North Coast

Title: Benches
Medium: Film/electronic imaging
School: Coolum State High School

Artist Statement:
Liminal spaces convey emotions of solitude, loneliness and peacefulness in often eerie-seeming transitional spaces. Benches, a digital animation, emphasises these same emotions and incites feelings of peace and isolation for the audience. This animation expresses the slow, even hesitant movements of the character through the quiet, transitional spaces of the Brisbane Botanical Gardens. Through a personal and contemporary context and utilising bird tweets, traffic sounds and footsteps as background sound, the artwork exudes peacefulness and reveals the lack of humans present in places—benches—specifically designed for habitation and highlights the lack of people in inherently human spaces.

Title: My Rabbit’s Life
Medium: Oil painting and found objects
School: Matthew Flinders Anglican College (Buderim)

Artist Statement:
Nostalgia is a space where past and present selves sit together, offering clarity in times of transition. To find security and comfort, we can often draw ourselves back to nostalgic times and reminisce. As a student growing into a young woman, my mind frequently wanders to my younger self. This work explores a return to childhood memories for comfort and clarity, representing a quiet dialogue between who I am, who I once was and who I’m becoming. Through personal symbols such as my mother’s furniture, paintings and the stories they hold, I sit by objects that shaped me. I return to the past not to relive it, but to better understand the girl who quietly shaped the woman I’m becoming, captured in a soft echo of memory and introspection. Through this work, I invite audiences to consider their own inner child, and the tender strength found when we look back.

Title: Licensed
Medium: Drawing
School: Immanuel Lutheran College (Buderim)

Artist Statement:
Licensed is a multi-image coloured pencil artwork on kraft paper that reflects the freedom of gaining a licence and the individuality that develops through travel. The work explores how driving creates shared experiences, offering a sense of connection that many can relate to. The intended audience response is one of reflection, encouraging viewers to draw on their own memories of travel and connection. Influenced by Yeung Tong Lung’s 360°, which fragments city life into detailed moments rather than a single view, the piece adopts a layout that mirrors the natural movement of the eye. This approach gives the drawings both realism and believability, enhancing the concept’s impact. Through its focus on a universal mode of travel, Licensed connects personal journeys with broader ideas of interconnectedness, demonstrating how ordinary experiences can link individuals through common understanding and shared perspective.

Title: Pink Tape
Medium: Painting
School: Nambour State College

Artist Statement:
The work Pink Tape addresses femininity and the disconnect with nature. I have created this work to explore how people interact with nature. In this portrait of my sister Holly, she is not visible nor are there any physical interaction between her and the lilies, as she holds them with the sheet. This is a disconnect between people and nature, and how the modern age sanitises our connection with nature. In conventional portraits the subject is seen. Instead of focusing on the subject I have chosen to highlight the flowers she is holding. Often nature is used as background fodder in portraits, so I have reversed this role. I have used the hot pink sheet to connect the portrait to Holly, and the idea of femininity within the drawing.

Title: Vessels of Fear
Medium: Film/electronic imaging
School: Burnside State High School

Artist Statement:
Vessels of Fear is a multimedia exploration of the body’s physical response to fear through a contemporary and personal context. I focused on the 2 major organs affected by the sympathetic nervous system, the lungs and heart. I used textured tissue paper, thread, ink, hot glue and acrylic paint on wood to represent the unpredictable experience of fear through the textured surfaces. I photographed each piece at different stages of the artwork to construct an animated piece that expands and contracts simultaneously with my own heartbeat and breath. Incorporating my own heartbeat and breath reinforces the personal context and uncontrollable nature of fear. These animations are projected onto a human chest, turning the body into a living canvas. This way of displaying is unusual, and making the internal organs visible from the outside immerses the viewer into the body’s biological reaction to the emotion of fear.

Title: 50% Off
Medium: Installation
School: Fraser Coast Anglican College (Wondunna)

Artist Statement:
My artwork reclaims Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade to confront the emptying of meaning from sacred Indigenous objects. Once grounded in ceremony, Country, and ancestral knowledge, items such as the boomerang and didgeridoo are now mass-produced, sold in tourist shops and exploited by those outside the culture. Inspired by Duchamp’s Fountain, I reimagined hand-cut boomerangs painted with slogans like '50% OFF' and 'Sorry Day Sale'. These satirical phrases lay bare how sacred symbols are reduced to cheap souvenirs; their spiritual weight erased for profit. The use of bold colours and retail-style signage mimics consumer advertising, while the empty hangers stand as a haunting reminder of absence; the emptiness left when culture is commodified. For me, this work is not only protest but a deeply personal act of reclamation. It asks: when our sacred stories are sold, what remains; and who holds the right to decide?

