2025 Finalists - Midsumma and Australia Post Art Award

Medium: Stencil on archival paper

I believe strength lies in the collective community, that we’re able to overcome and achieve great things when we band together as a group. Visually this artwork presents two carabiners (tools used for climbing, tools your life depends on) clipped to each other, the carabiners acting as a metaphor for people. This work is part of a series; here showing two of the same carabiners in different colours, joined together to create the shape of a heart. This artwork celebrates community and the strength in finding similarities in one another.

Medium: Installation

Rainbow colours are often used by companies and brands to create products and services to attract the LGBTQIA+ community.

This Rainbow capitalism often however does not equate with actual systemic change; the virtue signalling often disguises the fact that many companies do not have in place cultures of acceptance and tolerance and when push comes to shove discard their support for profit.

Further to this governments utilise Rainbow washing to justify their political actions and beliefs. This work acts in solidarity with the LGBTQIA+ communities living in countries where the death penalty still exists for homosexuality.

Medium: Gouache on Canvas and video performance art

Having experienced most recently discovering that some family members (the men) are actually homophobic towards me after thinking for years they accepted me, it was a big shock to my new partner and me. I painted an artwork in response to that experience where I felt stabbed in the back. Incidentally, I was not going to have a stabbed back, this happened by accident when I dropped my phone onto the painting and that was when I realised the universe was sending me a message to include this aspect as I had only just experienced the shock of discovering the truth of family. During painting this work, I had a moment of crying when I took a walk down the alley, up the road from my home. I decided this may help me release family and recording this moment helped me to realise I need to be me unapologetically, with or without family and their attitude towards my choice to be LGBT (since 1998!). Hidden in the sound is my face behind raining windows and enmeshed in the painting, my aim is to show people that we just need to be who we are and choose our family because blood can mean nothing if all they do is suppress, oppress and condemn us for being who we are.

Medium: Oil and brass leaf on wood.

This painting is for Jo, my friends, my communities.
Jo is disabled, sexy, trans, old, and worthy of the care and attention required to paint an oil portrait made-up of many caresses of her face and body.

Jo was ordained by The Order of Perpetual Indulgence. She is surrounded by a halo of golden nibs gifted by Brother Bimbo.

This portrait bears scars from mishandling by a major state gallery. They aren't hidden, they are part of her story, in gold.

Jo is manifest fully: father and grandmother; Elder; playwright; performer; Queen Jesus; St Jo, Scribe of Our Souls.

Medium: Bluestone screening, fibreglass, dust, and oxides.

‘Rock Cathedral no.2’ is part of a series of sculptures exploring queer spirituality and mysticism. Made from crushed basalt, the structure is reminiscent of an ancient ruin. The subtle rupture reconsiders the hard basalt material into an expression of delicacy, carrying a palpable fragility.

The work embodies the fluidity and mutability of queer spirituality. Rather than imposing a fixed meaning or aesthetic standard, it celebrates the plurality of queer experiences, welcoming diverse interpretations. The choice to transform basalt—a traditionally solid, foundational stone—into something fragile and open to interpretation, reflects the resilience and nuance within queer experiences.

Medium: Photomontage.

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over …every living thing that moveth upon the earth” - Book Of Genesis

The Dominion Project is a reverse fable series where men are substituted for domesticated animals in order to explore power dynamics in settler culture. The aim of the project is to capture the way colonial/settler men have dominion, with gestures and positions of dominance and submission taken from the shearing process.

The characters in this image are the shearer, the sheep and the overseer. Nudity is used to emphasise the vulnerability of the shorn, the intimate contact between the shearer and the sheep and the power of the overseer.

Eureka would like to thank Ross. Lindsay and Evan for collaborating in this project and seeks collaborators to transform the series into a performance piece.

Medium: Felt, elastic, and polyfill.

Growing up queer in suburbia, feeling isolated and disconnected from personal queerness and community. On the phone, our voices could meet in an ephemeral, liminal space. A place of exhale. A place inherently queer and trans because we make it. Even if space is so vast and community so far, queerness exists.

In making Transient, I was reaching to integrate all parts of myself as I transition. The intimacy of exploring yourself and connecting with queer community. Your voice changing on T. As queers we change but we can still reach for one another. Our connection grows deeper as we connect deeper to ourselves. The colours and use of felt are playful, lending itself to drag expression. Transient creates a tether to the raw self with irreverent beauty and humour, which for me, is inherently queer.

