Positioning themselves within the frame, these artists craft memories and autobiographical narratives to explore truth, identity, culture, ancestry, and politics. Through deeply personal cultural and familial histories, the works reflect on lived experience while highlighting the ongoing impacts of Australia’s colonial past on First Nations peoples. Featured artists include Hayley Millar Baker, Michael Cook, Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis, Damien Shen, Dr Christian Thompson AO, and Keemon Willams.

MARS presents Chun Yin Rainbow Chan’s inaugural exhibition, Continuum. Continuum brings together a selection of works that reimagine the bridal laments of Hong Kong’s 圍頭/Weitou women, to whom Chan has deep ancestral ties. Through silk paintings, experimental calligraphy and audiovisual works, she translates these culturally endangered songs into contemporary forms that preserve their subversive feminist voices while reflecting on loss, resilience and solidarity.

We all have an instinct to seek guidance and ask questions of the future, especially during periods of uncertainty. Throughout history, people have looked upward, outward, and inward for signs of what lies ahead. A GREAT AND WONDROUS SIGN inhabits that same space of questioning. Searching for answers and holding tension between hope and apprehension, faith and doubt. This is mirrored in materiality, combining the longevity and certainty of [...]

“The worlds are busy and carefully laid out, take a look around,” shares David Booth about the works in his latest exhibition Rearranging the Universe. Extending on his practice of world building, Booth has created a library of stamps which reshape, move and rearrange with each print and reconfiguration. About this new body of work, he shares: “I’ve been building a new practice of play and experimentation in the studio; [...]

Kerry McInnis has been painting and drawing the River for many decades. The focus of her renditions of a waterway, wet or dry, has always been to represent the interconnectedness between the river and the earth that shapes it – to investigate the rhythms of liquid and solid form, to layer in paint the inconstancy of the river in both its power and vulnerability. Moving away from [...]

Barbara Dawson’s work is a contemplation of senescence — ageing seen not as decline, but as a layered experience shaped by growth, memory, and renewal. Using the life cycles of plants as metaphor, she explores the human journey: its fragility, quiet strength, and continual transformation. These works trace the parallel landscapes of inner and outer worlds, finding beauty in both blossoming and fading, in change, endurance, and [...]

Artists from throughout Australia bring a lens on the concept of ‘earth’: our home, the environment, soil, land, fragility, strength or purpose; the need for its safe keeping and preservation, inclusive of all that lives within. This open exhibition has invited works to provoke awareness, dialogue, political activism, experimentation, thoughtfulness, playfulness, or deep contemplation.

In Abstract Connotations, Hincksman explores human nature and our interactions with the natural environment., in the face of rapid changes due to the advancement of technology and social change. Hicksman’s practice allows the simplicity of everyday thoughts and experiences to inspire the paintings. The process can be quite dynamic between contemplation and the use of colour, form and tone, along with the fluidity of paint with various forms [...]

Focussing on line rather than tone, this exhibition features drawings on paper in a variety of media including pencil, crayons, ink, and watercolour. These are not necessarily drawings of things; they are abstract works but may evoke subjects. As clay dries, it hardens, and each stage creates a different engagement with the drawing process. Roper says, “Line drawing has been much on my mind of late as [...]

Skin after Successive Skin is born of a story of feminine transformation, rebirth and embodiment; a story that led Elle Wickens to imagine how they felt language of the body can be recorded through material, how sensation can paint, and how painting itself speaks of, from and to the body. In this exhibition, Wickens creates an environment that echoes her own sensory tones, a space where interpretation is embodied, co-produced, [...]

Jenny Topfer makes paintings that operate in a world of whispers and patient disclosure. Their communicative intent is held — undemonstrative. Such discretion remains rare but for Topfer, consideration and judgement have quietly accumulated over a long arc of time. There is simultaneously much more and much less at stake in these recent paintings. Made on either side of calamitous fires in Tasmania, fire that took many of [...]

Alcaston Gallery presents a significant private collection of paintings from 2003-2007 by the esteemed Tiwi artist Timothy Cook. This collection of historical significance and provenance exemplifies a moment in time when the collector focused on the emerging artist and his career development at Jilamara Arts and Crafts in Milikapiti on Melville Island, north of Darwin in the Arafura Sea. Timothy Cook’s art practice is now celebrated worldwide [...]