Title: Family Portraits
Medium: Painting
School: Sunshine Coast Grammar School (Forest Glen)

Artist Statement:
The world portrayed through a screen appears ‘perfect’. A false reality built upon perfect people, crafted to suck us into a dimension where we are made to feel united. Family Portraits displays how we become obsessed with the lives of people on screen to the extent that we know them better than our family. Furthermore, the Rococo portraits establish the postmodern world we live in, as the false sense of reality from the Rococo movement remains relevant in today’s screens. Family portraits used to celebrate the people we call our family or share blood with, though now we value screen time over family, videos engage us more than siblings, and we know people through media rather than actual experiences. Screens offer us a luxurious dream that feeds us the hope of a fake reality. We fall into this trap till the family portraits that once made our reality disappear.

Title: Fed to Fit In
Medium: Painting
School: Aldridge State High School

Artist Statement:
Through personal and cultural context this artwork explores the emotions, identity and cultural conflicts of a young Asian woman raised in a Western lifestyle. Fed to Fit In depicts a woman throwing up an exaggerated stream of pasta and eggs to represent my Italian and Korean heritage along with other Western foods such as pizza and burgers. These foods represent more than just meals, but the cultural, emotional and societal ‘ingredients’ we’re forced to ingest daily. After viewing the Vomit Girl series by Filipino artist Mai Nguyễn-Long at the Triennial exhibition at GOMA, I was inspired to portray my story through a grotesque exaggeration. I want the viewer to question the limits of consumption; what we hold back, and what inevitably spills out.

Title: Prometheus’s Creation
Medium: Drawing
School: Baringa State Secondary College

Artist Statement:
From a young age, I’ve personally loved the exploration of Greek mythology, inspiring my traditional styles. This piece, Prometheus’s Creation, is representative of the story of Prometheus and the Theft of Fire, a prominent narrative within Greek mythology, following his defiance of Zeus. My triptych follows Prometheus’s story displaying both figures within the first half of the piece, demonstrating his part in man’s creation in the form of pottery, the kiln firing illustrating man’s gift of fire. Conversely, the bottom half of the triptych stylistically references olden Greek vases, often constituting many of the stories known in Greek mythology today. The owl characterises Prometheus, embodying wisdom, the eagle characterises Zeus, embodying authority.

Title: City Life
Medium: Painting
School: Nambour State College

Artist Statement:
Daily life in the city unfolds through fragments, moments of pause, fleeting encounters and the silent architecture that holds them. This series depicts painted scenes with embroidered grids, weaving deliberate barriers directly into the surface, creating an incomplete image, inviting the viewer to question how cities shape how people meet, separate and coexist. Stitched threads represent the boundaries, divisions and unseen structures that shape urban experience. What is hidden, what is revealed and what lies between becomes a space of tension. The contrast between soft textile and rigid surface reflects the ongoing tension between natural and human-made environments, where delicate threads intervene in concrete spaces to expose how urban life unsettles the landscapes it occupies. City Life suggests that the city is never whole, it is layered, rebuilt and continuously changed by those who move through it.

Title: What it Means to be One if We Are Many
Medium: Installation
School: Sunshine Coast Grammar School (Forest Glen)

Artist Statement:
‘How do you see yourself?’ A question we all encounter at some point in our life, yet which few of us, if any, truly know how to answer. What It Means to Be One If We Are Many centres on the fragmented construction of identity, unmasking how we are influenced by our experiences, surroundings, memories and influences. Four radically different figures, a time-wise man, a young-girl seized with insecurity, a bird symbolising bold freedom and a classical interpretation of Venus de Milo representing idealised beauty, their identities juxtaposing, their characters merge. These personas don’t seek coherence, yet as their faces, limbs and torsos intertwine, they reinforce the complex, multi-faced nature of identity. As they spin into odd combinations of one another, the piece resists the idea of a singular, stable identity. Instead, it represents the building blocks that constructs one’s identity, leading us to question ‘what it means to be one, if we are many?’

