Charlie Miller is a proud Kanolu man based in Naarm whose cultural mark-making is rare yet strikingly poignant. Charlie explores the journeys we make back to Country, as well as the growth we find in the Country we are placed on. Charlie refocuses cultural importance to the living things we call our ancestors; plants, animals, undulating mountain ranges, and the deep carvings of our rivers.

My name’s Nick, I like to paint and live my life. Painting is calling, painting is performance, and it makes me calm. Customary, continuity, contemporary.

F**k ya, I’m an artist.

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“Pitcha Makin Fellas are all different people with different stories to tell. We break down the generalisations about Blackfellas. We are learning about our past as we go. We’re making for a better future for all of us now. We’re making art, no bullshit.“

Pitcha Makin Fellas are an art collective based on Wadawurrung land in Ballarat, Victoria. The Fellas are about making good art and telling interesting stories; they look at a range of different issues from friendship, food, family, Country, mystery, politics, football and nature.

More than that, painting with the Pitcha Makin Fellas is a way to help encourage and develop fine, strong people who work constructively, creatively and carefully for Community.

Kee Mansell is a Nipaluna based visual merchandiser who describes her creative practice as a visual representation of her growth, cultural journey, and her strong affinity with country. Kee feels that her necessity to create art finds itself in the often unnoticed beauty of the natural world, and by using ephemeral materials, endeavours to create an environment that places her audience in her shoes, as an artist and as an Indigenous Australian.

3000 kilometres from her home in the Top Western Cluster of the Torres Strait Islands, Tymaniah Newman revives her community from the Maluyigal Nation through poignant imagery, which she develops here in Naarm months after taking the photographs on Country. This carefully timed and intentional practice is completely personal; it is derived from an internal demand to feel the presence of her community, whilst living and studying so far from home.

As a proud Ngunnawal woman based in Naarm, Hope Constable has spent the past three years studying Indigenous Studies and Creative Writing at Melbourne University, steadying her creative practice in a firm resistance to the colonial state. Using the English language, a tool forced onto Aboriginal communities with the intent to replace ancestral language, Hope is cutting yet firm in her written expression.

Alena Ozies-Landers is an emerging artist based in Naarm, her Country is Broome, WA. Her creative practice is founded by her Noongar/Djugan knowledge and cultural identity, which she continually develops through her own discovery of what it means to exist as an Aboriginal woman in Naarm; a city more different in feeling than kilometres to Broome. Alena pushes the boundaries of contemporary practice through her limitless resourcefulness and refusal of western conventionality.

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