Metropolitan North

Title: Living in the Shade of Decay
Medium: Sculpture
School: Mount Alvernia College (Kedron)

Artist Statement:
My artwork Living in the Shade of Decay is a reflective piece on the fragility and darkness of life. It uses symbolism as a display of the ever-changing seasons of life, and the marching of time towards imminent death. The crow’s skull and lily flower both reflect motifs of death in Western literature and culture, however the crow in other folklore, represents a messenger and an omen of fate. The lily flower is a symbol of purity and love, contrastingly the white lily is commonly used as a funeral flower representing the hope of preserving the innocence of the dead’s soul. The rotten apple and the squashed blackberry symbolise themes of memento mori through depictions of decay and the passing of time, highlighting the impermanence of life as a replicate of the decomposition of the human body and end of a physical life. This artwork reflects on the contrasts of life; how beautiful and destructive it can be.

Title: Carmen
Medium: Painting
School: Brigidine College (Indooroopilly)

Artist Statement:
Titled Carmen, my work seeks to challenge society’s idea of beauty and self-worth, through the representation of a woman many would overlook as they tread the pavement of Brisbane’s West End. Through working in a cultural context, Carmen explores the story of an Indigenous woman, Carmen, whose story is one of hardship, strength and vulnerability, coursing through a life of adversity through homelessness, abuse and mental health challenges. Carmen encourages audiences to challenge their preconceived ideas and internal biases around beauty and human value; representing Carmen as the dignified and beautiful woman she is—who despite adversity, continues to love, laugh and hope. Carmen’s portrait is positioned against a backdrop of woven carpet featuring objects of significance to her, interwoven with designs inspired by native flora. Soft, feminine pastels highlight Carmen’s femininity, supported by flowing linework. Carmen’s gaze travels beyond the canvas’ borders, hopeful of a brighter future.

Title: The Reality of Abstraction
Medium: Drawing
School: Burpengary State Secondary College

Artist Statement:
Viewers of art are amazed by artists who can depict reality in photographic detail in their work. Artists such as CJ Hendry have captivated audiences with their hyperrealistic depictions of everyday objects. The challenge for this work was to represent an image that was essentially abstract in its nature in a hyperrealistic manner, thus challenging viewers to question the image. My work is essentially hyperrealistic in nature, and this particular drawing challenged my usual oeuvre in terms of subject matter. It is a self-portrait drawn from a photograph of me underwater in the bath.

Title: The Eyes are the Window to the Soul
Medium: Film/electronic imaging
School: Kelvin Grove State College

Artist Statement:
'Every day is all there is' (Didion, 1977) and as such, we should choose to appreciate every second of it. The Eyes are the Window to the Soul captures and romanticises small, seemingly insignificant moments and interactions we take for granted, emphasising their beauty with short bursts of mixed-media animation. The work itself is a time-based piece which compiles short, intertwining clips, film-style light-leak transitions, multitracked audio and an original composition to document a sense of nostalgia. Shooting handheld allowed me to organically explore shots which immerse the viewer, combining mainly medium and close-up shots to highlight the intimacy and importance of otherwise ordinary interactions. Additionally, in each mixed-media section, I employed non-traditional layering techniques to create a flickering slideshow of photographs, which appear to dance across the subject, providing a clear visual representation of finding beauty in the mundane.

Title: Out of Body Experience
Medium: Fabric, thread, beads
School: Brisbane Girls Grammar School

Artist Statement:
The unit concept, ’art as alternate’, explores how a different understanding can be applied to the same focus. By alternating critique to simply appreciating the beauty of devotion. Focusing through imposed realities, I question how human-made concepts like devotion create an out-of-body experience. Inspired by Cao’s complex stitchwork and Shaw’s messy textile art, this captures the surreal, out-of-body sensation of devotion. The centre, a bright tone, golden coloured Sacred Heart—borrowed from Roman Catholic iconography, stripped of precept to identify as an emblem of devotion. Large scale, carpeted, bloodied rams surround it, embodying devotion not as gentle but as a consuming force, while collaged, dark rotting mulberries signal devotion’s inevitable decay. These elements explore tension between love, sacrifice, suspended in a state beyond the body and beyond reason. Audience is invited to engage with the conversation of the blurring lines of personal truth and devotion.

