VIEW HERE THE AMAZING ARTISTS FROM IWAF 2023
GRACE BAILEY
Grace is an artist and educator based in Geelong in Victoria, Australia, with a focus on producing large scale works in both acrylic and oil, often working live as part of public events. Her work is full of energy and life using paint and line to suggest inner thoughts and emotions. The bigger picture is the exploration of spiritual aspects where the seen world intersects with the unseen world.
Since 2013, she has been involved in many cultural conferences internationally where she has painted live so the audience can see the images taking shape in real time.
In 2017, she published her first book and has been creating online art courses since 2020. She was a finalist in the Shirley Hannan National Portrait Award and the Tatiara Art Prize (Winner of People’s Choice) as well as within Art Battles in Hobart and South Melbourne as well as artist-in-residence in Cairns, Sydney and Ballarat.
2023 has seen her exhibit in a solo showing, five combined exhibitions, and paint overseas in multiple countries including the United States, Singapore and New Zealand.
CHALIE MACRAE
Chalie MacRae is an Australian contemporary abstract artist based in Yarraville, Victoria. A born and bred Melburnian of Scottish-Italian descent, she developed what would become a long-term love for art after travelling abroad as a young adult. However, it wasn't until after working as an intelligence analyst for some years that Chalie began painting. Her paintings are created to evoke a sense of calm or connection to nature. They are loved by her clients for both the relaxing quality they bring to their homes and recognisable unique brushstrokes which add a sense of movement and energy. Chalie works with acrylics and oils and gravitates towards a palette that is nature inspired. She immerses herself in her studio for days at a time where she allows influences from nature, travel and music to intertwine, create something that did not exist before and bring each work slowly to life. Her paintings have been shown in numerous group exhibitions and her works are held by private collectors domestically and internationally. As well as featured in several magazines, notably Home Beautiful (2022, 2018), Home Beautiful, Hamptons Homes (2022), and Inside Out (2020).
@chaliemacrae_art
JOHN TRIFONOPOULOS
“Remember when you were young, and realised how different the same thing looked just by covering one eye, and then the other? This is photography for me. I create unique visuals by favouring the uncommon view and looking for the inconspicuous excitement in our everyday environment.
I’m John Trif, a photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. I have been looking at the world through a camera lens for the last two decades, starting out in the advertising industry specialising in print production and managing large scale campaign shoots. However in the last 10 years, I wanted to look at the world through my own camera lens, and haven’t stopped shooting since.
For me, my photography doesn’t end after the button is pushed. My extensive appreciation for the craft means I am meticulous about the final product. I always shoot with the intent of printing my images, to produce a tangible and personal experience for the viewer, even if that viewer is just me.”
DEANNE ECCLES
In 2005 Deanne moved her studies in Venice studying Goethe’s Theory of Colour and Theories of Colour and Perception Goetheanum in Dornarch, Switzerland. She lived in Istanbul, Turkey. Then moved to Andalusia, Spain - painting in watercolour and oils, as well practising and being a student in movement and colour. She also practised Butoh dance and Flamenco dance. These experiences have greatly influenced her as an abstract colourist painter.
Since moving back to Australia in 2008, Deanne took up residence in the Yarra Valley where she now lives with her husband Toby and their two boys on a 20 acre property in the heart of a mountain ash forest in the Yarra Valley.
OLGA DZIEMIDOWICZ
Olga Dziemidowicz is a Polish-born visual artist currently based in Melbourne.
She works predominantly in painting mediums and has a background in Architecture & Urban Planning, experience in corporate innovation and has recently obtained a Graduate Certificate degree from the Victorian College of the Arts.
She is a full-time artist creating from her studio in St. Kilda and actively exhibiting her works.
CARMEL COSGROVE
Carmel is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong peoples. She studied Bachelor of Arts, Visual Arts (Honours) achieving First Class Honours at RMIT. Carmel has been actively involved in the arts community, serving as a committee member at Trocadero Art Space.
Her artistic achievements include recently winning first prize in the Show Your West-Side Art Exhibition and Prize at the Connectivity Centre in Footscray. Additionally, she has been a finalist 3 times in the Gallipoli Art Prize in Sydney, a finalist in the Environmental Art and Design Prize at MGAM Sydney and a finalist in the John Leslie Art Prize.
