Previously showing at Brenda May Gallery

Paper is such a commonplace and pervasive material. We write on it, read it, drink out of it and eat off it, yet in terms of conservation it is considered one of the most fragile of mediums in the art world.

This exhibition is ostensibly concerned with the nature of paper itself; featuring works produced with paper or about paper.

A sense of identity is grounded in our individual experiences that makes our own storytelling unique and also familiar. The cautionary tales that pervade everyday life are often ritualised into the cultural use of domestic objects, helping to construct collective and personal identities. Throughout this exhibition, the act of subverting such familiar ideas and items to reveal a sense of threat or violence is explored as a way of transforming and appropriating the familiar into fantasy, making visible the myths we live by.

Fantastic worlds and mystical dreamscapes enact the absurdity of human existence in my porcelain works, encaustic panels and prints. The works in this exhibition combine primordial plant forms such as yuccas, agaves and cacti, with fanciful figures and imagined landscapes. Magicians signal a quest, fantastic creatures interact and medieval monsters are guardians of future possibilities.

Inhabiting these small works are creatures from the Renaissance historia animalium of Conrad Gesner, humorous figures from 16th century French humanist and artist Fran?ois Rabelais, contemporary Japanese ?kawaii?, pop-imagination figures and toys and grotesque historical imagery. This cast of creatures and plants is combined to create various peculiar and curious scenarios. My characters live in a world where nothing is certain.

I feel like everything I want to say is written in the lines and planes of each piece. The repetitive physical process of carving translates my decisions and ideas into a subtle language, inherent in the finished form.

I found a stand of melaleuca clinging to the rocks along a wild stretch of beach on the north coast of NSW; branches twisted and deformed by an unforgiving wind; desiccated and brittle for want of water. Dead now, these trees bear witness to a life - like many other lives - on the edge, and a struggle to survive in less than ideal circumstances.

This melaleuca forest formed the starting point for the woodblock prints in this exhibition. In the working process I discovered that struggle can result in rich complexity, in elegance and grace.

New work by Josh Raymond.

This work is part of my continued exploration of geometric forms and the interplay between positive and negative space. I am also playing with the appearance of weightlessness, whilst continuing to use dense, industrial materials.

Brenda May Gallery will be exhibiting the work of three represented artists - Will Coles, Waratah Lahy and Mylyn Nguyen - at Art Stage Singapore.

This popular annual event was established by Brenda May at Access Gallery in 1998 and continues to be an important platform for the promotion of sculpture.

This year features the work of Senden Blackwood, Joel Bliss, Walter Brecely, Will Coles, Jim Croke, Marguerite Derricourt, Todd Fuller, Lyndal Hargrave, Kelly-Ann Lees, Barbara Licha, Simon Maberley, William Maguire, Angela McHarrie, Emily McIntosh, Brendan Murphy, Leslie Oliver, Arun Sharma, Benjamin Storch, Greer Taylor and Peter Tilley.

I continue to make work which references aspects of the human body.

Using process as an end and a means, and allowing for elements of human error, vigilant hand-eye co-ordination will underpin the performative nature of the work reflecting rhythm and movement.

When we consider objects, we identify them by their purpose. Having worked as a ceramicist for the last ten years, the making of objects for the everyday has been my life.

The idea of looking at objects and turning them into something else has always excited me. By playing with size, scale and function, we may find something that seems familiar, a little bit odd. Anything that is not where it belongs or where people normally think of it as being, can change perceptions of how we view things.

'Object, Odject' is the deconstruction of the everyday to challenge viewers to interpret something in a way in which it was not normally intended to be understood.

This is a journey through the everyday in the hope of finding the little magic that I used to carry with me on the train, in my backpack and the reserved special spot on my desk. But, the more I work; the Company car, the Company responsibility, the Company phone and the time spent on, in, and immersed in the Company, I can not seem to find the bear that I packed out of the way.

This is about the tiny little bit of moss that sits in the crack of the concrete footpath outside the office that reminds me that one day, I should stop working and go find bear.

Somewhere in between the active and the still,
the imagined and the real,
between light and shade, truth and tale, and of course
hope and defeat...
Between resting and at flight,
and somewhere between duty and desire,
that is where he stands,
this is where we find him.

Scale is often disregarded as a consideration when making sculpture when it shouldn't be, as it is just as vital as things like subject matter, materials and composition. These sculptures are not maquettes but are works that, hopefully, are comfortable at the size they are.

The decision-making process in these works is just as intense as it is with a larger piece; however, working on a small scale enables me to complete sculptures relatively quickly and thereby receive the rewards that a sense of completion provides. I've certainly enjoyed constructing these sculptures and I hope others enjoy seeing and experiencing the final works.

