2025 Finalists - Midsumma and Australia Post Art Award

Medium(s): 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(s): 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(s): 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(s): 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.