Title: Teeth for Teeth
Medium: Painting
School: The Gap State High School

Artist Statement:
Teeth for Teeth is a reflection on the current genocide and inhumane treatment of Palestinians, created by drawing upon the interconnectedness between these people and caged dogs. Through the dogs’ expressions, I’ve represented the feelings—anger, sadness and exhaustion—being a social commentary on Western society’s dehumanisation of people, as inspired by Michael Zavros’ critiques on contemporary consumerist culture. However, I’ve also paired these representations with harsh, vibrant red lighting to symbolise extreme danger, anxiety, overwhelm, inspired by Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro lighting and narration. By placing spaces between the canvas panels, I’ve implied a narrative of the dogs being imprisoned with the audience being free on the other side, reflecting my own perspective of seeing many displaced people reaching out for help online but feeling helpless to make any significant difference, only able to watch.

Title: Making Myth
Medium: Drawing
School: Aspley State High School

Artist Statement:
What’s the first thing you think of when you hear of pop culture? Is it the iconic cinematography that has shaped the film industry or the bold pop art movement? Making Myth visually illustrates the ever-evolving mythical stories and supernatural creatures throughout cultures and how pop culture media has influenced the popularity of these characters. Pop culture refers to popular cultural products and trends transmitted via mass media and widely consumed by the mainstream population. In expressing how pop culture influences the knowledge of myths and creatures, I collected data from a range of people, different in age, gender etc, using a questionnaire. The questionnaire refers to pop culture in relation to movies and TV shows. Making Myth uses inspiration from pop art, fine liner and comic book art to visually represent pop culture as a whole.

Title: Rabbit-Hearted Saint
Medium: Painting
School: Kelvin Grove State College

Artist Statement:
Rabbit-Hearted Saint is my evolution into art as a potentially healing medium, to reconcile my turbulent relationship with spirituality. Informed by themes of childhood, gender and spirituality, I depict myself in a cathedral-style frame, holding a golden rabbit. Inspired by the visual language of medieval altarpieces, I reimagined myself in the place of a saint, centralising the self as the arbiter of faith and protector of my own. The golden halo and rabbit, alongside the arched board reference ideas of divinity and vulnerability, while the androgynous figure challenges conventional ideals of gender and patriarchal spirituality. By blending historical symbolism with personal and emotional themes, I invite viewers to reconsider where spirituality is derived from. Ultimately, this work reflects my interest in how art transforms old symbols into new narratives, encouraging viewers to reflect on how spiritual maturity derives from personal empowerment, rather than institutions of faith.

Title: Flayed Carcass
Medium: Sculpture
School: Queensland Academy for Creative Industries

Artist Statement:
Inspired by the works of Tamara Kostianovsky, Flayed Carcass speaks to the concealment of animal suffering amidst modern consumer society. We do not like to think of ourselves as being a part of something so gruesome and violent, so I think that we often choose to look away from issues that concern us as they provoke uncomfortable emotions. Flayed Carcass entices the viewer to look forward and to come eye to eye with the unsettling. Rather unassumingly, this piece holds an enigmatic allure which encourages the viewer to take notice of its intricate details. In this sculpture, I have cannibalised the remnants of consumer society, stitching together a new life for the unwanted. I produced this piece as I believe that it is important that we acknowledge our own role in the ever-expanding narrative of consumer culture.

Title: Changes Within Time
Medium: Installation
School: Hillbrook Anglican School (Enoggera)

Artist Statement:
Changes Within Time explores the connection between past and present memories and the emotional connection to physical spaces like our homes. My work is representative of my past and present home, shown through the use of shadows, projections, old and new floor plans and unconventional renovation materials. The process of collecting these materials and arranging them in the rough shape of my present house, allowed me to reflect on the time and effort that went into choosing these materials, whilst also using the floor plans and projections to demonstrate the changes that occurred throughout the process of the renovations. My artwork is overall reflective of both my past and present homes and is also representative of how we can be emotionally connected to our homes, and other spaces that share deep meaning.

Title: NFD – Not Further Defined
Medium: Painting and sculpture
School: Queensland Academy for Creative Industries

Artist Statement:
This digital print in a tacit expression of identity that responds and reflects upon my experience as a Persian Australian. It signals the mixed perceptions and negative stereotypes that have been attributed to me and often my family members due to our mixed Eastern and European heritages. Employing the universal symbol of unique identity, my fingerprint, I have recontextualised the portrait form and combined it with a photographic montage of my father’s eyes. Connotations of perceived identity are left for the viewer to draw their own conclusions and understandings. The work challenges public perceptions of belonging and the challenges of existing in a third space, even for free thinking educated people. The title, Not Further Defined, is taken from government documents to signal a lack of knowing how to classify our ethnic identity.

