Andjana Pachkova: Artist Statement & Bio

My art practice is centered around discovering the ephemeral and the spiritual in painting. My work tends to be a meditation on identity taken outside of its original context through a repeated process of contextualization and recontextualization, both willing and forced. In my practice, I re-balance the harmony of being in the questions asked: “Who are we?” “Who Am I?” and “How do I belong, both to culture and country?” It is through the exploration of places, land, both lived in and imagined, that I can glimpse at an answer. The closer I get to the places of personal significance, the more defined and prolonged is the glimpse, sometimes it is enough to whisk the painting from the ephemeral currents of ideas and pin it down to a flat surface. Akin to the Russian and German Romantic painters and writers, I often gaze toward the expanse of the horizon to understand where we are coming from and possibly glimpse as to where we may be going. All throughout the search I am confronted by the three guards of my personal truth - nostalgia, ledsomeness and keir. In the end the search keeps going, hunting after the universal in the context of particular, with dual aids of powerful tools - memory and intuition.

Andjana Pachkova

Born in Ukraine, Andjana Pachkova comes from a traditional Russian art tutoring background. Following the political shifts of Perestroika, she moved to Moscow, where she began formal art training through classes at the Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts. Alongside this, she pursued legal studies and went on to complete a Bachelor of Law at Moscow International University in 1998.

In 1997, Pachkova was awarded the prestigious Davis Fellowship, which enabled her to move to the United States for postgraduate study. She earned a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Dartmouth College in 2000—where she also undertook art courses—followed by a Master of Law from Harvard University in 2001. During this period, she continued to deepen her artistic practice, also taking courses at New York University (NYU). Her work grew out of a deep interest in human relationships to place and landscape, particularly the subtle psychological transformations that occur as people move through and between environments.

After relocating to Australia in 2013, Andjana formalised her art training by completing a Diploma of Visual Arts at Northbridge Visual Art School in 2014. She has since exhibited regularly in Sydney, presenting four solo exhibitions with Stanley Street Gallery. Her practice has been enriched through mentorship and study with notable Australian artists including Idris Murphy, Jo Bertini, Brandt Lewis, Denis Clarke, and Tony Tozer.

Andjana Pachkova’s work is held in private collections across the United States—including the Harvard Law faculty in Cambridge, Massachusetts—as well as in Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Finland, Israel, and Lebanon.

Artist portrait by Jessica Maurer

Andjana Pachkova: CV July, 2025 Download

Claire Primrose: Artist Statement & Bio

When we think of a place, we imagine it not in its entirety, but rather as integral parts; feelings and images pieced together to create the impression of a whole.

In Primrose’s practice, she mirrors this concept, the serendipitous recreation and abstraction of these views encourage our eye to piece together the changing actions of material, much like Primrose herself does so in her studio - so that we too, may feel a sense of place. She pieces together the remnants of these places; a collection of memories, samples and studies which are then reworked into the applique of paint. Through a process of layering; she scratches, sprays and applies a mixture of mediums in a way that not only conjures up feelings of awe and wonder felt only by arriving at a greatly-anticipated scenic view, but does so in a way that allows the colours, layers and gestural mark-making to actively illustrate the scene before you.

Claire Primrose is a painter who works primarily with mixed media. Primrose graduated with a BA in Visual Arts (majoring in printmaking) at ANU, Canberra, in 1997. Based in Queanbeyan, she has also completed a Graduate Diploma in Secondary Art Education and has taught both Visual Art and Dance at various high schools in Canberra for ten years. She has been represented by Stanley Street Gallery since 2015.

