue Tompkins’ (b. 1971, Leighton Buzzard, United Kingdom) practice is lead by an enquiry into language and personal expression, through the spoken, sung, and written word. Over several years this has incorporated text, sound, installation and live performance.

 
 
Addressing language in visual and spatial terms Tompkins works with the fragments of words, phrases and lyrics gathered from everyday encounters and experiences. By an almost rhythmical accumulation of words – ordered, interrupted and repeated – Tompkins allows us to experience the flow of language in state of flux – both open ended and closed – paused, re-mixed and undone.

   
 
Tompkins has been involved in exhibitions and performances worldwide. Selected solo exhibitions include Diana Stitger, Amsterdam; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Inverleith House, Edinburgh; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis and West London Projects, London. She has presented performances and been included in numerous group exhibitions including those at Bregenzer Kunstverein, Bregenz; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; the 29th São Paolo Biennale, São Paolo; Hayward Gallery, London, ICA Whitechapel and Tate Modern, London; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt and Artists Space, New York.


   
 
Tompkins produced the web-based project, ‘My Kind Book’ with Dia Art Foundation, New York and received the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2011.

     
Sue is represented by The Modern Institute, Glasglow.