Title: Spirits of Kokopo
Medium: Installation
School: Marist College Ashgrove

Artist Statement:
Papua New Guinea is my home. It has a deep history and is known for its richness in culture and traditions. My artworks aim to share the events and customs that have shaped me. I am constantly inspired by my culture, and I have an ongoing interest to learn more about my family’s customs and traditions. The Tubuan which features in my work, is an iconic masked figure which has always caught my interest. It represents a female spirit involved in rituals and dances and serves as a symbol for the Tubuans which took part in the Kututabu ceremony at a family funeral. The inclusion of the single mask brings knowledge of the many mask festivals and fire dances taking place throughout the year. It provides a sense of patriotism through combining colours of the East New Britain Province and Papua New Guinean flags.

Title: This and A: (Beer/Cig/Hand)
Medium: Painting
School: Brisbane Grammar School

Artist Statement:
This and a Beer/Cig/Hand confronts the glorification of addiction in contemporary culture through 3 paintings of high-speed crashes: Christian Fittipaldi’s 1997 wreck, Zhou’s Stake F1 crash in 2024, and Steve Brooks’ Lotus 91 crash in 2022. At first glance, these paintings seem like mere records of sporting disaster. Yet, the prominent logos -Budweiser, John Player Special, Stake—advertise gambling, drinking and smoking, addictions normalized on social media. Each car is titled with a phrase: ‘This and a Beer,’ ‘This and a Cig,’ ‘This and a Hand,’ satire on current Instagram and Tik Tok trends of glorifying these addictions. The twisted metal and fractured branding expose the harm beneath this glossy façade. Will viewers see only crashes, or will they recognize their own complicity in idolizing these vices? By transforming wreckage into metaphor, my work challenges the audience: will you simply watch, or will you question the culture that fuels it?

Title: Constructed Realities
Medium: Installation
School: St Joseph's College (Brisbane)

Artist Statement:
Technology has transformed every facet of what traditional art once was, expanding both the materials we use and the possibilities available to us. It enables the enhancement, manipulation and reproduction of images, dissolving boundaries between what is real and what is fabricated. We now encounter images that prompt us to question their origins and authenticity. By incorporating nontraditional materials and processes shaped by technological advances, these works demonstrate how contemporary art can be redefined through digital innovation. This investigation reflects a cultural shift in which artists can seamlessly combine new approaches, media and concepts to create works that challenge perception. Where this merging of physical and digital practices will lead remains uncertain, but it signals an era in which technology is not only a tool but a central force in shaping artistic expression.

Title: Fatherhood
Medium: Painting
School: St Joseph's College (Brisbane)

Artist Statement:
This large-scale painting reflects identity, growth, and the determination to rise above personal hardship. It evolved from previous work, carrying a deeper emotional resonance. The composition focuses on 3 central male figures, my grandfather, father and myself, while the detailed, white-outlined forms of friends represent overlapping influences. The contrast between dark, muted tones and areas of light reinforces the tension between loss and hope. The composition guides the viewer through the narrative, from my home in the upper left, anchoring the work in memory and the interconnected relationships that shape my journey. Texture adds depth, evoking the layered complexity of family history. The work captures the sadness of my father’s absence and the enduring guidance of my grandfather, yet it also holds the determination of a boy choosing to set aside pain and succeed. Fatherhood tells the story of a life in transition.

Title: Bloodshed
Medium: Sculpture
School: Everton Park State High School

Artist Statement:
Silence fills the air, familiarity sinks in my skin, eyes weeping once more, it settles underneath my blood, like fire set aflame, sorrows of the fallen, 'I thought I was okay, that I was better' I say once more.

Title: Mother, Daughter, Holy Spirit
Medium: Installation
School: Clayfield College

Artist Statement:
Identity vs Ethnicity explores the layered experience of growing up between Moroccan and Australian cultures. My work combines Moroccan window patterns, representing memory, protection and spiritual tradition, with the Sydney Harbour Bridge, symbolising belonging, place and openness. Together, these forms express the tension and harmony of cultural identity. The triptych format creates a shifting lens: the side panels fold inward to obscure a transferred image of a woman’s eyes, visible only from a certain viewpoint. This illusion invites the audience to look into, not just at, culture. Depending on perspective and light, the meaning changes—reflecting how identity is never fixed or wholly visible. By drawing on the Islamic tradition of aniconism, I replaced figurative imagery with patterns and abstract symbols, honouring cultural values while exploring them through contemporary materials. This work asks viewers to reflect on how heritage, faith and lived experience combine to shape personal identity.

