2024 Artists
& Collaborators

  • is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on Gadigal, Wangal and Dharug land in Sydney, Australia. She engages with painting, drawing, photography, weaving and embroidery to explore complex social and political themes. Anna holds a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in painting (2021) and a Master of Fine Art (2023) from National Art School, Sydney. She has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize (2024) and the Dobell Drawing Prize (2021).

    Shown as part of SYRUP 006.

  • Brodie Cullen's practice typically incorporates the creation of painterly assemblage works in an attempt to reframe the civic space as a public archive of bodily thresholds and how they are governed in lived experience. 

     Cullens practice often blurs the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and installation, incorporating elements of bodily presence and action by attempting themes of anthropomorphism during the process of making pictures, which he likes to refer to as documents of events. Using the civic space as a natural meeting place for the body and how it is governed, allows Cullen to recognise and critique value systems at play in this public space. Through attention to the intricacies and inequalities of value within society his work challenges viewers to question and reassess these systems, ultimately encouraging a more nuanced understanding of value in the urban context.  

    Shown as part of SYRUP 001 and SYRUP 006

  • Emily Ferretti is a Narmm/Melbourne based painter. Their lyrical abstractions draw on moments from memory and imagination with playful depictions of the everyday are depicted with confident and articulate applications utilising vibrant and inviting palette. They completed their Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours Victorian College of the Arts in 2006 and has exhibited extensively throughout Australia. They were awarded the prestigious residencies, the Greene Street Studio residency (awarded by the Australian Council of the Arts), the Cite des Arts Internationale in Paris (awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Wales).

    Ferretti’s works are held in major collections including at Artbank, Monash University Museum of Art and the Macquarie Group Collection, as well as in private collections in Australia and the UK.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 001 and the upcoming SYRUP 007.

  • (b. 1998) is a transdisciplinary artist residing on Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia).

    Their work occupies the realms of new media, sculpture, writing and photography. Starr’s practice engages with new technologies, non-anthropocentric theory and a diverse lineage of image making processes to generate future imaginaries as a means of critiquing the trajectory of anthropocentric techno-capitalism. Much of their practice involves the collation and expropriation of overlooked data. The process of image making allows Starr to visually reify the glitches, contradictions and ideological undercurrents of data sets, illuminating the material realities of abstracted information while theorising on the future implications of our technological and ideological systems.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 002 and SYRUP 006.

  • Maya Stocks is a PhD student at the University of Sydney based in Sydney College of the Arts, where she has been researching the history of Earthworks Poster Collective which operated out of the Tin Sheds at the University between 1972-79. In her practice as an artist, curator and researcher she works within the mediums of sculpture, print and painting to examine the ways in which capitalist infrastructures, geared towards extraction and efficiencies, performance and ‘outputs’, have shaped the everyday world around us. Her studio work connects with anti-technicist approaches in written research exploring industrialised systems of the streamlined, efficacious, and functionalist versus the human, tactile, organic and anomalous. She is the twice recipient of the David Harold Tribe Fellowhship for Sculpture, the Fauvette Loureiro Travel Scholarship and the Arthur Macquarie Travel Fellowship which enabled her to spend time researching her PhD at the British School in Rome in 2023. In 2022, she curated the show Sydney Buries its Past at the Tin Sheds Gallery at the School of Architecure and Design at the University of Sydney. The show brought together key poster works and ephemera from the archive alongside new commissioned works from Sydney College of the Arts cohort made in response.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 003 and SYRUP 006

  • (b.1999) is an emerging Australian artist based in Gadigal/Sydney, committed to developing a unique material practice in painting and drawing. Her work is grounded in studio-based research, where the canvas functions as a scaffold, capturing the passage of pigment, dust, debris, and occasionally acrylic paint. This layered process embeds a rich history within the surface, reflecting both the labour-intensive nature of her practice and a thoughtful commentary on the contemporary landscape of painting. Tara’s investigation into the interrelationship between painting, archival material, and physicality embeds temporal remnants of place and bodily memory into the canvas, transforming it into both inscription and surface trace. In her approach, nothing is wasted; every material is thoughtfully repurposed as a foundation for future works.