Primrose has participated in various group and solo exhibitions both locally and nationally; including being selected for DIRECTION NOW> national touring exhibition with 10 other artists who also focus on abstraction. She was the winner of the 2017 Waverley Art Prize – Drawing. Most recently she has been selected as a finalist in the 2019 Wyndham Art Prize, SA; the 2019 Hunters Hill Art exhibition and the 2019 Highly Commended and People’s Choice Winner in the Wingecarribee Landscape Prize, Bowral.  She has also been selected as a finalist in the Paddington Art Prize, The Fleurieu Biennale, The Kedumba Drawing Award, The Tattersall’s Club Landscape Prize, The Hawkesbury Art Prize, Morton Bay Art Prize, the Norville Art Prize, the Whyalla Art prize and most recently, the Paul Guest Drawing Award.

Claire was awarded winner of the Queanbeyan City Council Regional Art Prize in both 2009 and 2015, the Goulburn Regional Art Award in 2016 as well as the Capital Chemist Art Award Tuggeranong in 2015. She has also been awarded a Highly Commended in the Queanbeyan City Council Art Award in 2010 and the Hawkesbury Art Prize in 2012.

Claire Primrose: CV January, 2020 Download

Denis Clarke: Artist Statement & Bio

Painting for me is a bodily thing. It involves the relationship between one’s self and making contact with the tactile. Why tactile? Because I am touching materials and feeling out my experience of looking at a subject such as landscapes, people and buildings.

Drawing is the whole key. Not drawing for its own sake but drawing to explore ideas for connecting with the world. Finish is irrelevant. These drawings serve the purpose of the painting and illuminate my imagination to the possibilities of new compositions. I am interested in the physicality and directness of drawing which often finds its way into my works on paper as well as my paintings.

My interest is what I would call 'creating a process of informed experiment'. I allow myself to risk and play with media while aligning my senses with the observed. It is the otherness or feel of a subject which provides the impetus to experiment and find new solutions with mark.

For me, working before a subject is deeply complex and a chance to explore visual language. The test is to find graphic statements and abstractions which truthfully parallel perceptions and travel towards a resolved image. Previously Unseen explores my reactions and connection with the urban which has been an important aspect of my painting for many years. It is a reference to my wish to try and see the world anew.

Denis Clarke works across painting and drawing, exploring the relationship between himself, the bodily and the tactile. Interested in creating a process of informed experiment, his paintings extend conversations of subject, texture and paint fluidity that suspend perception and reality. His work layer playful exchanges between drawing and painting processes, finding new solutions with mark-making to explore the subject. Contextualised within the European neo-expressionist movement, Clarke’s colourful gestural works deconstruct improvisation, inviting new and playful languages of representation.  

Clarke completed post-graduate study at St Martins School of Art, London, and received the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship as well as Moya Dyring residency at the Cite International des Arts in Paris. 

Based in Sydney, he has spent periods working and studying in London and Switzerland, teaching at the Camden School of Art and the Hampstead School of Art, exhibiting at Gillian Jason Gallery, Boundary Gallery and James Colman Gallery, Knightsbridge, as well as creating set designs and costumes for the experimental Opera Factory, in Zurich and London. 

Clarke returned to Australia in 1998. 

He has held 17 solo exhibitions since 1975 and has collaborated with several premier arts organisations such as Opera Factory in London and Switzerland, Warwickshire Arts Festival in the UK, and most recently as the artist in residence at Wollombi Valley Arts Council. From 1999 - 2010 Denis was a sessional lecturer at the National Art School and tutor from 2011 ongoing. He also instructs master classes at Charles Sturt University, the University of Southern Queensland, the Mitchell School of Art and the McGregor School.  

Clarke has exhibited in numerous Art Fairs including ‘Line Art, Ghent’, The Brussels Art Fair, The 20th Century British Art Fair, Royal College of Art, and The Islington Art Fair. His work is included in private and public collections including: the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Fitzwilliam College Cambridge and Lloyds of London. 

Clarke has been represented by Stanley Street Gallery since 2014.

