Cairns, AU

Fuzeillear is a British artist who has been living on Australia's Sunshine Coast for the past eight years, creating work imbued with a calm and stillness that she struggles to find in real life. Working with watered washes and brushes, she uses shadowy textures and strong highlights to bring a sense of depth and space, allowing the viewer to take a breath and, for a moment, float away.

Claire Foxton is an emerging Australian artist, muralist, and designer. Claire’s art practice explores the apex of visual design, fine art and street art through a hybrid of figurative and abstract works using traditional and improvised techniques. With a mix of self-taught and formal education, Claire has established a unique style centered around photorealistic subject matter, color, shape, form, and texture. In 2016 she painted her first large-scale mural triggering a love for public art, its accessibility and the inevitable exchange it creates between the artist, artwork and the local community.

Ian McCallum is an Australian artist whose practice slips between indoor and outdoor work. He explores the interaction of color, notions of the everyday, how the body interacts with a painting intuitively, the history of the surface and found elements. McCallum’s documentative process of repositioning his daily interactions through layering and a collage-like aesthetic creates a visual anthropology. The studio work utilizes photography, interspersed with fast and intuitive surface experiments that form a diary of the artist's thought processes.

When working in the public realm, his practice is heavily informed by his studio paintings and the interactions of the immediate environment of the artwork. This creates a dialogue between the outdoor and the indoor and the slippage that occurs in the transference of ideas. McCallum discusses the distinction between how things look and how we judge them to be. By painting on a large canvas, a certain form of external experience implies and produces a consciousness of one’s own body within its environment; discussing perception and questioning scale. This approach seeks mindfulness in the ordinary and leads to the understanding of the world.

Regular Rick (aka Rick Beresford) is a Cairns based artist, curator and arts educator working across a variety of mediums and disciplines.

Andrew Dennis is an artist living and working in the subtropics of Sydney since 2000. Studio Dennis is the collective name for a practice which covers multiple outputs such as mural art, painting, design, textiles and street graphics. Drawing from a diverse range of inuences including 20th-century art, low-brow comics, skateboard culture and points in-between, Studio Dennis has developed a unique language that is complex and unique.

Working with a collection of characters and objects best described as a cabinet of curiosities, Dennis creates a decorative wallpaper that deals in subjects such as civilization, future living, biodomes, and animal behavior. Much of this exploration taps into the visionary constructions of the artist as a passionate collector and amalgamator of artifacts, whether it be retro furniture designs, early primitive African masks or other memorabilia. The constant search for interesting connections from human history is a source of intrigue and creative interest.

"Georgia Hill is an Australian artist, specialising in type based artworks that combine bold, black and white textures and lettering within experimental compositions.

Since studying Visual Communications at the University of Technology, Sydney, Hill's instantly recognisable aesthetic has developed from exhibition based illustrations to striking works for private commissions, client-based projects and murals which are read in terms of connections, time, place and community.

Over the past three years Hill's large scale mural works have come to inform an exploration not just of personal reflection through lettering based artworks, but also how structures, along with our natural environments, are home to and vital in allowing these experiences to exist and develop from one physical context to another. "

Bronte Naylor is an Australian artist based in South East Queensland. Since 2011, she has been exhibiting her illustrative works in galleries and as large-scale artworks in public spaces. Naylor completed a Bachelor degree in Creative Industries, majoring in Visual Art at James Cook University, Cairns. In 2016, Naylor undertook a residency at First Coat Studios, Toowoomba, where she established a full-time art practice.

She is currently completing her Honours degree in Visual Art at the University of Southern Queensland, where she is investigating contemporary painting and memory theory through digital and physical applications. Her creative processes are influenced by the continuity of memory and its relationship to time. Naylor observes how the human mind returns to retrieve memories, warping them in this process.

National collaborations with First Coat International Art Festival, Sea Walls Australia and Big Picture Festival have seen Naylor firmly positioned as an emerging heavyweight in Australian public art.

George Rose is often mistaken for a boy. She is actually a visual artist with a flair for not taking life too seriously. She spends most of her time up ladders painting murals and sometimes makes it into her studio just to try something a bit more normal. She feels most at home with a paintbrush in hand but also likes the feel of a pen, spray can, drill or Warm tablet. Since graduating, George has thrown caution to thawing and abandoned her formal design training opting to pursue a multidisciplinary art practice. She has spent the last several years pretending to be a gypsy, rarely in one city for longer than a few months painting walls in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Canberra.

Phibs is one the most respected and renowned names in Australian Graffiti/Street Art. His public art works are prolific in Melbourne & Sydney and are far-flung across the globe.

Originally from Sydney, Phibs came from a strong graffiti background and was active in community programs, inspiring the artistic potential of this now popular art form. Moving to Melbourne in 2001 saw Phibs exposed to an evolving Melbourne street art scene and the joined the Everfresh Studio collective. In Melbourne Phibs established a name within the fine arts and rapidly became one of the cities most respected and renowned artists, on & off the streets.

Phibs distinctive style signifies the symbiotic, engaging the urban with the organic. He produces works across a vast variety of mediums and consistently reflects his own unique realms of symbolism, multiculturalism and mythology. Largely inspired by nature, his works have spawned a menagerie of signature characters.