Title: Future in Two Frames
Medium: Digital illustration
School: Matthew Flinders Anglican College (Buderim)

Artist Statement:
Humanity must find a balance between the organic and the algorithmic. Artificial intelligence has become a fast-growing staple in contemporary culture, slowly becoming more pervasive throughout human life and creativity. Future in Two Frames is a digital artwork that explores humanity's need for art, creativity and its economic role. A balance needs to be established between AI and human creativity to mutually benefit each other. The blue television lens represents humanity, within it a boy fishing and a woman riding a bicycle, evoking a time when the only conscious creators were humanity. The red lens focuses attention on the impending future of artificial intelligence. The robot figure symbolises its growing influence over our perceptions and creative processes. Without the lens, neither side dominates, but they merge, a symbolic balance point where human and machine could coexist, enhancing one another. This intersection reflects our uncertain future: where equilibrium shouldn’t be assumed.

Title: Help Yourself
Medium: Painting
School: Sunshine Beach State High School

Artist Statement:
Two figures sit in stillness—both are me. One braids the other's hair, a quiet act of care that echoes a deeper truth: I am my own support. This painting explores the weight of solitude in both a personal and cultural context, where comfort is self-made, and connection must come from within. The monochromatic blue palette intensifies a sense of vulnerability and melancholy, nodding to Picasso’s blue period and echoing a numb quietness beneath the surface. Inspired by Frida Kahlo’s duality in The Two Fridas, I reflect not on identity divided, but on self as both giver and receiver of comfort. In this work, I invite the viewer to sit in the stillness, to feel the ache of self-reliance, and consider where we each turn when there is no one else to reach for.

Title: Absence
Medium: Sculpture
School: Coolum State High School

Artist Statement:
This body of work critiques the mindlessness of modern consumption within a contemporary cultural context. Headless, faceless figures push trolleys in silent unison, their identical movement echoing the conformity of mass consumer behaviour. Across from them, seated figures among paper bags reflect a later stage possession stripped of meaning. The divide between the 2 groups mirrors the journey from pursuit to acquisition, where individuality dissolves in both states. Drawing from Kruger’s satirical clarity, Giacometti’s fragile forms and Fleury’s branded symbolism, the work uses imperfection and handmade textures to resist the glossy ideals of advertising. The absence of faces removes personal identity, reducing the figures to embodiments of their purchases. This physical and conceptual separation underscores the cycle of buying and owning, exposing consumerism’s quiet power to shape behaviour and self-worth.

Title: Through Her Eyes
Medium: Mixed media
School: Sunshine Coast Grammar School (Forest Glen)

Artist Statement:
I am a mosaic of everyone I’ve ever met, shaped by not only who I am, but by who the world tells me to be. Nine faces, my friends, my mirrors, layered in fluorescent chaos, masked in unauthentic features. Brunette turned blonde, bare turned botched, each face distorted representing the pressure to glow up, fit in, be more. Their jealous, sad eyes looking around, silently judging, envying and comparing. Written over are the comments and thoughts of our generation, ‘trending’, ‘not enough’, ‘new look’, echoes of posts, critiques and internal thoughts. Each layer becomes a mask, the thicker the paint, the harder to see the girl underneath. Through her eyes embodies sonder. On display, always seen, but never truly known. We see others through filtered gazes, unspoken expectations, the female gaze, one that watches, compares and wounds deeper. So, we perform, layer by layer, until we lose the girl underneath.

Title: Contain Her
Medium: Painting
School: Nambour State College

Artist Statement:
Feminine identity is deeply woven into our culture, celebrated, criticised and continually redefined. While femininity can be empowering, it’s often reshaped into something harmful, reinforcing norms that pressure women to conform to unrealistic ideals. My work challenges this narrative through an alternate perspective. The subject of the painting is a close friend, captured in a moment of transition from girlhood to womanhood, a stage that’s both inspiring and relatable for many women. Her portrait is pressed against a glass frame, smudging her makeup and distorting her expression, the very image culture demands we perfect. In this moment, she is smudged, raw and real. Femininity is stripped of its polish, revealing something honest and human. Through this artwork, I reject the notion that women are defined solely by material beauty, instead highlighting the tension between societal expectations and the evolving nature of feminine identity.