Carmel has also been awarded the mixed media and photography/multi-media awards at Albert Park College and overall winner of Tattersalls Contemporary Art Prize Williamstown Festival at the Substation. Carmel has held several solo exhibitions showcasing her artwork at various venues such as Trocadero Art Space Footscray, Shifted in Richmond, Blue Oyster Artspace in Dunedin, Hobsons Bay City Council, Art in Public Places, and most recently at SOL gallery in Fitzroy.
She has participated in numerous group shows over the years including Exposure exhibition at Trocadero during The Big West Festival, SubUrban Art Project - Melbourne Fringe Festival, Hosier Lanes City Lights, Brunswick St Gallery and Air-Four Elements at the Creative Space Sydney.
Carmel’s artistic journey has taken her to central Australia’s Larapinta and the Flinders and Gammon Ranges with the Larapinta trail artists exhibiting at Sydney’s Defiance, Moree Plains Gallery, Shoalhaven City Arts Centre, Nowra, and Ewart Gallery Sydney.
Looking ahead, in April 2024 Carmel is scheduled to attend an Artist in Residence program at the Westcove Estate in Ireland, further enriching her artistic experiences and career.
Allison Taylor - Etal Ceramics
Allison is a small batch ceramicist specialising in hand built planters and functional wares with a focussed interest on developing glazes. Her style and talent are unquestionable and deserves a place in many homes and businesses.
Ani Ipradjian
Ani is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Inspired by the enthralling landscapes of nature and city themes, her work can only be described as unique. Best known for her asymmetrical style, Ani creates luscious textures, shapes and colour combinations that encapsulate Australia’s native flora, suburbs and outback landscapes. She describes her pieces as a true representation of her past, present and future. Having studied a Diploma of Art and Design, Graphic Design and Photography, her artwork feature’s a combination of acrylic painting and mixed media. Working predominately with soft pinks, calming blues and a warming mustard’s, Ani Ipradjian Art will liven up any room.
MICHAEL HAWKINS
Michael Hawkins is a New Zealand-born artist who lives in Melbourne.
His art practice can be split into two specific areas, limited edition works and original paintings. Both strains are interested in how meaning can be generated from the visual interaction that takes place between sign and signage -between the familiar and the unknown. Whether through common-place motifs such as a snake or a lump of wood or through more ambiguous imagery creation and juxtaposition.
Michael’s current works draw on sources such as ‘Where the Wild Things are’, Camping and Ghost stories (among other things) to evoke child-like wonder. These works aim to appear light and bright initially but with more sinister undertones that reveal themselves through further viewing, creating a juxtaposition between the malevolent and the naïve and nostalgic.
Michael graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from RMIT (Melbourne) in 2012. He has completed a selection of international Artist Residencies, and been a finalist in a number of Art Prizes, including the Parkin Drawing Prize. His works are held in various private collections in New Zealand, Australia, Europe and the United States.
TAMARA RUSSELL
Tamara is a Textile Artist specialising in free machine embroidery, hand stitching and mending. In her textile practice, she explores her surroundings interpreting what she sees in embroidery.
Her work has been exhibited in the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Australia. Tamara’s practice engages with the natural environment recreating images and shapes in her embroidered works in 2 and 3D form. In her work she is able to portray social issues including environment, climate change and the treatment of asylum seekers. Textiles are the perfect medium for expressing thoughts using hand and machine stitching.
Tamara works with found materials and finds joy in the unexpected uses that can be found for them. She loves this unpredictability and enjoys the inventiveness necessary to transform them. She uses materials that are reclaimed, things with a history that have been discarded and might otherwise end up in landfill.
In creating her Textile Kintsugi pieces Tamara uses the principles of Kintsugi, a Japanese repair method, as a process to recreate discarded ceramics. Using reclaimed textiles, many hand-dyed, to wrap broken pieces and reassemble them with stitch, enhancing the breaks. As with Kintsugi the aim is to celebrate the imperfections, recreating the ceramic to become more interesting for its irregularities giving the object a new lease of life that becomes more refined thanks to its ‘scars’.
DAVE BEHRENS
Dave commenced painting in acrylics in 2002 to explore the theme of identity. It’s a theme that investigates the identity of self predominately, yet he is drawn to the concept of exploring identity in a broader sense. He uses mark-making, pattern forming, and colour to express these ideas of identity. There’s an intention to use colours and associations to commit ideas to address this expression. The process of identity can be creative or destructive, yet his purpose is to be creative, using known concepts and mixing them with unique attributes to form positive outcomes.