Denis Clarke: CV July, 2022 Download

Jackson Farley: Artist Statement & Bio

This new body of work is exploring our collective self through the lens of the artist's very selfish self! The works are a hyper-yuck renaissance resurgence that see accepted forms fragmented, repurposed, collaged, put back together and then broken once more. Thank god for the power of AI to give the artist some abs where needed! Jackson becomes his own muse in these works while cautiously navigating the AI landscape. Intentionally celebrating its most advanced and rudimentary aspects to create arresting imagery that references the place from which we have all come, while pondering as to what might come next. Each work acts as a snapshot into a neo-non-narrative of self; a minor moment in time of our impending collective self-work journey. Like when you want to stop nurturing your 'little me' you decide to kill it instead (with a light saber), indeed the little dance between our inner and outer 'me' that is constantly in flux. Ultimately the works aim to bring voice to the little feelings that we all face, but forget to talk about. Because literally, the only person who cares about your self-work journey is you! And your therapist (because you pay them to care).

Jackson Farley is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on unceded Gadigal land. His practice intertwines narrative and humour to point out the absurdities and pointlessness of fine art definitions and power structures. Using digital media, biro pens and ‘self-care’ pencils, Farley’s work is as sentimental as it is a parody, pondering naïvely on categories of art, material, and painting process.

Jackson completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with First Class Honours at the Sydney College of the Arts in 2017 and was awarded the University Awards for Drawing and Printmedia. He has also studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, USA and was awarded the China Cultural Centre residency in Chengdu, China in 2017.   

Jackson's work was recently exhibited in Indonesia and he will be exhibiting at the '24 Sydney Contemporary. Career highlights - selected as a finalist in the 2021 Dobell Drawing Prize #22; the recipient of the City of Sydney creative live/work tenancy program.  In 2019 - finalist in the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Travel Scholarship Exhibition; 2018 he was selected for the Blake Prize, a finalist in The Churchie National Emerging Art Prize in Queensland and a finalist in Hatched at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, WA.

Jackson Farley: CV August, 2024 Download

Shaun Hayes: Artist Statement & Bio

The collection of plastic objects that inform Hayes’s sculptures are evocative of certain memories and feelings, capturing these ephemeral moments in time. Hayes contemplates the nature of today’s throwaway society and using seemingly unimportant, everyday objects, humorously highlights the importance of being more conscious of the enduring impact waste has on the environment. Drawing on the aesthetics of traditional ceramic vessels combined with contemporary objects, his adorned vessels echo a blending of past and present, old and new as well as illustrating the material similarities between plastic and ceramics.

Interested in the feelings and memory these throwaway objects evoke, Hayes comically uses trash to build vessels of Western cultural heritage. Our garbage becoming a biographic assemblage of certain value systems. The unimportant plastic bottle, the takeaway container and toothpaste ironically put on a pedestal, vitrified, forever set in stone. Almost sarcastically, the works are critiques of how material value is manufactured. But in the environment, it does not matter, material hierarchy does not exist, and both refuse to break down and return to the earth.

Through methods of repetition, rearranging and joining of cast objects paired with a tonal colour palette, Hayes’s sculptures are reminiscent of fantastical and comical imagery whilst also highlighting the tensions of growing up in conversation with existing in a wasteful, thoughtless consumerist society.

Shaun Hayes is an Australian ceramic artist whose work explores the intersection of memory, material, and environmental consciousness. Through his innovative approach to ceramics, Hayes transforms discarded plastic objects into enduring sculptural pieces, challenging perceptions of value and permanence. His work often carries a sense of nostalgia and humour, prompting reflection on the everyday items we overlook and discard.

Hayes completed a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) with Honours in Ceramics at the Australian National University School of Art in 2013. His career has since taken him to the historic ceramic studios of Jingdezhen, China, where in 2023 he has exhibited as part of international ceramic art exchanges. He has received significant recognition for his practice, including winning the 2024 Muswellbrook Art Prize (Ceramics) and being a finalist in the 2022 Waverley Small Sculpture Prize. He has also represented Stanley Street Gallery at the 2018, 2023 & 2024 Sydney Contemporary Art Fair and the Melbourne Design Fair.

