My artwork explores the experience of embodiment - the intersection between the internal and external worlds that meet in the visceral sensations of the body – and, specifically, how this can be expressed in painting.

The autobiographical body, intimacy, touch and the instability of identity are themes central to my practice.

Celeste Chandler received a MFA (2003) and is currently undertaking a PhD through the VCA. She has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, participated in numerous curated group shows; awarded a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship; twice received an Elizabeth Greenshields Scholarship (Canada); won the R&M McGivern Prize (2008) and awarded an Australian Council Emerging Artist Grant(2004). Her work is included in public collections including GOMA and the QU Art Gallery and she has undertaken residences in Australia and overseas.

Kirsten Turner's paintings are predominantly figurative images based on personal snapshots - depicting ambiguous scenes to explore rites of passage, notions of being 'present' in a moment of time and the banality of the everyday. Recent works show private rituals performed during the creation of a face to display to the world, which although carefully cultivated, remains impermanent.

Kirsten Turner graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Art in Painting from the VCA (2004) after completing a Diploma of Visual Art at RMIT (2001). She has exhibited in various group and two-person shows including Anna Pappas Gallery, Project Space, Red Gallery and TCB art inc., for which a NAVA Visual and Craft Artists' Grant was jointly awarded. Turner has most recently shown at c3 Contemporary Art Spaces (2012) with the solo show 'For this hour', as well as co curating and exhibiting in the ‘The Sixth’ at West Space (2013).

I have ploughed the family archives to create a series of portraits using adhesive dressings (‘band-aids’) as a primary medium. The band-aids approximate flesh tones and are applied to describe the form and contours of the body. Via the symbolic and metaphorical connotations band-aids can evoke, I aim to charge each portrait with psychological weight, exploring and amplifying interpersonal dynamics.

Savina Hopkins is a graduate of The Victorian College of the Arts (BA Fine Art – Painting) and The University of Newcastle (Post Graduate Diploma - Scientific Illustration). She lives and works in Melbourne. Her recent art practice is predominately collage based, with a focus on using unconventional and salvaged materials. Her work is held in various collections including The National Archives of Australia, Museum Victoria, The Royal Society of Victoria and Lowensteins Arts Management.

Neil Shurgold uses the figure in everyday situations as the source material for his paintings. Observing people during his daily travels throughout the city where figures by way of gesture, their clothing or a ‘prop’, often becomes a tableaux for Shurgold’s work.

Neil Shurgold is a Melbourne based artist and musician who is the Co-Director of Rubicon ARI and is currently completing a BA in Fine Art at Curtin University.

I am interested in the intersection of fine art and popular culture. This focus has emerged from my background as a graphic designer and my interest in portraiture, popular music and nostalgia. Music is a trigger and I like exploring all those excessive enthusiasms of the true fan – the bands, the songs, the hair, the clothes. In the outer eastern suburbs of the 1970s, sharpies had all the allure and the thrill of a subculture and were a source of fascination in my teenage years. Another fascination while at graphic design school were British painters of the 60s especially the rare few women artists.

Lin Tobias is currently completing a Diploma in Visual Art at Victoria University, where she has majored in painting and printmaking. She is also a graphic designer, working from her own studio, La Bella Design. In 2012 she was the recipient of the Fiona Myer Travel Grant which enabled her to undertake residencies at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum, Wisconsin and Hatch Show Print, Nashville in the USA. She has been a finalist for the last three years in the Silk Cut Print Award.

Simon's practice is sampled from the everyday. Like an apocalyptic joyride through the news, accessible images are gleaned from contemporary mass cultural image dumps. Starting at such a general, familiar point encourages us to explore our current contemporary psyche through the two dimensional space of the reproduced images it consumes and is consumed by.

Talking about the present, using out-moded technology of the past, Simon is able to explore personal as well as shared anxieties about how our physical and social environments have changed and how they will continue to change in the future.

We are used to seeing these reference images in the media most commonly to describe something negative. The technology induced ectoplasmic forms suggest a corruption or intervention in the way we view the image which challenges the initial face value and assumptions we attach to familiar scenarios and suggests alternative readings.

New Zealand born Agnew uses the figure as a focus of her artistic practice which encompasses painting, drawing and animation. Rebecca Agnew completed a BFA at Otago Polytechnic School of Art in Dunedin, NZ and has completed her Masters of Visual Art at VCA Melbourne. Agnew has exhibited at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, NZ; Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne, Platform, Melbourne, No No Gallery, Melbourne and Felt Space, Adelaide, 24hr Art, Darwin. In 2011 Agnew was commissioned to create a stop animation for the Bon Scotts. Rebecca Agnew was the recipient of the 2011 Substation Contemporary Art Prize Exhibiton Award, Nellie Castan Award.