Fine Art Fiona

George Adams curator, gallery director and collector has had a career in the visual arts in Sydney supporting and encouraging emerging artists. Together with his partner artist Ron Adams, George set up and ran MOP Gallery from 2003-2016, an ‘artist-run-initiative’ which gave emerging artists, curators and writers the opportunity to explore experimental ideas and new work. Its follow on, Galerie Pompom shifted George’s focus but not his passion for supporting artists. Though Galerie Pompom closed in late 2021, George’s contribution to supporting experimental art in Sydney is lasting.

Uncompromising in her approach and unflinching in her resolve and determination, Eugenia is an artist who works in digital media art, often embodied within larger ambitious installations, which explore language, translation and the body from a personal and feminist perspective. 

She talks candidly about her migrant background – Czech-born of Greek parents who arrived in Australia in 1959 – and the constant negotiation required to find way to feel a welcome part of an Australian scene. Eugenia’s work weaves images of her body, personal familial stories and texts, in various guises, to describe this uncertain and ever-shifting terrain. She takes us beyond where we usually go.

Kylie Stillman is enthralled by making, slowly by hand, repurposing, recycling materials to create sculptures, large and minute, that reveal ‘signs of life’ in the natural world. It could be a bird carved by hand from a stack of books or beads threaded or glued on paper mapping the tracery of a spider’s web made visible by morning dew. She works with old-fashioned craft and handiwork meshed with modern art concepts, ‘taking something very common and then giving it nobility’. The results are breathtakingly beautiful. 

Kylie talks about her approach to making and the realisation that buying a tube of red paint was exactly what her art could not be about.

Teresa Biet is an art collector based in Sydney who has found a way to support artists beyond buying their works. As her passion for collecting artworks deepened, so too did her understanding of how difficult it is for artists to develop professional careers. Together with her husband Andre, Teresa founded Art Incubator, a philanthropic, not-for-profit organisation which supports artists to establish careers and promote their works to new audiences. Art Incubator identifies emerging artists and pairs them with a gallery to present their first major commercial exhibition. Since its inception, Art Incubator has actively supported 18 artists establish promising careers. 

Teresa speaks with great insight into how buying art became something much more for her. 

Joan Ross is an Australian artist based in Sydney who works across a range of mediums including drawing, painting, installations, sculpture, video and, more recently, VR. She has an abiding interest in the legacy of colonialism in Australia, particularly the effects of colonialism on Indigenous Australians and the environment. Her work is bold and distinctive, particularly with her use of the garish high-vis yellow – a colour which, since 9/11, is symbolic of authority and power – and animation of 19thC landscape prints by John Glover and Joseph Lycett. 

She doesn’t shy away from challenges and recent large scale projects include a mural on the hoarding around the building site for Sydney Modern at the Art Gallery of NSW and a major light projection across the façade of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

We have a great conversation about finding her way as an artist with an approach that is wholly her own. 

As a curator, writer and now well-known and successful ceramic artist Glenn Barkley shares many stories about his fascinating career in the visual arts. 

With no formal training in ceramics, he has nonetheless carved out a niche with his delightful, quirky ceramic objects. They are hand built and endlessly decorated with images, texts and markings which reflect a lifetime of studying art history and museums, writing about art, and his love of horticulture and music. Ancient Rome meets the Museum of Contemporary Art meets the Doobie Brothers. He is currently completing a global history of ceramics to be published by Thames and Hudson in 2023. He is co-founder and co-director of The Curators Department and of kil.n.it experimental ceramics studio, Sydney.

You’ll find all the images and more information on Glenn at the websites of the galleries which represent him: 

As one of Australia's most acclaimed photographers, Robyn Stacey has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally since the mid–1980s. Her fascination for photography lies in its technical and aesthetic capacity to connect science, art history and culture. She develops series of works, often exploring an idea or subject over many years, inspired by B-grade films, historical botanical and decorative collections, art history and science. From sumptuous still lifes to pinhole camera contemporary scenes to images of just light and colour, her work is endlessly surprising, reflecting her technical expertise and genuine curiosity to create a rich and wonderful photograph. 