His work was the subject of a major feature in The Journal of Australian Ceramics (Issue 63, 2024), highlighting his unique perspective on material, memory, and environmental impact. But at its core, his work is about something simple: paying attention—to the things we use, the things we throw away, and the pressures, both big and small, that shape us all.

Currently living and working in Ngario Country (Captains Flat, NSW), Hayes explores new ways to reimagine everyday materials, transforming the discarded into thought-provoking ceramic works.

Shaun Hayes: CV March, 2025 Download

Margarita Sampson: Artist Statement & Bio

Human life to me has always been part of a rich and interconnected world, rising and falling, living and dying, interdependent: the mouth of a flower is also my mouth, the surface of a prickly pear is like testicles and soft anemone forms are like our own soft tissues. Healthy and unhealthy; reaching maturity and falling away. In my work, allusions to multiple forms are drawn but not cemented. For me, the power of the work comes from a rich soup of inferences which the viewer provides from their own experience. I say, “is this not unlike...” and you say “yes, but also...”.' The works bring up questions, invites narrative and suggests possible futures with any number of outcomes.

Margarita Sampson was raised on Norfolk Island, and the varied sea life made an indelible impression on her as a small child. As an adult, her sculpture and jewellery work draws upon this rich visual vocabulary. All works are meticulously hand-made by the artist, comprising of hand and machine sewn textiles. In Sampson's Infectious Desires series, the found furniture is sawn and altered, re-carved and gilded, before being overlaid with textile 'landscapes'.

Born in Nowra, NSW (1970), Margarita Sampson grew up on Norfolk Island, attending COFA in Sydney with a BA & M.Art in painting (1990, 92). She began textile sculptural work in response to the first Sculpture Sea (1997) & a photograph of her initial work ‘Urchins’ went become one of the defining images of the exhibition in its early days. Her following work “Fish Curtain’ received the People’s Choice in 1998. Her textile work is often inspired by her childhood summers spent moving between aquatic & terrestrial realms on Norfolk, and embraces hybrid soft forms that transition between human, animal, vegetative and mineral states. 

After some 15 years away from Australia, Sampson returned in 2011 and won the Object section of the Waterhouse Art Prize in 2012 with her work ‘Anenome Incursions: Zsa-Zsa', and subsequent works been finalists in the Wynne prize, the Blake Prize, twelve Sculpture by the Seas Exhibitions and most recently won the Hillview Indoor Sculpture Award 2018.  Her solo show ‘Infectious Desires’ at Stanley Street Gallery in 2015 received international press coverage and critical acclaim. 

Sampson’s work often takes a domestic object and imagines a paradigm of excessive growth, where the soft parts grow and overtake the host, a reflection on current environmental unbalances and possible ecosystem collapse. The work is also very personal, as the objects contain lush openings, curvaceous forms, are provocative and often feminist; meditating on the artist’s aging body within society and spiritually reflecting the artist’s Buddhist practice. She currently lives in a meditation retreat centre. 

Sampson works with commercially available textiles and found objects for her interior works, but also draws on her jewellery practice for work utilising enamel and copper, and wood and steel for large outdoor works.

Margarita Sampson: CV January, 2020 Download

Daehoon Kang: Artist Statement & Bio

As a silversmith the use of traditional silversmithing techniques, especially hand raising, allows me to create the fluidity of organic sculptural objects, which have a close relationship to natural forms.

Often my work is imbued with Korean wit and humour, and overlaid with  elements of my own experiences that I’ve had since moving to Australia. Some of my work aims to challenge, engage or surprise the viewer, for example one of my work “Flying Teapot” (the collection of the Arts Centre of Melbourne) reveals unexpected outcomes as you examine it closely. Firstly it is perceived to be a teapot, but then you realize it can’t possibly function as such as its actual function as a lamp becomes apparent.