This body of work is a privately constructed environment that is a juxtaposition of unlikely objects; collectively a symbolic arrangement that both illustrates and defies the ordinary.

A characteristic quality evident is that the works are imbued with a certain stillness or calmness, not necessarily subdued or impassive but pensive and contemplative. There can be a sense of emptiness suggestive of the transient nature of life. A range of thematic ideas and formal strategies are employed, derived from a visual vocabulary that is readily understood. The objects, imagery and underlying narrative are universally common yet multi-layered in meaning, significance and complexity.

Peter Tilley, 2011

This exhibition will consider the representation of food within the visual arts and beyond the standard still life tableaux.

The consumption of food is a universally shared experience, enabling people viewing the exhibition to connect with the issues surrounding consumerism, food production and cultural identity.

'Art + Food: Beyond the Still Life' will be on view during the Crave Sydney International Food Festival.

My work continues to explore the Still Life and its place in contemporary Australian painting. I focus in particular on the sort of objects that might be found in the home. Sometimes this is because they are interesting in their own right, and other times it is because these objects act as symbols that suggest more ambiguous or contradictory meanings. Either way, there are rich traditions to build upon.

In this current series of work I look at the way the miscellany of things found in the household environment can comment on everyday life in Australia, from the small triumphs and tragedies, to all the ordinariness that lies somewhere in between.

Among the artists I most admire is Cézanne. In his mature years, he attempted to give underlying structure to his landscapes by rendering them in terms of cones, cylinders and spheres. As a pale homage to the Master, instead of copying his style or even attempting to apply his theory, I have found real structures that are in fact made from these simple geometric shapes. They are the grain silos and other agricultural and industrial structures that rise like gigantic monuments out of the vast western plains.

Like the Dadaists of their time, this exhibition will seek to define the undefinable - with prints, collages, artists' books, zines, posters, typography and more.

Akky van Ogtrop graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, majoring in printmaking and has a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from Sydney University, with her Thesis on Dada. As director and manager of major arts events, Akky has many years of experience as an arts administrator and creative manager with extensive contacts and national and international project experience.

Akky was the Founder and Executive Director of the Sydney Art on Paper Fair and is an approved valuer for the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program in International and Australian works on paper (prints, drawings, watercolours and artists books) after 1900. Akky is also currently serving on various boards, including: President, Print Council of Australia; Member Cultural Committee, Manly Art Gallery & Museum; President, Sydney Chamber Music Festival and is a Foundation member of the Art Gallery of NSW.

My work is still concerned with memory, preservation and both the psychological and physical aspects of the human condition. This new body of glass sculpture intends to examine these layers of intricate and complex systems and magnify some of these astonishing processes that occur within us, constantly to manage our complex world.

Emily McIntosh, 2011

Originally, the shapes and motifs within my work were influenced by imagery from outer space, which as they evolved, became part of my sculptural language. In my current body of work the process has been immediate, with each sculpture resonating parts of the one that came before it. I think this has created a strong lineage in the work which shows a methodical evolution of ideas.

Corrigan Fairbairn, 2011

In my practice I combine traditional processes of printmaking with new possibilities associated with scientific body imaging and data manipulation to create works that question being in the world. I think about how experiences transform us. I also consider how science and technology mediate our existence.

Here I have experimented with new methods of representing the human form, visualising body-shape through pattern and mark and isolating the figure. In this body of work I present the body outline reduced to a flattened sandblasted plane or a web of patterned interlacing. The transparency of the glass challenges ideas of gravity, materiality and object-setting relations.

The thickness of the glass holds light between the sandblasted surfaces and the glitter of the sandblasted planes dissipates the certainty of the forms. The boundary between back and front (inside and outside, or here and there) is made permeable. The visual intersections made possible in the glass also suggest the multi-layered nature of knowledge and experience of place. These images suggest the possibility of parallel as well as intertwined systems, with their own intrinsic meanings in multidimensional connections.

The subjective experience of the work varies according to position, time, lighting and location.

- Patsy Payne, 2012

Chiaroscuro is the treatment of light and shade for dramatic effect in drawing, painting and printmaking. It is the effect of contrasted light and shadow created by light falling unevenly or from a particular direction, on something or someone.

Chiaroscuro is thought to have originated before the Renaissance; this exhibition seeks to show the work of contemporary artists using this traditional practice.

My work evokes the sounds, sensations and body postures found in our urban spaces - the language of the street. Are we as viewers, simultaneously the observer and the observed - stepping in and stepping out of the frame? A body, traced or sprayed like a tattoo on the wall of a narrow laneway, leaving the skeletal remains and memory of a dance. It is the conversion of noise into motion, into fractured image and crackling light.

Robert Boynes, 2011