Jan Murphy Gallery presents a compelling group exhibition featuring a diverse selection of artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, ceramics, and photography. Each artist brings a distinct perspective, engaging with themes of culture, identity, memory, and materiality.
ZAACHARIAHA FIELDING
Born in Port Augusta (1991),Zaachariaha Fielding comes from a strong family lineage of artists and storytellers. His energetic and visceral paintings exist as contemporary works whilst acknowledging and honouring the visual language of his culture. Fielding’s paintings are embedded with iconography that acknowledge and pay respect to tradition, A angu culture and his inherited Tjukurpa (ancestral knowledge and law).
Currently based in South Australia, Fielding’s work has been recognised in major art awards, most notably as Winner of The Wynne Prize (2023), finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize at Art Gallery of South Australia (2021) and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards at Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory (2021).
JASON FITZGERALD
A cabinet maker by trade, Fitzgerald’s art practice allows him to do away with precision and more playfully explore the parameters of materials and function. Repetition has been a consistent feature in Fitzgerald’s practice, and his ceramic pieces take their cues from familiar shapes.
Fitzgerald completed his BA at QCA at Griffith University in 2011 and has exhibited regularly since 2006. He has been a finalist in numerous awards including The Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award, The Alice Prize, The Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize and the Gold Coast Art Prize. His work is held in Australia’s Artbank collection and a number of private collections.
BETTY MUFFLER
Betty Muffler (born 1944) is a highly respected senior Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands artist and renowned Ngangkari (traditional healer). Born near Watarru, Betty Muffler grew up at the Ernabella Mission following the displacement and deaths of family members in the aftermath of the British nuclear testing at Maralinga and Emu Field. Witnessing the devastation of country and surviving this experience motivates Betty Muffler’s recurring depiction of healing sites and the intensity of her connection to these places in her paintings titled ‘Ngangkari Ngura’ (Healing Country).
She has been a repeat finalist in a number of major awards including the Wynne Prize and the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Award, having won the Emerging Artist Award (2017) and the General Painting Award (2022). Her work has been included in numerous major institutional exhibitions including the 14th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, The National: New Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021), Tarnanthi at the Art Gallery of South Australia (2017, 2020, 2022), Kulata Tjuta at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes (2020) and Before Time Began at Fondation Opale, Switzerland.
ARA DOLATIAN
Ara Dolatian’s works delves into the cultural ecologies surrounding lost and stolen Mesopotamian artefacts. Through tangible and visual means, it serves as a vivid representation of sculptural deities, architectural forms, and vessels that have been lost to time. Rather than replicating the pieces, the intention is to draw inspiration from them. The resulting eccentric forms boast unique colour schemes, pleasing curves, and delicate edges, inspired by archaeological figures and decayed architectural sites.
Born in Baghdad, Iraq, and now living and working in Melbourne, Australia, his sculptural practice is intimately bound to his Iraqi heritage and its ancient Mesopotamian history. Dolatian holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (sculpture) from RMIT and a Master of Social Science Environment and Planning. In 2023 he was included in Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria and Craft Victoria’s major exhibition for Melbourne Design Week.
ROBERT MALHERBE
For over 25 years Robert Malherbe has confidently explored and returned to the sensuality of the natural environment and the intimate landscape of the human form. His landscapes, nudes and still lifes all share a sense of immediacy born from painting ‘alla prima’ (a direct painting technique where a work is completed in one session, often by applying wet paint in layers).
Immigrating to Australia in 1971 from Mauritius, Malherbe worked as an animator before spending a decade living and travelling in Europe. He has been a regular finalist in some of Australia’s most prestigious art prizes including the Archibald Prize, the Wynne Prize, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, and the Kilgour Art Prize. Most recently Malherbe was artist in residence at Tweed Regional Gallery.
JACQUELINE HENNESSY
Jacqueline Hennessy’s feminine figures offer themselves to our gaze, conditionally: a body, a gesture, the minutiae of fabric or hair, in restrained tonal paintings. Faces are rare. Painted in layers, with the weave of the canvas showing through, these images exhibit control, translucence achieved through washes of thin raw umber paint, worked meticulously, then disrupted with over-brushing and worked again.
Hennessy (born 1977) graduated with a Masters of Fine Art (Painting) from Sydney’s National Art School in 2019. Before studying art she worked as a lawyer, then completed her Honours degree in Psychology. Hennessy was the inaugural recipient of the Tweed Regional Gallery – National Art School MFA Residency Award in 2019. She is a three-time finalist in The Portia Geach Memorial Award (2020,2021,2022) and has also been a finalist in the Doug Moran Portrait Prize, Mosman Art Prize and Kilgour Art Prize.
LINCOLN AUSTIN
Lincoln Austin’s sculptural works play across materials and scale, from intricate assemblages to expansive installations. Austin’s artworks invite the viewer to engage and experience shifting fields of colour, movement and form.
Based in south-east Queensland, Lincoln Austin has exhibited nationally and internationally, receiving numerous grants and prizes, and participating in forums, workshops, residencies, artist talks, cultural exchanges, university teaching, and mentorships. In 2021, a 20-year survey exhibition, Lincoln Austin: The Space Between Us, was curated for Ipswich Art Gallery by Samantha Littley, Curator, Australian Art, QAGOMA. Austin has produced 18 large-scale public projects and has been awarded two prizes for Art and Architecture by the Australian Institute of Architects. Austin’s works are held in many public and private collections, including Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
GERWYN DAVIES
Employing elaborate costumes made by the artist himself, Sydney-based photographer Gerwyn Davies’ art explores identity and the fictitious possibilities of digital images. Davies works with elaborate and stylised costumed figures, often set in a constructed landscape, which subverts our expectations of a self-portrait by concealing the face. “Where the camera is conventionally claimed to possess a unique capacity for revealing something of a subject to its viewer, in my own practice, I instead perform acts of queer photographic dis/ appearance.”
Gerwyn Davies completed his PhD (2021) at the University of New South Wales Art and Design, where he also lectures in photography. He has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and internationally including exhibitions at the Museum of Sydney, Australian Centre for Photography, Singapore International Photography Festival and Brisbane Powerhouse. In 2021, he was awarded the Director’s Choice Award – Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture at Tweed Regional Gallery. He is a five-time finalist in the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award and has been a regular finalist in The Sunshine Coast Art Prize, the Alice Springs Art Prize, the Bowness Prize and Clayton Utz Prize.
LINDE IVIMEY
Linde Ivimey’s otherworldly creatures are layered with totemic and autobiographical significance. The hybrid figurative forms borrow from the artist’s life directly, bringing animation and resonance to her personal memories. Every object, effigy or reliquary transmits a sense that it is from a place deep within – the body or psyche.
A major exhibition drawn from twenty years of work, ‘Close to the bone: Linde Ivimey’ was shown at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2003 and in 2012, the University of Queensland Art Museum mounted the solo exhibition, ‘If Pain Persists’, accompanied by a major monograph on the artist written by Louise Martin Chew. Artworks by Ivimey have been acquired by public institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria and UQ Art Museum.
Image: Jason Fitzgerald, Detour 3, 2025, stoneware and glaze, 15.0 x 28.5 x 27.0 cm