I also think various cultural experiences have influenced the production of my work.  An essential element is the fusion of Korean and Western cultures that result in a universal visual language. In Australia I have a small studio where the limitations of space have encouraged me to explore the translation of silversmithing techniques to a scale applicable for wearable jewellery and containers. It also reflects a change of process, whereby individual components are constructed and then collated into a composition, allowing greater freshness and versatility than that provided by a fixed design concept.

Daehoon Kang who studied in Korea and Australia and has pursued his successful practice in Australia since moving here permanently in 2003.

He has built an exhibition profile that includes Australia, SE Asia and Europe; he is a multiple award winning and highly collectable artist, producing exquisitely crafted silversmithing and jewellery that transcends specific cultural characteristics. He has work in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Centre of Melbourne, and numerous private collections.

Amy Dynan: Artist Statement & Bio

"I use the framework of beauty to explore the relationship between humanity and nature. My large-scale pastel paintings merge photorealism with abstract sensibilities to document moments of sublimity, transition and fragility in nature. The dynamics of light and dark work as a metaphor for the opposing forces in nature and in ourselves, creating landscapes that hover between land and sky, material and ethereal.

For me, drawing is a lens through which the spectrum of our existence is revealed, and a means to marvel at how lucky we are to feel it fully. To this end my work documents nature in flux and celebrates the beauty of what we stand to lose.”  

Sydney Contemporary '25 - 'Flight of the Sirens'

Amy Dynan brings her unique vision to Sydney Contemporary with Flight of the Sirens, a new body of work presented by Stanley Street Gallery. This evocative series reimagines the mythological siren as a meditation on transformation, freedom, and the untamed human spirit.

In Flight of the Sirens, viewers are invited to see through the eyes of the siren in flight. Large-scale pastel paintings— dramatic in scope and saturated in colour—unfold as emotional cartographies, mapping thresholds between inner and outer worlds, the seen and unseen. Shaped by longing, liberation, and the quiet reclamation of emotional space, these works hold both stillness and wildness at once.

Rooted in ancient Greek mythology, sirens were once seen not as mermaids, but as enigmatic, half-bird, half-woman figures whose songs spoke of deep knowledge and transcendence. Over centuries, the siren was recast as a symbol of danger and seduction. Here, she is reclaimed as an archetype of the feminine psyche in transition—a rising into sovereignty.

Dynan’s visual language resists the urge to resolve light against shadow. Instead, her works allow beauty and longing, light and shadow, to coexist—mirroring life’s own tensions. Her mastery of pastel reaches new heights in this series: pigments are layered, luminous, and immersive, evoking vast aerial seascapes that are at once expansive and deeply intimate.

At its heart, Flight of the Sirens is a celebration of perspective. It invites us to look not with fear, but with wonder and courage. In reclaiming the siren’s gaze, Dynan offers a potent symbol of liberation, transcendence, and connection to the wild, ever-changing forces within and around us.

Amy holds a Master of Contemporary Art and Master of Fine Arts from The University of Sydney. Amy has been
a finalist in numerous prizes including the Dobell Drawing Prize, Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize, JADA Art Prize and John Leslie Landscape Prize, and has been selected for residencies in France, Norway, Hill End, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Tweed Regional Gallery and Bundanon Trust (William Fletcher Scholarship).

Represented by Stanley Street Gallery since 2014, Dynan has presented four solo exhibitions; Flight of the Sirens (2025), Sublime (2023), Skytalk (2021) and Water (2019).

Amy Dynan is an award-winning artist, renowned for her nuanced balance between conceptual rigour and classical skills.

Amy's paintings are rich in sublime imagery and draw on various periods throughout art history including Impressionism, Surrealism, and Abstraction. For Amy, the question in art is not what is sublime but how do we access it? Her work explores how we encounter sublime moments and the reverence that emerges through relationship with nature. Permeating her work is a love for the Australian landscape—the clarity of light, the boundlessness of sky, and the classic burnt colours of country.