Title: ERFENIS
Medium: Film/electronic imaging
School: Burnside State High School

Artist Statement:
ERFENIS explores generational trauma, and the connections and patterns found in contemporary society that trace back to our family histories. The short film depicts imagery of my families' experiences during the apartheid, where my grandma said the strategy was to ‘divide and conquer’, creating separation in their society and manipulating history and information to control the masses. This and the mistreatment of those not deemed white by the government are found throughout the film, through imagery of events inspired by real events experienced by my family that I carry through inheritance of their culture and memory.

Title: Eye of the Beholder
Medium: Interactive collage
School: St James Lutheran College (Urraween)

Artist Statement:
This artwork reflects the dichotomy of life and death, and the line in which we, as people walk between. The coral cay Lady Musgrave is home to a species of tree that periodically blooms beautiful sticky flowers called Pisonias. These trees are home to a bird called the Black Noddy Tern. They share a symbiotic relationship, in which the terns provide fertiliser through their droppings. However, when the trees do not receive enough nutrients, they release sticky flowers to entangle the terns and force them on the island so they cannot fly, then using their decomposing bodies as fertiliser. This almost parasitic relationship inspired me to view the way humans also interact with local flora and fauna throughout our world. Death of the terns provides life for the trees, and in turn the trees provide sanctuary and life for nesting terns, who use their leaves in nests. However, death of nature provides only luxuries for humans, new housing developments, car parks, resources and ingredients for future landfill. And we often give nothing back in return. So, what if the environment could fight back?

Title: The Real Truth
Medium: Painting
School: Immanuel Lutheran College (Buderim)

Artist Statement:
The Real Truth examines cultural deception in the age of technology, focusing on how humanity’s relationship with nature has been negatively affected. With the rise of AI-generated images, false representations of wildlife circulate widely, convincing many viewers who cannot detect the signs of manipulation. Inspired by Alex Colville, whose work presents realistic experiences through an unrealistic style, I reversed this approach by depicting unrealistic experiences in a truthful style. While computer-generated images are inherently false, our brains instinctively perceive them as real at first glance. The audience’s engagement progresses through 3 stages: initial belief, questioning as they notice discrepancies and finally reaching an understanding of The Real Truth behind the image. This process encourages viewers to reflect critically, not only on the artwork itself but also on the reliability of what they encounter on social media, prompting them to reconsider their assumptions about nature and reality.

Title: Serenity
Medium: Painting
School: St Andrew's Anglican College (Peregian Springs)

Artist Statement:
Serenity explores my emotional connection to the natural environment that surrounds my home. Personal connections to memories, love and happiness resonate through formal abstract representation, textural surfaces and emotive colours. Using a palette of soft and warm hues, I aim to evoke the calmness and peace that is found in moments of stillness and reflection. The thick impasto application invites the viewers to engage physically and emotionally with the surface, as the raised forms echo the depth of feeling that is embedded in personal and collective memory. My method of application is intuitive and expressive, allowing the paint to guide the process as much as the subject matter. Serenity is tactile and immersive encouraging the audience to feel as much as they see.

Title: Teeth, Story, Bed
Medium: Painting
School: Siena Catholic College (Sippy Downs)

Artist Statement:
Can you remember that delicious feeling, snuggled, warm in bed, drifting away to a whimsical tale? The focus of my artwork, Teeth, Story, Bed, is to transcend the familiar to evoke a sense of place and time; being read to by parents evokes memories of childhood. My work can be viewed through formal, personal and cultural contexts, exploring the human condition—simplistic moments that build parent-child relations, realised as the most influential to one’s conditioning. The formal context influenced my use of chiaroscuro, a Renaissance technique, portraying the fragility and intimacy of relationships, while Bernard Siciliano’s Social Network inspired my use of realism and depiction of human connection. My work is a personal portrayal of the innocence of a child's world—uncorrupted by the seeping toxicities and hardships of life; contemplation on the innocent journey of childhood helps you know yourself in a present place and time.

