Welcoming Eve Mathies to the Practice Studio Gallery in April. Eve is a second year fine arts student at QUT with an emerging focus on textiles within her creative practice. Returning often to themes surrounding the feminine experience, fabric manipulation and embroidery become potent and layered modes of communication in her work.

Eve will be exhibiting and working in our gallery space from April 10-21, with her residency culminating in a closing event on Friday, April 19 from 5-8pm.

In much the same way as fashion can be read a collage of references to moments past and present, local artist Caro Toledo enjoys playfully combining disparate elements to create new narratives. Toledo’s works are both personal and universal in nature and you may be able to find yourself somewhere in the middle of any one of them. Join us for an intimate opening event on Friday December 1 from 5-7pm or pop in during the week to browse this latest body of work.

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Art making comes to me in waves, the tides of which are unpredictable, Life and all that. 

Whilst making the works for Soul Elevator, feelings of  curiosity and happiness 

prevailed. I was imagining thoughts and what their physicality might be, they could be a little like these works: loose and seemingly still taking shape, buoyed by the tunes facilitating my mind’s meanderings. Like thoughts, the works are layered, one thing triggering another, another playing off something else. Nothing was ruled out, and that creative freedom was incredibly gratifying, and… elevating.

Collage allows me to transform words and visuals, to extract a new meaning of my doing. I enjoy displacing things, turning them about, cutting up the words of others and tell my own stories. Mind you, I don’t spell things out, no. There’s space for a little mystery, a game of sort. In a way, it’s a collaboration: I do some of the work, you’ll do the rest. And that’s a little magic, don’t you think?

In October we welcome Emily Ebbs to the Practice Studio gallery space.

Emily Ebbs is based and practising on Gadigal land. Her process based work evokes the emotional residue of memories. She focuses on the idea of the stain. The stain shows signs of something marked or discoloured that is difficult to remove where she finds it is closely linked to the idea of past events that shaped us emotionally. Emily is a finalist of the Mosman Art Prize for 2023. She also recently won the Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olly Art Centre Nancy Fairfax (AIR) award, 2022. Ebbs also won the Prix Yves Hernot painting award, 2022. 

This body of work is a more playful series that explores the simple nostalgic moments of walking home on a sunny day and letting your hand graze along the ornate iron fences. Emily has used her usual stain technique but added a more figurative element of the cast iron fences.