Title: Suffocating Silence
Medium: Installation
School: St Benedict's College (Mango Hill)

Artist Statement:
Suffocating Silence explores the feeling of isolation and the way our thoughts can slowly take over when we’re alone. I used black ink on paper printing words like alone, unwanted, overwhelmed and suffocated. As the words stretch across the scroll, they begin to lose their meaning, dissolving into noise, a heavy, overwhelming cloud of emotion. The repetition shows how thoughts can spiral, growing louder and more intense, until they trap you in your own mind. The paper becomes crowded and messy, symbolising the way overthinking can feel endless and impossible to escape. Suffocating Silence shows how isolation isn’t just being physically alone, it’s being stuck with nothing but your thoughts, and how those thoughts can begin to swallow you whole. In the density of the text, I hope viewers feel not only the weight of these emotions, but also a shared understanding that in recognizing the suffocation, we begin to breathe again.

Title: ¡Hay más que decir!
Medium: Painting
School: Albany Creek State High School

Artist Statement:
El Salvador is a country often portrayed through television as inherently violent. Most media highlights El Salvador’s violent history without ever acknowledging the deep-rooted cultural elements that make El Salvador feel like home. Technology’s focus solely on bloodshed reinforces the narrative that Central Americans are violent by nature and leaves no room for true immersion in the beauty of Salvadoran culture and traditions. This is the thing that truly runs in our blood—food, festivities and family—like cords connecting technology. This is not a focus on Salvadoran nature itself but on the shackles of misinterpretation that technology can carry. I invite the audience to look deeper into the red string as not only representing bloodshed but as a bloodline that connects these televisions and paints a fuller narrative of El Salvador. Technological one-dimensionality is a negative social facet often overlooked when discussing El Salvador’s portrayal.

Title: Posh Map
Medium: Painting
School: Music Industry College (Fortitude Valley)

Artist Statement:
The posh species prioritises prestige and luxury over general fulfilment. Their inner-city habitat—a testament to their never-ending pursuit of money, pride and validation. They hunt in packs, luring their prey as the apex predator of the common man species. Tempting them with the same luxuries they possess by default, only to trap them in their web, simultaneously stripping the common man’s livelihood and happiness as they labour to repay astronomical mortgages.

Title: This is Me
Medium: Installation
School: Clayfield College

Artist Statement:
In my artistic practice I explore identity as something layered, unseen and always changing. I use symbols, patterns and personal objects to represent an identity that has been shaped by both Papua New Guinea and Australian cultures. By using traditional and contemporary materials and processes like mixed media, layering and painting, I represent my deep roots of identity and transformation. The portrait is now present allowing for my ancestry to be shaped through the surrounding symbols. The materials that grow from the figure like roots that mirror ceremonial tattoos, woven patterns and traditional items echoing forms of a totem pole. This suggests that our identity is carried and inherited. The pink and purple tones represent my femininity as a bicultural woman. Each panel connects through elements of the sky, sea and land echoing Pacific art. This work is a personal reflection of pride, grounded in cultural memory and personal expression.

Title: Faces of Beauty
Medium: Installation
School: Nerangba Valley State High School

Artist Statement:
Faces of Beauty explores the theme of enhancing beauty using the natural world. This piece explores the various art forms, concepts and media that are associated with femininity and holistic beauty culture. These concepts are shown through traditionally feminine art processes such as botanical dyeing, embroidery, pressing flowers and various types of printmaking. The 2-part display of this work is a critical feature—it encourages the audience to interact with the work and view it from multiple perspectives. This feature encourages the audience to view each element close up so they can better understand the meaning of the work. The attention to detail throughout this piece encourages the audience to take time to view the work and appreciate the intricacy of each piece. This underpins the delicate connection between nature and beauty.

Title: Quarantine
Medium: Sculpture
School: St Peters Lutheran College (Indooroopilly)

Artist Statement:
Quarantine is an exploration of the human psyche manifested in physical spaces in post-pandemic society. With the Information Age and the isolating COVID-19 pandemic, life has changed dramatically, and our private living spaces have morphed in conjunction to our psyche. The sculptural aspect of the work reflects this through its rigid structures which contain glimpses into microcosms of private spaces, including the bedroom, the study and the toilet. These intricately handmade rooms represent the unique manifestation of my human psyche in physical space and are contained in claustrophobic boxes to symbolise the separation of the self from the outside world. The lighting of the sculpture combined with the photographs of empty rooms cast in vivid lights conveys a melancholic loneliness which reflects post-pandemic society.

