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

Jacquie Meng: Artist Statement & Bio

My works explore exaggerated and self conceptualised self portraiture in a way that considers arranging the self, objects and landscapes in a way that is carnivalesque and grotesque.  The idea of the carnival liberates us from the constraints of everyday life, allowing for a fluid exchange of identities and roles.  This idea resonates deeply with the diasporic experience, where identity is often fragmented and multifaceted. I also consider site-specificity, and how the displacement of cultural objects impacts identity formation within diasporic communities. I believe that arts relationship to place can reshape perceptions of identity, and thus paintings not only exist as static objects but engage with the context of their display. 

A large consideration in the making of my work is ‘thing-power’, a concept that explores agency within objects, and how non-human entities can possess agency in determining meaning.  In these works the self is a clock, the eyes are pool balls, the dresser mirror is a portal to a playground, the pool table is a groomed garden with patterns of i-ching coins.  I am interested in the way that patterns travel across time and space and have spiritual meaning or idiosyncratic ones… or both. Scattered in my work are patterns from Han Dynasty tombstones, traditional fortune telling mechanisms and prints on fabric and clothing.

Jacquie Meng graduated from ANU with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (First Class Honours)/ Bachelor of Art History and Curatorship in 2022. She was awarded the Brett Whitely travelling scholarship in 2021, selected as a finalist in 2022 'the churchie' emerging art prize at the IMA, and PICA’s 'Hatched'. In 2023, she took part in residencies include Kunstraum in New York and Pilotenkueche International Art Program in Leipzig and in 2024 she was selected as the recipient of the Waverley Artist Studio residency in Bondi.

In 2023 and 2024 she represented Stanley Street Gallery at the 'Sydney Contemporary' and was also selected for the 2024 Canbera Art Biennial.  Meng also exhibited in ‘YEAR OF THE DRAGON’ at 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art, ‘The Floor is Lava’ with Tiles Gallery and ‘Choose Your Fighter’ with Marvin Gardens New York.

Jacquie was awarded the 2024 Mosman Art Prize - Guy Warren Emerging Artist Award and was a finalist in the Lenn Fox painting prize.

Jacquie Meng: CV May, 2025 Download

Agus Wijaya: Artist Statement & Bio

Wijaya’s practice questions the construction of both the personal and cultural self through 3D abstraction, experimental sculpture and new media.

He draws on the beliefs and elements from his home country as he seeks to reconnect with the cultural heritage – that he stayed away from, but came to realise – that despite everything, helps explain his perception of things.

His recent works are a multi-medium exploration of identification and dis-identification, of personal and cultural histories, of the bridges and glitches between ways of knowing and seeing.

Born in Cianjur, a small town in West Java, Agus Wijaya is an Indonesian artist of Chinese background who now lives in Australia. He embraces what are seen as separate cultures and disciplines, for they all have a part in his identity construction and practice. His works make similar connections, serving as his place of reconciliation.

Wijaya has been selected as a finalist in the Grace Cossington Smith, North Sydney Art Prize, Fisher’s Ghost, Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize and the churchie at the Institute of Modern Art. He will next present his work at Pari and Sydney Contemporary 2023, and is one of the four artists commissioned as part of the expansion project by Newcastle Art Gallery. 

Agus Wijaya: CV September, 2023 Download

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.”  

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 three sell out solo exhibitions at Stanley Street Gallery, ‘Water’ (2019), ‘Skytalk’ (2021) and 'Sublime' (2023).

Amy Dynan: CV March, 2025 Download