    Tara holds a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from the National Art School (2023), where she was awarded the prestigious Lift Off Award upon graduation. Since then, she has participated in numerous exhibitions and has recently been a selected finalist for the Mosman Art Prize 2024, the Gosford Art Prize 2024, and the Macquarie Art Prize 2024.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 001 and SYRUP 006


  • Heath Franco’s practice has a refined and unique graphic ontology that operates across drawing, time-based and installation. His work investigates Western popular culture and desires, domesticity and notions of ‘home’, the chaos of existence, and contemplations on the nature and possibilities of space-time.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 006

  • Ruth Marbun is a visual artist based in Jakarta, Indonesia. She started her career in fashion before shifting into visual arts. Ruth is deeply interested in the connectivity between human beings and also their surrounding environments—their thriving capability for adaptation and survival. She celebrates imperfection as fabrication of life, as seen and reflected in textures and deconstruction of figures in her paintings, textiles, drawings, animations and installations. Her works have been featured in Jakarta, Jogjakarta, Singapore, and Australia.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 003

  • Kuba Dorabialski is an artist, writer and educator originally from Wrocław, Poland. He works primarily in video installation. He's interested in mysticism, political history and the personal poetic; his tools are geography, language and cinema history.

     

    Kuba's work has been exhibited in the US, Europe and Australia and several of his videos are in the Artbank collection. In 2017, he won the John Fries Award with the video installation Floor Dance of Lenin's Resurrection. In 2019, his work Glasses on My Nosetip won the Open category in the Fisher's Ghost Art Award. In 2021, his Invocation Trilogy was exhibited at Carriageworks, Sydney, curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham. In 2023, the feature length Connection of the Sticks had its theatrical premiere at the Sydney Film Festival, programmed by Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd.

    He is a lecturer at UNSW, Art and Design. Kuba lives in Sydney, Australia.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 004

  • Saskia Haalebos is a neurodiverse, multidisciplinary artist who works with text, film, code, performance, audio,

    printmaking—whatever the idea calls for around themes of time, mortality, empathy and mis/communication.

    She lives on unceded Ngunnawal Country in the ACT region of Australia.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 004

  • Born in 1976 in Australia. Lives and works in Sydney. Combining history and anthropology, Kurt Sorensen's photographic practice echoes a colonial history, invoking the antagonistic encounter between early European settlers and the Australian landscape. Sorensen connects with his subject matter through in-camera and darkroom processes that allude to the precarious and uneasy relationship of colonial Europeans with the antipodean environment.

    Sorensen's photographs have been included in several nationally recognised prizes and has been shown extensively both nationally and internationally. His work is held in several public and private collections in Australia and overseas.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 004

  • Katrin Koenning (b.1978) is an artist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne, on unceded Wurundjeri Boon wurrung Country.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 004

  • Clara Joyce completed her undergraduate studies at the Victorian College of the Arts and went on to study her Honours in Fine Art at Monash University where she achieved the highest mark in studio practice. She is now completing her Masters in Fine art at Monash University. She has shown at Cache, Cathedral Cabinet in Narm (Melbourne) and Cool Change Contemporary in Boorloo (Perth).  Working primarily in painting, Clara Joyce’s practice considers the passage of light through water. Her approach involves a unique staining and layering technique, which generates complex and ethereal visual effects. Joyce’s work investigates elusive and alternate registers of perception, inviting the viewer to immerse themselves in a potent interplay of colours, textures and luminosity. The work brings to mind internal bodily images whilst simultaneously appearing cosmic in scale, generating a productive tension between the macro and micro. 

    Shown as part of SYRUP 005; 'A tide is a very long wave'.

  • Joshua Edward is Co-Founder & Editor (fine art) for publisher no more poetry, and recently appointed Vice-Chair of Blindside Gallery, Melbourne. They exhibit actively in the medium of sculpture following formal studies at Victorian College of the Arts (2018). Joshua has exhibited broadly both within Australia and internationally, and is held in the numerous private collections. Joshua’s practice largely concerns itself with the drudgery of everyday life as inoculation against the miasma of The Modern Condition. They use creativity—their numerous projects and frequent collaborations—as a reminder of fulfilment within, and explanation of, the reality of early adulthood. Allowing creativity to form both the product, and outlet, of living. This amalgamation, alloys of imagined worlds, domestic shapes, familiar forms and figments of popular iconography, create a visual language which depends on the known to form new modes of seeing.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 005; 'A tide is a very long wave'.