Phibs unique works have attracted numerous major brands and publications and several of his works have been acquired by the National Gallery of Australia for its permanent collection.

Now based in Sydney, Phibs continues to exhibit interstate and Internationally in galleries, on walls & at various festivals.

George Rose is often mistaken for a boy. She is actually a visual artist with a flair for not taking life too seriously. She spends most of her time up ladders painting murals and sometimes makes it into her studio just to try something a bit more normal. She feels most at home with a paintbrush in hand but also likes the feel of a pen, spray can, drill or Warm tablet. Since graduating, George has thrown caution to thawing and abandoned her formal design training opting to pursue a multidisciplinary art practice. She has spent the last several years pretending to be a gypsy, rarely in one city for longer than a few months painting walls in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Canberra.

Mostly based in Adelaide Australia, Vans the Omega has been creating and painting letterforms for over two decades. Graffiti and urban art were early influences, and from a young age, he was fascinated by the scale and visual impact of graffiti and street art along train lines. The work of Vans the Omega can be seen on streets around the world; with his signature style inspired by the natural world, crystals, sacred geometry, ancient scripts, architecture, engineering and the idea of movement or balance.

Having traveled around the globe consistently since 2000, it has been a long-term goal of Vans The Omega to organize the second Wonderwalls Festival in Port Adelaide in April 2017. The festival brings some of the best contemporary mural painters in the world together alongside national and South Australian talent to create one of Australia's largest outdoor galleries. The Festival aims to inspire and create a platform for local artists to learn and improve their personal practice in the field and bring the world to South Australian artists to create the same impact and base knowledge in the Street art/Mural field to inspire the next generation.

Amok Island (born Amsterdam, 1983) is a multi-disciplinary artist from the Netherlands, based in Fremantle, Western Australia and if he weren't an artist, he would be a biologist. Heavily inspired by early naturalists’ scientific illustrations, his work embodies the accuracy and precision representative of technical drawings, used for identification purposes.

The theme of natural exploration and conservation is a strong and constant undercurrent of Amok Island’s artistic practice. His lifelong fascination with nature and her relationships and history with humankind drive the artist’s obvious appreciation and obsession with his subjects and his urge to direct the attention of his audience to them.

Amok Island pursues a point of balance where minimal shape and color remain capable of realistically representing a subject. To accomplish this, he renders his subjects to near bare minimum geometric elements of form and places paramount importance on the use of a carefully considered color palette.

Amok Island has created murals in over 25 countries worldwide and exhibited his work in Australia, the Netherlands, and Japan.

"Cinzah Merkens is a New Zealand based multidisciplinary artist, event producer, curator and father of two, based out of Napier, Hawkes Bay.

Cinzah paints from and for his environment, often expressing his views about pressing environmental issues, with a strong sense of colour, movement and balance. His work also explores themes such as the interrelationship between man and nature, duality, mythology and story telling.

Cinzah has exhibited extensively throughout New Zealand, also showing work in group shows, festivals and mural productions in Australia, Mexico, North America, Canada, Japan, South East Asia and the Caribbean."

Glen Mackie a.k.a. Kei Kalak has a bold, distinguishable style, featuring fine threadlike lines. He retells the myths and legendary stories he inherited from older family members.

Kalak says he has been elected as Yam Island’s ‘official’ storyteller and his mission is to keep alive the sacred stories of the four brothers who traveled from the north before memory and settled Zenadh Kes, or what most Australians know as the Central and Eastern Torres Strait Islands.

Originally from the UK, Cracked Ink has been part of the New Zealand street art scene ever since he made the move down under 10 years ago. Cracked Inks quirky, character-based art is bold and eye-catching, whether it be an art piece from a gallery or a mural in the street. Predominantly an aerosol artist, Cracked Ink also utilizes other creative avenues which include, sketching, painting and sculpting which have been some of his favourite mediums to work in over the past few years.

With one of the most unique aesthetics in Contemporary Street Art; Retro Futuristic duo The Low Bros are made up of Berlin-based brothers Christoph and Florin Schmidt. Together, they examine the contradictions associated with identity in a digital age.

Andrea Huelin is a painter who takes her inspiration from the often-overlooked stuff of everyday life. Using loose brushwork, Andrea creates unlikely oil paintings from quirky scenes and juxtaposed objects that have presented themselves by accident. A former journalist, Andrea is interested in observing and recording what she sees, giving pause to fleeting moments and offering new ways to observe the ordinary. She has held a number of solo exhibitions and has taken part in group shows in Cairns, Brisbane, and Melbourne. Her portrait of Stanley Jones AO is on permanent display in the Cairns Supreme Court. Andrea is a member of the National Association of Professional Portrait Artists.

David Houghton is an artist based on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. He uses a combination of techniques from formal styles and traditional hand-painted signage, to graffiti and realism. Inspired by pushing boundaries to create more meaningful works that represent his love for the natural environment, often combining animals and natural elements of color.

Houghton has produced a diverse range of creative commissions including photo-realistic portraits, scenic underwater, flora and fauna murals, modern contemporary pieces and vibrant street art that can be seen across SEQ. He also publishes Australian mural and art magazines - Clouded Thoughts and Blank Canvas.