Lisa Carrett recently completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours), UNSW Art & Design and was one of only 6 artists shortlisted in the 2018 TWT Excellence Prize.

Lisa’s painting practice engages with the recognition of her own familiar present/past and the ways previous sentiments of home (post-Colonial) have been deconstructed.

The origins of the sentimental notions of home appear early when, as a 16 year old, Lisa Carrett was a finalist in the 2013 Young Archies at the AGNSW with a portrait of her father.

I´ve drawn my dad basically because he´s my hero. He is a single parent who looks after two crazy teenagers by himself. He is strong and brave-faced even in the tougher times but also has a great sense of humour and has taught me through his approach to life – never give up. I think anyone as inspiring as Paul Carrett deserves recognition as the hero they are.

Carrett celebrates the sense of identity that informed the construction of Australian working class neighbourhoods of her father´s and probably his father´s times in the subject matter of her painting.
Lisa Carrett´s paintings evoke a sense of nostalgia, a familiarity that is sympathetic to past and present, yet through, what Carrett describes as “the uncanny archives”, this familiarity can also reference darker histories.

Eunjoo Jang was born in South Korea and now lives and works in Australia. She recently completed a Master of Fine Arts, UNSW Art & Design and has been a regular finalist in prizes including the Paddington Art Prize, the Lethbridge 10000, the Ravenswood Australian Women´s Art prize, and the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Award.

My practice explores the phenomenon of virtualization… For example, on a daily basis I walk through suburbs and streets, viewing long rows of double-storey brick terraces… these.. provoke a curiosity about an aerial view of the layout of these buildings which I then depict by employing geometric shapes, various colours and scratch hologram (technique). The scratch holograms represent ‘the virtual’, while line drawings and painting represent the physical.
In doing this, they act as the ‘real’ representation. By means of this method, each (encised) line then glows and the brightness can be adjusted by building on the scratches… This results in the scratched marks being transformed from a simple depiction of boundaries to a geometric form where these lines form the arcs of circles that create an orbit image… Through light reflection, some parts start to glow and create three-dimensional shapes on a two dimensional surface. ~ Eunjoo Jang, August 2019

Public Collections: Macquarie Group Collection; Art Incubator; Council of The City of Sydney.

Claudio Valenti was born in Italy where despite an early interest in drawing, he graduated with a Masters in Gregorian Chant and Choral Director, before moving to Sydney, Australia in 1999 where he continues to work as a music teacher and composer. His visual arts practice embraces the disciplines of painting, drawing and photography. Valenti feels they all strongly relate and co-exist together. In art, as in his music, he is driven by the suggestive rather than the immediate, depicting imaginary landscapes where texture and light play a dominating role.

I have always been attracted to the use of new materials.
I work on the utilitarian panels that surface our ordinary environments…
The rhythm of everyday life is fast and overwhelming… beauty can easily pass by unnoticed… we need to learn how to look, how to see… and to recognise… to learn to look at things differently.
Using lithographic ink on melamine panel, together with a repetitious process of adding and scraping back, using only a printmaking roller, kitchen papers and scraping tools, has allowed me to blur the boundaries between painting and drawing (and), above all… to search for beauty even where it may not seem to exist… ~ Claudio Valenti, August, 2019