Title: Night Out
Medium: Drawing
School: Nambour State College

Artist Statement:
This series of artworks explore queer relationships through Macy and Jess, who represent femininity in femme queer relationships. Their relationship is subject to gender constructs as they enjoy a night out as a queer couple. In society it’s not normalised for a queer couple to show affection in public. This work rejects that mainstream held viewpoint. This work highlights social constructs through the juxtaposition of the 2 female figures presented in a pub, which is a masculine dominated space. By entering this space, gender norms are challenged and questioned by onlookers.

Title: A Room Alone
Medium: Painting
School: Immanuel Lutheran College (Buderim)

Artist Statement:
A Room Alone conveys the challenges of identity in modern society, addressing the complex effects of environment and subsequent personal experiences. The influences of Marc Rothko and Hernan Bas were central in sparking the concept, inspiring the creation of an emotionally expressive work that explores identity and self-expression. By bringing internal perspectives to the surface, overlapping moments in a figure’s life highlight the dynamic forms of expression that exist both within a space and within fleeting moments of existence. The use of oil paint allowed for vibrant, blended strokes that created opportunities for stark contrasts and bright highlights. The context behind this piece ultimately reflects personal experiences, constructing an image that represents viewpoints and outlooks shaped by different locations, as well as interactions with various artists, media and events. In particular, it confronts mental health challenges and the societal pressures of being a young woman, conventions which this piece attempts to both explore and challenge.

Title: Memento Mare Conchylomania
Medium: Painting
School: Siena Catholic College (Sippy Downs)

Artist Statement:
Have you ever considered how shells contribute to our climate? They act as carbon sinks, with decomposition and shell building processes impacting atmospheric CO2 levels and ocean acidity, my focus for this artwork. Memento Mare Conchylomania expresses the importance of preservation and how pollution is strangling the Earth’s climate. Influenced by the work of great Dutch painter Adriaen Coorte and Australian artist Marian Drew, whose works are vanitas, and memento mori beautifully depicting the art of dying. As such, my work can be viewed through a cultural lens. The traditional 'tondo' form, layered in resin shows a juxtaposition of contemporary context and traditional techniques.

Title: Hollow
Medium: Painting
School: Meridan State College

Artist Statement:
Hollow explores the artist’s personal context with anticipatory grief and the emptiness that comes with the impending loss of a loved one. Acrylic is used to evoke emotion and convey the artist’s internal state. The 3 smaller paintings represent the artist’s family, while the large self-portrait featuring an open, hollow chest symbolises emotional emptiness. The work reflects the complex release and lingering void that often follows anticipatory grief, where relief and sorrow coexist. With the feeling of something missing in your life constantly lingering on your mind. The expression in the self-portrait, along with deliberate use of form, movement and realism, highlights the internal struggle. With the negative space and emphasis on the torso and empty canvas reinforce the theme of loss. This piece draws inspiration from key artists Chiharu Shiota and Käthe Kollwitz, who’s emotionally charged works on grief and personal experience significantly influenced the development of Hollow.

Title: Swan Serenade
Medium: Painting
School: Peregian Beach College (Peregian Beach)

Artist Statement:
Contemporary artist Rithika Merchant inspires me through the way she expresses identity and femininity. I feel a strong connection to Merchant’s work, as her use of symbolism and spirituality creates stories that reach beyond words. Merchant's practice encourages me to reflect on how women’s lives and struggles can be explored through art. In my own practice, I want to reflect on ballet, relationships, gender roles and the pursuit of balance and perfection. Dance has always been more than movement to me—it is music made visible, a way to express emotions that words cannot capture. Inspired by Swan Serenade, I now want to expand from shoes into a full costume. Drawing from Swan Lake and Merchant’s motifs, my artwork can embody femininity, storytelling and connection.

Title: Indifference
Medium: Mixed media
School: Kepnock State High School

Artist Statement:
Limitations shape individual art perspectives. Indifference explores the symbolism of abstractions formed through contemporary styles adapted from personal limitations. Be it rites of passage, significant experiences or individual characteristics, all aspects of one’s life alter individual techniques, attitudes, beliefs and practices. Indifference communicates with audiences through alternative interactions of physical and visual interpretation. Braille invites the audience to engage with a physical touch sensation, whilst the visual features of glow in the dark, UV and neon paints invite the audience to heavily engage with multiple layers of emotive visual expression. ​