New figures, new grounds considers the relationship between bodily limits and artistic practice, exploring how changes in health can disrupt established ways of making and how artists may or may not negotiate this landscape.

Art practice can occupy a complicated dual space: it can be a ground for exploration, research, curiosity and expression, but also a site entangled with career opportunities and institutional expectations.

What happens when disruptions to health mean the methods, pace or identity we engage with can no longer be supported? What occurs when the timeline shifts and there is a rupture in mobility, when the body itself encounters limitations interrupting our goals and expectations? How does this change our relationship to time, labour, identity and artistic possibility?

Negotiating practice in altered health circumstances can engender complex feelings and outcomes. Previous methods may become unfeasible, requiring rethinking, while returning to practice can bring both hopes for recovery and pressures of productivity.

How do we adapt to new limits within creative making and find sustainable and meaningful ways to continue? New figures, new grounds brings together varied responses to these complex experiences, exploring what can and cannot be born from this ground.

Asha Maria Dare
Of Sri Lankan Tamil and British heritage and raised cross-culturally, Asha Maria Dare is a painter whose approach reflects a life shaped by shifting cultural and geographic worlds.


Anna Dunnill
Anna Dunnill is an artist and writer based in Naarm/Melbourne. She makes textiles, drawings, essays and poems.


Marcel Feillafe
Feillafe works across a diverse range of media including sound, installation, photography, and drawing. Based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia Feillafe has exhibited widely over a 20+ year career.


Ashika Harper
Ashika’s practice explores how life experiences shape identity and inform knowing, and the self-narration strategies people use to make sense of who they are.


Elyss McCleary
Elyss McCleary’s practice explores forms found in layers of shapes and colour that shift between representation and abstraction. Her compositional placements reflect various spaces.


Ruth O’Leary
Working across drawing, painted textiles, photography and performance, Ruth deploys her body as both material and subject creating work that confronts invisible labour, sexuality and the complexity of women’s lives.


Pip Ryan
Pip Ryan is an artist based in Narrm/Melbourne. Her practice explores themes of the uncanny and absurd using sculpture, drawing, painting, installation and video.


Jessica Schwientek
Jessica Schwientek is a fine artist working within the expansive realm of photography. Focussed primarily on process and the cathartic act of image making.


Elise Sheehan
Elise Sheehan is an object maker and kindergarten teacher. Her pedagogy and art practice co-exist and derive from similar processes, methodologies and mindsets.


Alex Sinclair
Alex is a landscape painter based in Naarm/Melbourne who explores the
human experience of relating to and navigating through terrains shaped by ancient forces and biospheres.


Rie Delange (curator)
Rie Delange (she/her) is a Naam/Melbourne based visual artist, educator and curator. Her practice is concerned with illuminating unseen and obscured relationships between bodies, materiality, language and landscapes via mixed-media spatial assemblages. Her work aims to communicate a sense of discovery, encounter and an embodied felt charge for the viewer.  


Katie Paine (accompanying text)
Katie Paine is a Naarm-based artist and writer. Her practice spans installation, video, narrative fiction, drawing and photography. Her practice concerns itself with the serpentine trajectories of ideas and information across time, and the ways we encounter and understand the world through the collection of information and the construction of knowledge. Recent work has explored such ideas across the fields of hauntology, archival politics, and science fiction. She has exhibited nationally, including at First Draft, Spring 1883, Gertrude Contemporary, Metro Arts, ACMI, c3, Kings ARI, Latrobe Art Institute, SEVENTH Gallery and Bus Projects. Her writing has been published in VAULT Magazine, Art + Australia, un-Magazine, Runway Journal and Art Almanac.