PhilJames grew up on a diet of MAD comics and Loony Tunes cartoon characters, as well as doodling over the photos in his mother’s Vogue magazines. He then found his way to art school where he was taught technique and ‘real’ art history. All these influences and passions have found a way into PhilJames’ paintings and sculptures in which he melds these images and histories to bring humour, irony and a new and contemporary spin on what we think of as ‘high’ and ‘low’ art.
Here Philjames talks candidly about his journey as an artist, including some serendipitous moments which propelled his career forward - such as being a finalist in the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Prize, the Sulman Prize of the AGNSW, the Blake Prize and being selected for the Art Incubator program.

Elliott Routledge paints in both the public and private domain – outdoors on large scale brick walls and on canvas for private homes. His early years spent as a graffiti artist honed his technique and love of colour and graphics. These days he is more likely to be commissioned to paint a large outdoor mural or manage a fellow artist to undertake something equally ambitious, having ticked all the boxes for government/ council approval.

The biodiversity crisis facing Australia’s native flora and fauna is the focus of Pamela Pauline’s most recent photographic series: Fragile, Beauty Rich and Rare and On the Brink. Each artwork reflects true mastery of digital photography, in capturing the images of individual birds and plants, and painstakingly piecing them together when back in the studio to create ethereal landscapes and sumptuous still life compositions. The urgency of this crisis, at the forefront of Pamela’s approach, underlies the beauty of these artworks which makes them particularly compelling.
Pamela has been a finalist in numerous prestigious photographic awards, include the Smithsonian Magazine, the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize and the Ravenswood Australian Women's Art Prize.

Dr Kath Fries is first and foremost an artist who is interested in how the creative process can assist us – as both individuals and as communities - to make sense of our real and imagined worlds. She makes ephemeral installations from natural materials like mushrooms, bees wax and bamboo as well as things she finds in the back lane behind her home.

She is also a curator, working on HIDDEN contemporary sculpture in Rookwood Cemetery; as well as an administrator, having managed the John Fries Award, a generous art prize which recognised the talents of her fellow colleague visual artists and honoured the legacy of the contributions her late father made to the industry, https://www.johnfriesaward.com/.

Elvis Richardson’s art practice reveals the value and mystery in an ordinary life, as well as the harsh reality of its precariousness. She relies on found images and objects, sourced from the public domain, online or on the street, to give voice to the stories often deemed less interesting.

A significant part of her practice includes a major research project The CoUNTess Report. It is both art and advocacy, collecting and analysing data on gender imbalance across the art world and was the impetus for the #knowmyname movement.

Elvis did her MFA at Columbia University NY and achieved her PhD through Deakin Uni in 2019.

Elvis is represented by Galerie Pompom in Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery in Adelaide, and is represented in major public collections in Australia.

Dean Cross was born and raised on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country and is of Worimi descent. His artworks defy easy categorisation but they are created as installations, sculptures and/ or photography.

Dean’s career began in contemporary dance, performing and choreographing nationally and internationally for over a decade with Australia’s leading dance companies. He stepped across into the visual arts and since then, has gained considerable respect for a practice which critically examines where contemporary Australia is at, in terms of how we value and respect the richness and depth of the cultures of Indigenous Australians.

Wendy Murray is visual artist and activist whose drawing and printmaking practice is based out of studios in Sydney and Los Angeles. Wendy’s art is informed by her commitment to street art, graffiti art and older style printing technology. Her work captures an urban life & the pressing social and political issues of the day. She has a profound understanding of the power that image and text can play in the public domain.
Wendy's work is held in public collections including the National Gallery of Australia. In 2019 she was a finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize and in 2020 she was awarded a Creative Fellowship Grant from the City of Sydney.