He is influenced by ancient cultures, science fiction and popular culture and how these influences use ideas and elements to be identifiable. He has undertaken a journey of self-discovery through his art practice and from that journey, flows the expression of the energy of colour and movement in the form of his art. His intention is to draw the viewer in to explore his works and to interpret as they view it.
He has exhibited in Australia and the United States and his work is in private collections in Australia, New Zealand, The UK, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the United States and in corporate collections in Brisbane, Australia.
NADINE HOBSON
Nadine is a mixed media artist working producing abstract textured artworks on canvas.
Her pieces are emotive and immersive, drawing a connection between the natural environment and our inner emotions. Drawing inspiration from the forests of the Dandenong Ranges where she grew up and the coastal regions of our beautiful country, Nadine's work is influenced by natural elements, textures and colours.
MARCE KING
Marce is a portrait and figurative artist based in Australia.
In their work, Marce currently utilizes drawing and painting mediums, however, they are also passionate about printmaking, majoring in Lithography at University.
Marce's first Solo Exhibition was in 2006 at Brunswick Street Gallery in Melbourne, Victoria. Marce has gone on to have multiple solo shows in Melbourne, Sydney, New York, Bendigo and Ballarat and participated in many group shows in Australia, Europe and online.
Marce obtained a Bachelor of Visual Arts degree from Latrobe University, graduating with distinction and winning the graduate award at the end of their degree. The graduate award was a scholarship that allowed them to travel through Europe creating art and exploring the world for a number of years. This experience had a profound influence on their practice and cemented their love of art and their chosen subject matter of the human form.
A strong aspect of my current artwork is exploring the lives of the LGBTIQ+ people and related communities. I strive to express the experiences, lives, and the emotional aspect of their personal journeys. I am Transgender and nonbinary so my art also reflects my own personal experience. My work expresses and challenges gender, identity, belonging, and the social constructs around binary identification.
ANGELINA MIRABITO
Angelina Mirabito is a Melbourne-based artist. She works with the frequency of colour and emotion. Her work is raw, yet sophisticated. She’s self-taught. Her conventional training includes a PhD in the therapeutic value of creative writing. She has since discovered that by working with colour on canvas, she can say so much more with palette knives than through words.
She seeks to create on canvas an experience of connection with one’s inner life and feelings of inner beauty. Each painting begins with an emotion or confusion that is meditated on through painting with palette knives that cut through colour and limitation. She keeps painting until the inner obstacle is resolved and therefore transformed through colour on canvas. The painting is complete in that moment of recognition that the canvas now reflects what she finds impossible to explain.
Angelina cares deeply about expanding awareness on invisible disability, in ways that hopefully go on to empower people who struggle to navigate life alongside the effects of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. She believes that the presence of art has the power to make a positive difference and transform how one experiences public and private spaces.
YOLANDA SEVERI
Yolanda is a Melbourne born creative - Freelance Artist/Illustrator. Having spent the last 17 years as a Corporate Communications Manager, Yolanda then decided to pursue her passion for art and enrol in a Diploma of Visual Arts at Melbourne Polytechnic.
As a current student, Yolanda is focused on learning a broad range of mediums within area such as - Illustration, Drawing, Printmaking, Paint and Digital Art, as-well as experimenting across a range of subject matter.
Yolanda is strongly influenced by her Italian heritage, taking experiences from travelling abroad and her time spent along Coastal Victoria. Her current research is based on Modern European landscape and still life imagery.
Yolanda's freelancing business 'Yolsii Art' is based out of a small studio in Spotswood (The Old Milk bar), and is in the initial stages of development..
ROB MANCINI
Rob is a multi disciplinary art practitioner who has had an extensive career as an artist/illustrator and graphic designer, working for the general design and publishing industries, nationally and internationally. He has worked on numerous natural history projects and is deeply passionate about the conservation of shrinking habitats, particularly wetlands. Currently he has been working almost exclusively in the conservation and environmental communications sector. He has in the past and is currently active with local conservation groups.
Rob grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne and was always deeply fascinated with nature and wildlife, particularly birds and specifically wetland and migratory shorebirds. A lot of his time was spent exploring what nature could be found in and around the local suburbs, amongst industry and on the coast.