Title: Deluded Self
Medium: Photography
School: Albany Creek State High School

Artist Statement:
Delusion is a false belief that is held despite evidence and truth to prove the contrary. It’s often used as a mask, a way of hiding from ourselves and us from the world. My work, Deluded Self, a seamless three-panel image of my face distorted and crumpled, is an exploration not of self-identity but of self-delusion. Each warped iteration is a presentation of misperception, both of my own and of the people around me. How our own delusions can force the people around us to see us differently. In a culture that’s built on illusions, false narratives and inherited myths, delusion becomes survival. Furthermore, this repetition of the face across the three forms becomes a metaphor for how often we produce the same mistaken image of ourselves and of others. This work asks the audience to contemplate what is lost when we become complicit in our own delusions.

Title: Blooming Odyssey
Medium: Costume Design
School: Nerangba Valley State High School

Artist Statement:
My wearable art is inspired by the diverse flora of the countries I have called home. Each hand-folded origami flower symbolises a chapter of my life—moments rooted in the landscapes, languages and cultures that have shaped me. The metallic sheen of the gown reflects both strength and adaptation, capturing how I’ve carried fragments of each place forward as I’ve moved through new environments. My artwork represents travel beyond the mirror of time—a visual timeline of memory and transformation. While each flower is culturally distinct, together they form a cohesive tapestry, just as the many parts of my identity coexist.

Title: Below the Barre
Medium: Drawing
School: Kelvin Grove State College

Artist Statement:
Ballet is often seen as the embodiment of grace and effortless elegance, but beneath the beauty of every pirouette and plié lies pain. Below the Barre explores this duality, inviting viewers to confront the concealed cost of pursuing unattainable perfection. Soft charcoal drawings of my ballerina sister evoke the fleeting poetry of dance, juxtaposed with stark medical imaging that grounds the work in raw reality. Anatomical charcoal drawings are digitally inverted and printed on acetate. On closer inspection, tissue fragments are layered with scans of delicate tulle, subtly revealing the tension between ballet’s material ideals and its physical toll—flesh, bone and tissue are sacrificed for the art form. Contrast and emphasis heighten the dissonance between what is performed and what is endured, while form and texture create space for vulnerability and reflection. This contemporary inquiry resonates universally, speaking to the cultural pressure to appear composed while bearing immense strain.

Title: All the Warnings, All the Witnesses
Medium: Painting
School: Mt St Michael's College (Ashgrove)

Artist Statement:
We are causing more harm than we know. Earth’s average temperature has increased by 1.5 degrees since pre-industrial revolution, and humans continue to release 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. Earth is bleeding. The implications exist every day without us recognising them. Ocean acidification, polluted air filling our lungs—both shrouded by the innocence of a shining day. Then the ones we notice, droughts and flooding rains. My series of paintings encapsulates these experiences, both obvious and unseen, harnessing tree sap as a contemporary medium. Collected from trees in my yard, this sap, transformed to varnish, symbolises the blood oozing from wounds inflicted by society's negligence towards human-caused climate change. Inspired by Giuseppe Peppenone's use of natural materials and William Robinson’s paintings, each painting, with linear woven fibres, symbolic of Earth’s vast human population, with frayed/burnt edges representing our planet's disintegration at the hands of society.

Title: Burning Metropolis
Medium: Installation
School: Brisbane Grammar School

Artist Statement:
The Styrofoam used to construct Burning Metropolis has been carved from a single block of waste—originally destined for landfill. Concre​te takes 100 years to decompose, whereas foam takes at least 500. It means the very buildings in Burning Metropolis will outlast the real New York City, proving how wasteful it is for so many products to be made from Styrofoam. This isn’t a condemnation of Styrofoam itself, but of how we use it: once, briefly, then toss it aside. The same goes for plastic. Both are durable by design yet wasted by habit. Further, industrial waste, often laced with toxic chemicals, poisons marine ecosystems and devastates biodiversity. What starts as a vibrant tribute to New York gradually collapses under the corrosive power of acetone—a deliberate act that mirrors the silent destruction chemical pollution inflicts on our oceans. Burning Metropolis is both a memorial and a warning.

Title: I’m Full
Medium: Painting
School: The Gap State High School

Artist Statement:
Consumption, a key part of everyday life, has increasingly been amplified by social media and the normalisation of hyper-consumerist culture, specifically in relation to food. I’m Full depicts a large bowl of spaghetti against a dark, minimalistic background. A noticeable portion is missing from the centre, small by comparison to how much was served. The use of realism draws a likeness to real spaghetti, allowing the audience to easily identify the universal ‘comfort dish’. The simple, light ochre centre where the portion was removed, contrasts with the detailed spaghetti and meat around it, drawing the audience to what is absent. This alternate representation of food, by looking at what remains, criticises the modern Western ideals of abundance and indulgence. The deliberate use of negative space, prompts the audience to reflect on their own habits and experiences with food waste, encouraging more mindful choices in the future.