Amy holds a Master of Contemporary Art and Master of Fine Arts from The University of Sydney. Amy has been a finalist in numerous prizes including the Dobell Drawing Prize, Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize, JADA Art Prize and John Leslie Landscape Prize, and has been selected for residencies in France, Norway, Hill End, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Tweed Regional Gallery and Bundanon Trust (William Fletcher Scholarship).

Amy has held four solo exhibitions at Stanley Street Gallery, 'Flight of the Sirens' (2025), 'Sublime' (2023), Skytalk’ (2021) and ‘Water’ (2019).

Artist Portrait by Milly Mead

Amy Dynan: CV August, 2025 Download

Tor Larsen: Artist Statement & Bio

Tor’s artwork is inspired by film making processes in which a scene is defined by a camera frame enclosing environments, objects/props that viewers mentally and occasionally physically interact with. His disturbing and surreal creations are infused with a sense of lost history, changing social/philosophical values as well as well as darker subconscious themes.

The choice of materials has always been important for Tor. His preference for found and recycled materials and objects imbued with their own history, is crucial to his conceptual development, often informing the construction, ultimate shape and meaning in a given work.

Also crucial to his create process; is the juxtaposition of unlikely materials, objects and ideas as a means of stimulating thought and emotional responses in the viewer, sometimes affected through mechanical interaction with a work where the viewer becomes part of the process of its realisation.

Much of Tor's work attempts to recapture pasts; real, imagined or simply felt as well as to project a virtual and potentially threatening future into the mind of the viewer.

As an artist, Tor gained early exposure to tools and processes in his parent’s jewellery workshop. His first jobs were as a model and prop-maker which led to further employment in the film industry building miniature scenes and creating visual effects. In 1998, he completed a diploma in production design at the AFTRS, following which he worked for various companies and productions on the Gold Coast and in Melbourne as an art director and visual effects coordinator, eventually becoming a producer in Sydney. In 2015 Tor completed a degree in political economy at Sydney University. More recently he has been making jewellery, small sculptures and miniature installations that reflect his political, social and historical/cultural interests as experienced through the cinematic frame. His most recent exhibition was held with his parents and sister, Two Generations: Larsen & Lewers Pia Larsen, Tor Larsen at Spot81 gallery, Sydney in 2016.

Tor Larsen: CV January, 2020 Download

Emily Valentine: Artist Statement & Bio

Feathers are my paint. Over the last twelve years I have developed my own technique and style using feathers.

I create mythical beasts - winged dogs and lizards, and now aeroplanes. The planes moves the work in a new direction - combining the man-made form with the bird. Planes are colonising the skies. Birds no longer dominate our view of the heavens.

In my work I wish to discuss how attitudes to wearing birds parts have changed. Is this just because of fashion, or has society become more caring of animals? I wish to stimulate the viewer with the uncomfortable nature of the feather, to question our callousness treatment of animals and birds, and ask how we sub-consciously classify animals – pet or pest, valued or worthless, beautiful or plain and why.

Emily Valentine is a contemporary mixed media artist living and working in both Australia and her native New Zealand. Using feathers as her paint, Valentine was initially trained as a jeweller, however her work now spans both contemporary wearable art and sculpture. Using feathers from a variety of bird species, Valentine has exhibited her wearable art and three-dimensional work in numerous solo, group and touring exhibitions in both Australia and New Zealand. She has also been a winner and finalist of numerous awards. In 2014, Valentine won the WOW Factor Award in the 2014 World Of Wearable Art, in 2011, she won The Cat Advocate Prize for Emerging artist, for her work Catty Bird and in 2007, she was a recipient of the 30th Alice Springs Acquisition Award, Northern Territory Craft Award for her Dog Flu Series.

Her work his included in the collections of the National Library of Australia, the Northern Territory Art Gallery and the Worldofwearableart Museum in New Zealand. 

Emily Valentine: CV November, 2025 Download