In his personal art Rob has attempted to represent at-risk local ecosystems and vital natural diversity is his works, drawing attention to the often overlooked wildlife within the urban, maritime and industrial landscapes. More than ever, the conservation message is the main aim of his work, along with the desire to give some insight into the magic of our local natural areas.
“We are deeply fortunate in the west to have some special local wetlands and coastal habitats which are utilised by a rich diversity of birdlife, organisms and plants. It is critical to preserve, conserve and hopefully enhance these critical ecosystems”.
Most of these works are from Rob’s 2018 exhibition, ’Here & There – a Journey with Shorebirds’ which had a science meets art focus. With these mixed media pieces, he has attempted to employ an ethos of sustainability, with many of the panels using salvaged plywood panels as a substrate.
LINDSAY DOUGLAS
Lindsay lives in the Western Suburbs of Melbourne finding it a rich source of inspiration, both as an architect and as an artist. He finds great satisfaction in running his architectural practice Dig Design and the opportunity it opens up for him to balance his interests in art, design and the built environment.
As an architect Lindsay has an in depth awareness of the role he plays in shaping suburban form, both as built environment professional and as member of his community.
With over 20 years in architecture, his love of putting pen to paper has never waned, and he continues to use this medium to capture and record his observations of the human influence and impact on the built form.
Through his artwork Lindsay is looking to promote discussion around good design and the suburban mediocrity … highlighting the beauty and the value of good design within our uniquely Australian suburban lives. Capturing moments from in and around Melbourne's Inner West.
Founding Dig Design in 2002, Lindsay has forged a very successful career in architecture. He is a fellow of the Australian Institute of Architects, former president of the Building Designers Association of Victoria (now Design Matters National) and former president of the National Association of Building Designers.
When not putting pen to paper for architecture or art, Lindsay can be found out on the golf course or practicing his golf swing.
FERN SIEBLER
Fern Siebler is an abstract artist based in Melbourne, Australia. She grew up in a small regional town in Victoria, where her passion for earth, the flow of nature and all things colour began.
Fern trained as a graphic designer (BA.Communication Design) and is a self-taught artist. Many aspects of her artworks draw from her formal design training - negative space, colour and balance. Fern's abstractions are best known to be layered and flowing, inspired by the fluidity and movement of the earth’s elements; water, air, fire and smoke.
"I am inspired by nature and also draw from my own personal experiences, allowing the emotions, memories, feelings to guide my intuitive painting process. My artworks across all mediums are expressive and full of movement. When I paint I pour my heart and soul into the artwork."
Fern's works have been seen on popular renovation shows, Channel Nine's The Block 2019, 2020 & 2021 and Channel Seven's House Rules 2020. In 2020 Fern collaborated with Australian skincare brand Ella Bache where her artwork 'Sierra' adorned the Christmas Gift packaging. Most recently Fern was commissioned to create several artworks for the luxury new Barangaroo hotel, Crown Sydney. Fern's works are collected in Australia and internationally.
WEST END ART SPACE
West End Art Space is a contemporary art gallery in West Melbourne, Australia. It was established in 2016 by Anna Prifti with the vision to exist as a commercial and community gallery belonging to the West End precinct. It is a women owned and led art gallery that showcases 70% women artists.
In addition to its dynamic full year exhibition program, WE curates the Biennial of women abstract artists of Victoria. WE present hardworking, collectable contemporary artists with a proven dedication to their arts career
SYYPHER
“My name is SYYPHER and I’m a super-flat, neon pop artist; currently working as a visual artist, freelance illustrator, mural artist and amature animator based in Melbourne, Naarm, Australia.
Through my art I explore a world of neon-coloured nostalgia by painting childhood memories with a twist, inspired by cartoons, comics, animated films and music, all while reconnecting with my inner child along the way.
I love being able to play with the meaning of a shot through adding neon elements to further tell a story, rather than having it be an animated sequence. This allows my audience to not only recognise and reconnect with these characters they love so much, but the neon elements also add another layer of storytelling and intrigue that can be personally explored by every person who views it.”