Title: When the Stars Disappear
Medium: Film/electronic imaging
School: Everton Park State High School

Artist Statement:
I like stars. You probably like stars too. I want to take them for myself. I will. You won’t. What will happen if I take them? Will the world stay bright? Or will darkness overcome it? I guess we will find out. After all, we were born to inherit the stars.

Title: Perception is Subjective
Medium: Sculpture
School: Brisbane Girls Grammar School

Artist Statement:
In response to the concept ‘art as knowledge’, and the way we perceive and interpret the world through the visual, I explored my focus ‘human behaviour in art’. Two artists, Patrick Hughes and Thomas Deininger were researched, along with their contemporary contexts. The interesting forms of Hughes's work with Deininger’s use of depth, highly influenced the development of my work. Their understandings of environmental issues, and perception, affected my artwork. Research on global warming and current conversations about environmental damage, informed my final work. Perception is Subjective depicts my focus by revealing how people choose to interact with a problem, issue or complication. Symbols of white and clear coloured steps were used to add mystery and invites viewers to wonder what the greener side is like. By viewing the world through clear walls, the audience is prompted to think: what will my future look like?

Title: Seeing In Time
Medium: Painting
School: Queensland Academy for Creative Industries

Artist Statement:
Exploring the ability for time to weather perception and memory, Seeing in Time depicts deteriorating images from my late-grandmother’s photo album. Photography is typically viewed as a medium of truth, capturing brief moments and cementing them in physical reality. Shifting their content, mood, and implications to resonate with viewers in manner likely incongruous with the original moment, the natural corrosion of these images subverts this notion. Weathered by time, memories are also subject to contamination and erosion. Though a photo album aims to remedy this archivally, my paintings explore how the images it houses share a lifespan with the memories they aim to cement. Our interpretations of the images and the narratives that accompany them are layered and elusive—ever evolving. Through painting the ongoing deterioration of the images, the work embodies the nature of remembering the moments captured by them; their potential to shift, dissimulate and adopt new meaning over time.

Title: Your World
Medium: Painting and sculpture
School: Kelvin Grove State College

Artist Statement:
Do you see the world as it is, or as you are? You have a bad morning, and the world is against you—the sky opens up, your bus pulls away, frustration taints your day. Or instead, you receive a compliment at work, laughter flows easily and life seems full of promise. I invite you to step back and observe the world captured in front of you—of rolling green hills and golden blue skies. Stop and pause—I prompt you with not simply a painting, but to look through the different lenses and see alternatively. The same world as bright or dull, focused or unclear. Choose your favourite—it’s as easy as peering through another lens. How do you choose to see?

Title: The Load Men Cary
Medium: Painting
School: St Joseph's College (Brisbane)

Artist Statement:
Through symbolism and contrast, this work challenges toxic portrayals of manhood and critiques the media’s influence. Inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch represents a formative ideal of manhood—intelligent, compassionate and principled, much like my own father. He is well-dressed and composed, symbolising integrity and self-respect. In contrast, the faceless, dishevelled man in the window, represents the loss of identity and purpose in today’s distorted view of masculinity. His facelessness suggests a lack of self-awareness and moral direction, unaware of his role in society. This work calls the audience to reconsider what makes a real man—not dominance or power over others, but the responsibility to act with moral strength. A triptych of young male portraits depicts figures with awkward postures and blank expressions. These subtly unsettling images encourage viewers to empathise with men navigating this divide between conservative notions of manhood and evolving perspectives on gender, identity and emotional vulnerability.

Title: Resurgo Vindico: The Reclamation
Medium: Sculpture
School: Mt Maria College (Mitchelton)

Artist Statement:
Looking out to the horizon isn’t enough—we must look beneath the surface. Beneath the waves lies a world of beauty, power and fragile life. Though vast, the ocean is vulnerable and needs our protection. This work explores nature’s quiet strength as it reclaims what’s been taken. Inspired by Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater sculptures and my growing understanding of marine ecosystems, I’ve created 5 masks using synthetic moss, beads and shells to echo reef textures. These forms transform manmade materials into something organic, symbolising marine resilience. Resurgo Vindico, Latin for 'I rise again, I reclaim', speaks to renewal and restoration. As the ocean regains it​​s strength and beauty, this piece serves as both a tribute and a call to action. I hope to inspire awe and urgency, encouraging viewers to see the ocean not just as a source of life, but as a delicate system needing care.