  • Izabela Pluta is an artist with an interest in expanded photographic practice. Born in Warsaw, Poland, she currently lives and works between the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi in Awabakal country (Newcastle, NSW) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal (Paddington, Sydney). Grounded in the effects of globalisation and Izabela’s personal experience as a migrant to Australia, her work explores a fluid way of moving through and being in the world. She examines the role of photography in highlighting the impermanence and mutability of geographic boundaries, while also considering the broader cultural, political, and environmental impacts of such fluidity. She holds a PhD from The University of Wollongong, is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Art and Design Sydney, and is the current Artistic Associate at the Powerhouse Museum.

    Izabela Pluta is represented by Gallery Sally Dan Cuthbert, Sydney.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 005; 'A tide is a very long wave'.

  • Salote Tawale works with performance, moving image, painting and installation to probe ideas of self-representation. Humorously challenging stereotypes, Tawale presents nuanced articulations of the complex negotiations around identity as a queer Fijian woman with settler-colonial heritage living in Australia. Tawale’s recent works expand these concerns, acknowledging the growing significance of indigenous knowledge systems to individuals living in the diaspora and navigating this particular time and space. Tawale has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the 8th Yokohama Triennial, the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Carriageworks, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Para-Site Gallery, Hong Kong. Tawale undertook an Australia Council residency in London in 2018 and an Indigenous Visual and Digital residency at the Banff Centre, Canada in 2016. She is currently Associate Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 005; 'A tide is a very long wave'.

  • Shan Turner-Carroll a Queer, Australian artist of Burmese descent. Deeply fascinated with unearthing tacit knowledge, his practice integrates mediums including photography, sculpture, performance and film. The artist’s practice interrogates both human and non-human nature, alternative forms of social exchange and interactions between art, artist and viewer: sending and receiving signals. His work can sing to snakes, serenade and signal with aliens, and barter with islands, rivers, and oceans. Looking towards the multiplicity of connections between body and landscape, site-specificity is key to his practice, not only in making, but rather in how an embodied methodology of making emerges upon each site and location. Turner-Carroll sees art-making as ritualistic and transformative, using play, humor and experimentation as key elements within his current practice. His work is in the collections of The Art Gallery of New South Wales, ArtBank Australia, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, The Macquarie Group collection and The University of Newcastle.

    Shan is represented by COMA Gallery, Sydney.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 005; 'A tide is a very long wave'.

  • Yvette James explores the symbiotic exchange of matter between bodies and their environments. Through entangling materials such as engine oil, honey, silver, steel, and vapour, James’ sculptural installations critique the principle of purity. Leakages between architectures, bodies, and digital realms are studied throughout James’ sculptural installations. The human body is an amalgamation of familiar and foreign substances: bacteria, bone, chemicals, sinew, plastics, and neurons. To be a body is to leak in perpetuity.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 005; 'A tide is a very long wave'.

  • Alexandra Peters is a painter, sculptor, screen printer and noise musician from Narrm/Melbourne. Her practice situates itself within the field of expanded painting through the interrogation of support structures and framing devices. She completed her honours degree in Fine Art at Monash University in 2022, where she was the recipient of the Monash University Museum of Art Award and the Megalo Print Studio Graduate Residency. Peters has been selected for Hatched: National Graduate Show 2023 at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art where she will also be a resident artist. Recent exhibitions include Mildura Atrocity Exhibition curated by Dr Helen Hughes at NAP Contemporary, Mildura, 2023. Peters was also the recipient for the Mcfarlane Commission at ACCA. 

    Their work interrogates site as a political space by distressing images of archives and or place and reproducing this through the focusing prism of the screen to reveal and contract truth and untruth.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 001

  • I’m investigating a couple of things. One is flatness in painting, in relation to the pervasiveness of the digital screen. I’m influenced by 20th-century explorations of Cartesian space in art and in architecture, and I view the screen as a new framework for abstraction. Combining abstract geometry with references to the physical facilitates navigation between the tangible world and the virtual. I want to emphasise this growing divide. Another topic is history and its record. I’m intrigued by the long journey of an object from ‘buried rubble’ to ‘precious artefact’. In a 21st-century context, this is a journey towards digital immortality: many public museums have online databases of their collections, and when they don’t, this task is performed on social media. An object that was buried has its afterlife in ‘the cloud’. I think of this process as the translation of the physical and sculptural into the abstract and pictorial. I’m exploring how painting and photography can span or bridge this dichotomy.

    Shown as part of SYRUP 001