About the artists:

Vanessa Arthur is a jeweller and artist based in Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke’s Bay, Aotearoa. She has exhibited nationally and internationally for more than a decade. In 2011, she completed a Bachelor of Applied Arts at Whitireia NZ, and shortly afterwards was selected for Handshake, a leading national mentorship programme for contemporary jewellers. In 2025 Arthur was awarded a Creative New Zealand Fellowship & presented her solo exhibition 'Wonder Goggles' at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga. ‘A few years ago, while exploring a small town in Italy, I entered an old building. The entrance formed with a large marble slab. As I walked through, I noticed the stone had a deep worn dip, created by 800 years of feet coming and going. The perfect tension between the permanent and the fleeting. This is the feeling I aim to capture in my own work, small reminders of our own brief moment in time.’ Vanessa Arthur, 2026

Monique Barnett is a curious, process-driven artist currently living in Mount Maunganui, Aotearoa, New Zealand. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Canterbury, School of Fine Arts, where she majored in painting, and is now an MFA candidate at Whitecliffe College. Monique has lived and worked in Narrm, Australia, and Hamburg, Germany, and has held numerous solo exhibitions as well as participated in group and curated projects. Recent exhibitions include: Through Currents with Lisa Bate at Franklin Arts Centre, Pukekohe (NZ); Hanging on the Surface, Window Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau (NZ); Affectionate Wandering of Spaces Both Real and Imagined, Academy of Fine Arts, Te Whanganui-a-Tara (NZ); and Careful, the Floor is Wet, Mono, Lisbon, Portugal. In 2018, Monique was awarded an 18-month studio residency at Frappant e.V., an art house in Hamburg, Germany. In 2022, she was the Marsden Collegiate School Artist-in-Residence in Wellington, and in 2021, the Artist-in-Residence at Mono Lisbon, Portugal. Monique explores water as a metaphor for the human condition—fluid, shifting, and interconnected. Through painting and collage, Monique investigates how bodies relate to space, movement, and transformation. Influenced by feminist post-human thought, Monique considers how watery embodiment challenges individualism and highlights our political and ecological entanglements. She reflects on how bodies, like water, resist containment and continually transform. The translucent surfaces act as both skin and screen, offering glimpses into inner worlds while reflecting the world around them. Inviting quiet reflection—a space of softness, tension, and sensory possibility

Molly Cook completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (with Honours) at The Victorian College of the Arts in 2009. Since graduating she has exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions across Naarm (Melbourne) and Australia including TCB Art Inc, Rearview, Seventh, Nabe Studios, Brunswick Scout Hall, Daine Singer, Alta Forma, Stockroom Gallery and Sawtooth Gallery. She was the recipient of two funded shows at the George Paton and Trocadero Gallery. Cook works predominantly with found objects, recycled art works, and an expanded drawing practice. The mostly mixed media artworks contain sculptural structures, installations, ceramics, brightly drawn/painted elements and sometimes flowers. “The work explores ideas of feminism and the role of the mother. They are intentionally playful and blur the lines between art and craft and the role of the woman as the maker. This series of miniatures was made in small pockets of time carved out between caring for my children. The works emerge from half-formed thoughts before sleep and from objects gathered in a kitchen box—items I am drawn to and live alongside each day. Bound together with clear resin, the pieces reflect the fluid movement between work, making art, and motherhood. Short fragments of text reference both private reflections and shared conversations with other women, touching on the many transformations we experience throughout our lives. Colourful and playful, the forms are squashed into plasticine and fixed to an accumulation of kitchen lids—an assembled, domestic chaos.” Molly Cook, 2026.

Yongping Ren is a Melbourne-based artist and arts worker whose practice investigates how materials accumulate and preserve gestures, thoughts, and desires through time. Working with tensions between public and private, permanence and fragility, his work dissolves boundaries between the sacred and profane while centering marginalized forms of spatial intimacy, failure, and instability. Born in Xiaoyi, China in 1990, Ren is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art by Research at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. He holds a BFA from VCA and an MFA (Coursework) from RMIT University. His work has been featured in the Huaniao Island International Art Festival, performances at Powerhouse Museum Sydney, and group exhibitions at Testing Grounds, Alta Forma, Kyneton Ridge Artspace, and RMIT's IDAHOBIT celebrations. He has presented solo work at MAILBOX ARI, participated in the ARIXCHANGE residency program between Sawtooth ARI and Blindside ARI, and completed a residency at Absolutespace AIR in Tainan, Taiwan. Ren worked as Gallery Assistant at Bus Projects (2022-23) and currently co-directs Run Artist Run in Docklands, and artistic director at Blindside ARI, Melbourne. In the Liquidgroup show, Yongping continues his exploration of glue and watercolor, experimenting with forms like jewelry and In the Liquid group show, Yongping continues his exploration of glue and watercolor, experimenting with forms like jewellery and sculpture, to further develop his practice centered on stickiness and attachment.

Rebecca Odgers completing a Bachelor of Fine Art (Sculpture) at Monash University in the 1990s since then she has developed an art practice as an integral part of her daily life. It followed her to Sydney, Japan, Paris and London taking expression in silversmithing, sculpture, large site-specific installations and drawing. When Rebecca returned to Melbourne with a young family her practice became community focused resulting in 2 large scale mosaics made in collaboration with over 50 children. Rebecca has recently returned to exploring clay, the medium of her own childhood and has set up a studio with her now grown daughter Georgina, a silversmith. Rebecca is currently studying under the guidance of Neville French at SoCA (School of Clay and Art) in Brunswick.

Kate Stewart is a Naarm/Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist working across expanded painting, assemblage, and installation. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (with Distinction) from RMIT University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts. Recent exhibitions include Intermission (Five Walls Projects, 2025), The Murmuring (Rubicon ARI, 2024), and The Weather (Tropical Lab, Singapore, 2024). In 2025, Stewart founded Minnie Artspace, a domestic-scale, artist-run project space and residency program in Sandringham, dedicated to supporting contemporary practices through experimentation, dialogue, and community-focused engagement. “My current studio research explores instability, precarity and dis96sonance through materially responsive installation and assemblage. For Liquid, I present The Vine I and II: wall-hung works composed of bonsai wire, chrome beads and fragments of cumquat peel, forming spidery, vine-like structures that hover between jewellery, drawing and sculpture. Although materially solid, these works operate through liquid logics—flow, drip, suspension and potential collapse. Their precarious balance allows gravity, light and shadow to activate the work, producing shifting silhouettes on the wall. Working through expanded painting and New Materialist thinking, I use provisional structures to mirror states of flux—where form is always on the verge of change, resisting fixity or stable classification.” Kate Stewart, 2026.

Jordan Wood is an artist living and working on Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Since graduating from VCA in 2007, Wood has consistently exhibited across Australia and internationally. Drawing on personal and external experience, her work seeks to collate visceral responses as caught in the body. Traversing the spaces between histories and fictions, artefacts and debris, her multidisciplinary practice questions what we conceal and allow exposed. Recent practice examines perceived failures in artmaking and other life mishaps. Material, social, intimate relationships; pressed, stretched, expanded and shifting. Tension palpable, sometimes some things need to break. Reparations can be both inadequate and ingenious. Mediums pushed to thresholds, yet still hold and still care.5.