Title: Hold
Medium: Painting
School: Queensland Academy for Creative Industries

Artist Statement:
Hold centralises the cradling figure of my great-grandmother with a purposefully omitted child to draw attention to her role as the nurturer of many. Having grown up under extreme hardship, she developed a tough resilience, yet always embodied tenderness. Within this work, I forefront her personal experience with the often ignored and undervalued strength in nurturing roles. Although she is depicted in a typically nurturing pose, her facial expression is left intentionally ambiguous, and the colour palette is vivid and bold. This combination is reflective of the fortitude behind her tenderness, ensuring that passivity is avoided, and the artwork is active and powerful. The inclusion of geometric elements guiding the viewer towards the subject, provides imposing tension in contrast with her protective posture. This denotes the simultaneous strength and vulnerability I have long associated with her, and that quietly shapes my understanding of what it means to nurture.

Title: I’m Out
Medium: Drawing
School: Wavell State High School

Artist Statement:
In our culture, the dead interacting with the living is often depicted as a horrifying thought and as something to fear. Due to this, I want to manipulate how people consider a haunting experience by adding humour. Adding humour to horror is not a new concept; however, it reminds people to view hauntings in a different and more light-hearted manner, which I highlight with my stylistic choices. I use lines to direct the audience’s view towards the skull, using a lot of thin lines to create a unique ghostly outline and emphasise it. Through my character, I play with space and movement as she appears to be ‘jumping’ out of the painting, giving the illusion of depth. I also used values of grey to better direct the audience’s focus and attention to the skull and the person’s comically scared face and limbs ‘jumping out’ of the frame.

Title: The Birkin Burden
Medium: Painting
School: The Gap State High School

Artist Statement:
The Birkin Burden explores extinction and endangerment driven by human impact—consumerism and materialism. Research unveils many Hermes Birkin bags require three alligator skins, demonstrating overconsumption and ecological exploitation. Informing my manipulation of visual language, I use realistic rendering, vivid pinks and exaggerated scale to depict an eye-catching Birkin bag, composed against raw plywood. Contrast between acrylic paint and raw plywood juxtaposes opulence with material origin to expose the environmental cost of desire. Tonal shifts—from saturated pinks to muted beiges—heighten the illusion of luxury while revealing an ecological cost. Through expressive choices in colour, scale and composition, I critique the seductive nature of status brands and brutality embedded in their production. By intertwining factual research within aesthetic decisions, I provoke critical dialogue around sustainability, consumption and ethics. This intentional juxtaposition of superficial glamour and material origin invites audience reflection on their complicity in systems that commodify nature and threaten biodiversity.

Title: Signal Lost
Medium: Installation (3 x A2 prints and video)
School: Mt St Michael's College (Ashgrove)

Artist Statement:
Signal Lost explores the destruction of natural landscapes and humanity’s growing disconnection from the environment in the digital age. Drawing from personal experience witnessing nature’s fragility exploited while people remain absorbed by screens, the work critiques society’s passivity amongst ecological collapse. Through a contemporary lens, it combines installation, non-traditional materials, and multisensory elements to reflect environmental chaos and media overstimulation. The installation features prints of my face, scarred by nature and human imprints, alongside virus-like clusters of debris weighing down the face. This reflects lasting harm and shared burdens on our identity and environment. Projected alongside the prints, a video mimics a social media clip with collaged debris and unsettling imagery, confronting viewers with what they ignore. Influenced by artists, Brett McMahon, Levi Van Veluw, Shirin Neshat, Christian Boltanski and Leonardo da Vinci, as well as personal experience, the work centres on discomfort, questioning our role in environmental degradation.

Title: The Met Galah
Medium: Drawing
School: Everton Park State High School

Artist Statement:
My art is almost always made for an audience. So much of the art of today, although rightfully earning its place, brings to light the bleakness in our lives. We are taught our art has to have deep, meaningful undercurrents of what is wrong in this world. We take for granted the hidden gems (or in this case, gemstones) that come from each of our own unique experiences. I am a victim of this thinking. Many are a victim of this thinking. It’s not wrong to portray your negative experiences through creative outlets. More, that it can become exhausting. And before you know it, art starts to become a chore rather than an escape. I started the unit falling into the same trap but managed to end it with something completely unexpected— an artwork by me, for me. Now presenting the Met Galah: Cynthia Erivo, Jenna Ortega and Chirp-pell Roan.

