About the artists:

Roseanne Bartley is an artist-jeweller interested in the materiality of language and the agency of jewellery in human communication. Roseanne holds a practice-led PhD from the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University (2018). She was awarded the Australia Council Barcelona Residency in 2006 and has received funding from the Australia Council (2001, 2004, 2012), Arts Victoria (2001, 2008), Punctum, and the Ian Potter Foundation. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Powerhouse Museum, and Toowoomba Regional Gallery. Her work was highly commended in the 2025 Make Award managed by Australian Design Centre.

In recent works, Roseanne contemplates the speculative potential of untethered, omitted, or mis-spoken letters: seemingly redundant characters that confound spelling rules, appear phonetically superfluous, or gather as sounds, gestures, and residues at the edges of speech. Working through jewellery, she explores the systems and conventions that structure relationships between glyphic characters, and how the formal demands of jewellery vernaculars accent, obscure, support, or deny them, shaping both the legibility of their forms and their capacity to exert meaning.

Adam Cruickshank is a multidisciplinary artist whose work stems from a critical engagement with the relationships between art and design. He also works as a Lecturer in RMIT's School of Design. He completed a Fine Art MRes at Monash University (2011) and, with the support of an Australian Postgraduate Award, a PhD at RMIT (2025). His work has been shown in artist-run spaces and institutional galleries and museums, both locally and internationally.

Adam’s Portrait of the Curator as Type continues his work relocating design's technical objects into conditions where their use-value is suspended and they might be put to more poetic and reflexive ends. The artwork is both a functional font (distributed via USB) and a conditional portrait of the curator: it preserves the conventions of commissioned portraiture while rebuilding the portrait through typing – one of the curator's most constant, if less visible, labours.

Kelly McDonald is an artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa/NZ. Her visual and material language is informed by her childhood growing up in Latrobe Valley, adjacent to the largest brown coal deposit in the southern hemisphere. Kelly first trained as a nurse, completing a Bachelor of Nursing followed immediately by a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts, and more recently completing an MFA from Massey University. She taught for 12 years in the jewellery department at Whitireia Polytechnic and has exhibited regularly for the last 15 years.

In A part of something bigger, Kelly collects the detritus of urban and industrial life such as nails from the roadside and doorknobs from a metal recycler. She transforms these objects into sculptural and wearable compositions, assemblages that sit between adornment, artefact, and wall-based object. Influenced by her childhood growing up near the power stations of Victoria’s Latrobe Valley and the enduring mythology of Ned Kelly, the associated imagery sits at the core of her practice alongside the quiet histories carried by found objects. 

Artwork details: Roseanne Bartley, studio view, 2026; Adam Cruickshank, ‘Portrait of the Curator as Type’, digital image, 2026; Kelly McDonald, studio view, 2026. Images courtesy the artists.