JACQUELYN STEPHENS
Jacquelyn Stephens is a Melbourne based artist who has been creating for over 25 years after completing a BFA in Fine Art Majoring in Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts. Over the years she has had several successful solo and group exhibitions in commercial galleries and artists run spaces. Her paintings can be seen in many media publications and are held in private collections worldwide and recently appeared on the popular TV renovation shows 'The Block' and ‘Healthy Homes Australia’. Many of the key themes in her work have been informed by her interest in water, science, nature, the environment and the domain of medicine (especially following a brush with death from a mysterious brain tumour in 1997, the cellular origin of which was never discovered).
Jacquelyn’s paintings explore a sublime of the small and celebrate the life forces and luminosity inherent in all things microscopic, sub-atomic and aquatic. Having grown up on the cliffs of Flinders, staring into the eye of Bass Strait, she is also deeply inspired by the life-giving waters of the sea and what inhabits them. Jacquelyn creates magical underwater fields of mysterious ethereal glowing forms inhabiting ambiguous dark-lit spaces. Jacquelyn is drawn to re-interpreting light and references the blurred light or ‘bokeh’ of photography, the dark-light of microscopic imagery, and all the image making documentary world of revealing life’s glow. Sea-life, nudibranchs, algae, bioluminescent organisms, miniscule cell growth, and more recently, man-made illumination, all these universes inspire and influence the pictorial spaces and inform her paintings.
The reference to light is also about creating a glow, an incandescence, a moment of illumination, something mysterious, magical and special amidst the obscure dark. A glimmer of hope in gloomy difficult times.
STEPHANIE PERRINS
Stephanie Perrins is an artist & designer living in Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula creating on Bunurong land. Stephanie has been creating and painting from the moment she could hold a brush, having painted her first still life painting at the age of four.
Stephanie is a multi-disciplinary creative with a degree in Graphic Design and a love for photography. However, spending all day in front of a computer screen simply doesn't completely satisfy her creative expression, and she always feels most free when getting her hands messy.
Stephanie aims to fill her life with creativity every day, and when she isn't designing or painting, she spend my days outside with her 2 little ones.
Steph believes in finding beauty in the everyday and is often inspired by her time spent with her family exploring the local coastline, or discovering beautiful new horizons on camping holidays.
Steph loves to paint with a range of mediums and depict various different subject matters, but all of her creations explore expressive texture and colour.
GARY SMITH
Gary Smith grew up in the industrial town of Geelong on the Bellarine Peninsular of Victoria. He developed an early fascination with the flare from the oil refinery chimney and the local industrial landscape.
His canvases are infused with a splendour, opulence, dignity, stateliness, and majestic sumptuousness beyond their original status. The work-a-day grunge of refineries, distilleries, bridges, oilrigs, silos and storage tanks is disguised and imbued with a romantic vision and disguise. These industrial entities hover on the edge of recognition. Rows of silos appear as colonnades in a vast cathedral. Storage tanks masquerade as mystic spheres of possibility; as orbs, globes and shrines or pavilions of desire.
An alchemical combination of traditional glaze painting techniques combined with contemporary image application technologies transforms the everyday constructions into enigmatic, veiled, oblique structures with hazy focal ambiguity. Each of Gary Smith’s works is created with multiple layered applications of lustrous paint glazes and pigment which impart a pearlescent sheen to the surfaces. When combined with the sense of light and distance it gives a cinematic cast to the paintings.
Gary Smith’s technique has grown from his earlier series of ‘evocations of atmosphere’, that he developed from tiny fragments from the skies of nineteenth century romantic landscapes and his explorations of Western landscape painting and its relationship to Japanese scroll painting. Despite its underlying industrial imagery, his subsequent bodies of work are still aligned with this reductive approach to landscape and retain the stillness and Oriental ‘sensibility’ and silkiness of surface that is distinctive of his oeuvre.
Having completed a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Fine Arts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Gary Smith went on to complete a Masters of Philosophy in Visual Arts at the Australian National University.
Gary Smith has been a practicing artist since the mid 1980’s and has exhibited his work extensively in both solo and group exhibitions. He has been a finalist in a number of significant art prizes including the Archibald Prize (2012), the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (2012), the John Fries Memorial Prize (2010), the Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize (2009), and the Albany Art Prize (2009).
His work can be found in both public and private collections around Australia including the Victorian Education Department collection and the Artbank collection.
ARTI-LA (CATHERINE MACKAY & LARISSA TAYLOR)
Arti-la have exhibited together in a variety of galleries. Our work compliments each other through our love of nature, colour and texture.