Title: Constructed Conformity
Medium: Sculpture
School: All Hallows' School (Brisbane)

Artist Statement:
Constructed Conformity is an exploration, through a feminist lens, of how learned behaviours and mannerisms are shaped by societal and cultural norms. The printed symbols across the stacked Jenga blocks symbolise rigid but fragile imposed expectations that dictate our lives. The layering of symbols across multiple blocks highlights how these learned behaviours do not exist in isolation but upon one another, shaping identity and self-expression. The printmaking process itself, with the repeated symbols, mirrors the repetitive and ingrained nature of these societal pressures. These shapes challenge the viewer to recognise the constraints. Constructed Conformity invites reflection on how societal constructs shape identity, self-expression, and consider how much behaviour is genuinely autonomous.

Title: Fragmented Familiarity
Medium: Sculpture
School: Brisbane Girls Grammar School

Artist Statement:
This work responds to the concept ‘art as alternate’ and my focus of ‘piecing the puzzle together’ evolved and was further investigated. Angela Palmer and Jess MacNeil inspired me to experiment with personal, formal and contemporary contexts. Through experimentation and research, I explored memory loss and emotional disconnection. Audiences challenge fragmented familiarity and discover the fragility of memory and the quiet of losing a loved one. Layered destruction acts as a visual representation and metaphor for grief, disappearance and loss. Space is manipulated by intentionally not incorporating the temporal lobe, instead words that symbolise disconnection and faded memories with my grandmother fill the space. Viewers engage by physically moving around it, seeing different perspectives. The front shows an almost complete brain, and we wonder the absence of the temporal lobe, the side shows nothingness, emptiness—mirroring what’s left when memory fades. Viewers are left to wonder, what remains when memory fades?

Title: The Ashes
Medium: Installation
School: Indooroopilly State High School

Artist Statement:
The multimedia work The Ashes culminates in an installation that shows the artist’s journey in reclaiming power. A self-help book containing 101 decisions made by the artist is displayed, recording a social experiment on their struggle with indecision with detailed documentation of her feelings of powerlessness. In the centre hangs a wire mobile—a skeletal embodiment of past anxiety, fear and indecision. Projected through it is the violent performance of reclaiming power, the burning of a sculpture covered in 1,500 paper butterflies fashioned from pages of the self-help book. The display is accompanied by a collection of jars filled with the remaining ash—trophies for the audience to admire and fear. Increasing corruption is evident as the artist seeks more control over her life, and the audience questions the excessive use of power, albeit with good intentions. This completes the artist’s journey of self-discovery with more tension than closure.

Title: Fabrication of Nature
Medium: Installation
School: St Paul's School (Bald Hills)

Artist Statement:
Have you ever been camping, hiking or to the beach and wonder why you don’t do it more often? That feeling of quiet longing, that’s disconnection. Where tall trees once shaded us, tall concrete towers rise and house our overconsumption. We no longer fight to survive; we have passed that struggle to our environment, we now replace nature with our artificial stain on the world. Where we once sat and looked up at trees, we now sit on wooden furniture looking down at screens. This artwork captures a pause in our busy lives. The viewer is invited to reflect on their relationship to the natural world. This work exposes how much we produce, consume and discard and how nature has begun to fight back. It’s a version of nature reclaiming what has always been theirs, breaking through artificial layers, revealing the raw, living world beneath.

Title: Puppets
Medium: Painting
School: St Margaret's Anglican Girls School (Ascot)

Artist Statement:
I have used ‘culture as code’ to reflect global societal issues which becomes shared culture in all nations as a result of globalisation. The external influence of war has impacted my art as I reflect and speak for contemporary issues. Puppets comments on the Russian-Ukraine war, the flag colours are coded into the figures in the lower canvas. The middle and upper canvas is a man representing America with puppeteer hands over the figures. This implies that both Russian and Ukraine citizens are victims of war and America is controlling everything from behind. The abstract figures were inspired by Guernica, symbols of war such as tanks and guns were abstracted. Those figures demonstrate both mental and physical ramifications of war highlighting the devastating impacts of war.

Title: Who Bared Their Brains to Heaven
Medium: Sculpture
School: IES College (Spring Hill)

Artist Statement:
This piece is inspired by Tony Kushner’s, Angels in America (www.ntathome.com). This is a play that means a lot to me, its message about hope, love and justice is very pertinent, not only to the time it was written but also our own cultural and political landscape. I chose to create a textile work due to a monologue in the play that imagines tapestry as a work of extreme devotion, something that honours its subject due to its beauty and necessary time consumption. I chose to depict the angel as otherworldly, and the man in a more realistic fashion. I achieved this through different embroidery techniques, to demonstrate the themes of difference and overwhelming power that the angel represents.