Medium: C-type photograph.

This series is an inquiry into desire and the coded liminal space of the darkroom as a threshold between energy and materiality. Pre-exposure, the photographic image exists as energy, not form; and is only realized through an alchemical slow dance between silver, salts and light. The tulip stands in for the formal nude; curves and angled shadows mirror the body while petals glisten like wet flesh. The subject is depicted while interrogating the space around it; the interplay of object and shadow emerges only through exposure to light. Black and ruby red reference their primordial beginnings in the darkroom and the emergence from darkness into light. Photography is a referential medium, directing attention to what it signifies rather than to itself. One can argue that it is always about desire; the urge to capture an image and contain it within the boundaries of a frame. The artist’s choices reflect an internal wanting to connect with and create a specific reality, yet a photograph gestures toward a reality that extends beyond this. Proxy for Desire embodies a tension between being and not being, seeing and being seen, and the desire to uncover oneself without being exposed.

Medium: Cotton thread on counted cross-stitch cloth

Begun in 2023, this artwork took ten months to embroider by hand. The work is part of an ongoing series aiming to preserve cancelled queer characters in recent queer TV shows released to streaming platforms then axed. Depicting the character ‘Mingus’ from Queer as Folk (2022), the image is appropriated from an online article promoting the show at the time it released. The time I spent hand-sewing this artwork contrasts the speed at which this one-season US series was dropped, only a few months after premiering in Australia but just a few weeks in other regions.

Medium: Polystyrene, pigment and moss.

Tasty reflects on the lingering trauma of the 1994 police raid on Melbourne’s Tasty nightclub, an event I narrowly avoided but which continues to reverberate through the queer community. Cast from salvaged plastics, the work draws on themes of systemic violence, resilience, and survival—ideas central to my broader practice. It explores how safe spaces are built, threatened, and reimagined in response to ongoing harm, while considering the oppressive forces of surveillance, control, and othering. Tasty stands as both a reflection on past trauma and a broader commentary on the persistence of structural violence and marginalisation.

Medium: Giclée print on cotton rag.

‘He sees an opportunity to escape’ is inspired by the exploits of Andrew George Scott aka Captain Moonlite (1842-1880). The documented history of Scott indicates he was in a relationship with one of his gang members, James Nesbitt. Shot on location in Glenlyon, this series depicts scenes from Captain Moonlite’s time on the run following his escape from Ballarat Prison. Based on the outlaw’s real-life escapades, this work playfully explores and proposes a historical narrative that is only as truthful as I, the queer storyteller, determine it to be.

Medium: wax pastel on paper

Female Trouble examines the classic Hollywood, the underground, and low-budget cult films of 130 years of filmmaking and parades them through a queer (and camp) lens.

Taking a film title referencing women as its subject, this series is a survey of the depiction of the archetypal female through the vehicle of cinema and its sensational ‘turns of phrase’. By reducing the films to only their title, the context is removed (thus illuminated) and reveals popular culture’s obsession of what it is to be fe/male.
The titles ‘Satan Met a Lady’, ‘The Devil is a Woman’ and ‘Chained Girls’ have one thing in common – they promise to personify the damaged, deranged, and dangerous... woman.

The works at Midsumma are a small selection from a larger body of work – 130 film titles – that in their original format mimic the cinema screen from whence they originated.

Medium: Reclaimed stoneware, timber, chain, and barbed wire.

Inspired by medieval relics often found in monasteries, “Devil in a Cabinet” reimagines an ancient custom for the modern queer home. Historically, these cabinets held demonic figures allowing the faithful monks to spit or scratch the devil, externalising their struggles with sin.

This piece transforms that tradition, making the devil a scapegoat for oppressive societal norms and evil gay thoughts. The cabinet offers a safe space to confront internalised guilt and overly-horny ideas.

Medium: Porcelain.

This piece is a new direction in my artistic practice. Until now, my work has shied from any kind of representative form, opting to explore an abstract and almost monastic purity in composition using geometric shapes. I have been claiming this is representative of my lived experience in the built environment, but I realised it’s only one aspect. It’s dipping my toe in when I should be diving in head first. I want to express how vibrant and fantastical my own experience as a queer man is and encourage others to do the same. My experiences are vibrant, colourful and informed by place, but they’re also sexy and full of longing and surreal hopes and impossible dreams, as well as a bit of hurt in there too. This piece is my way of bringing all those emotions and experiences to the surface, creating something that feels real and true and resonates with my community.