Residue
Residue, curated by Georgia Boe as a part of Firstdraft’s First Nations Curator Program, brings together the practices of three artists at different stages of their careers, working in diverse ways with charcoal.
Residue, curated by Georgia Boe as a part of Firstdraft’s First Nations Curator Program, brings together the practices of three artists at different stages of their careers, working in diverse ways with charcoal.
Firstdraft is reviving our screening program to support ten artists working across video, film, and screen-based practice. The screening program runs from December 2025 - March 2026, offering multiple perspectives responding to two curatorial premises.
Guess what? In the '70s PM Gough Whitlam held an anthem quest to replace God Save the Queen. The Australian people responded eagerly with entries in notation, lyric and tape-recorded form.
stockpiler is an installation drawn from the remnants of her childhood garage, a room shaped by generations of quiet accumulation and a mosaic of several conflated identities.
Join us for the last workshop of the semester in our Artist Professional Development Series.
In this informal session, Georgia Boe, curator of Residue, will walk participants through how the exhibition came to be, including working with politically engaged artists and sitting comfortably in this space of discourse.
Join us on Friday, December 12th, from 6–10 pm to celebrate our final openings of the year.
Join us in the next artist professional development workshop to learn the basics of AV install with Gotaro Uematsu.
Artist Professional Development Program
Join us for the next artist professional development workshop in Navigating Arts Organisations with Kiera Brew Kurec. Kiera will guide you in working with organisations across the sector from ARI's to council led galleries to institutions.
Artist Professional Development Program
Join us for the next artist professional development workshop where you will learn how to write an eye-catching CV and artist bio with Audrey Newton!
Fog of war is a military metaphor that has been adopted as a mechanic in strategy-map-based video games. It appears as a darkened foggy area around a player’s avatar or base, differentiating the unexplored from the explored territory on a map shared with hidden enemies.
Penal colony, police state, imperial pawn. From its genesis, Australia has operated as a carceral and militarised state. How are artists responding to a structure that is physical, legal, and material—its legacies and its projections onto other places on the planet? Hijacking, intervention, documentation, glitching—fugitive artistic methods.
Headway is a large-scale installation formed from the remnants of a year-long performance by Felix Jackson. Throughout 2024, Felix wore one new white sock each day on alternating feet. By the end of the year, 366 socks had been collected, each marked with the traces of daily use.
Alina, Olena, Lana and Jana is a single-channel digital video work and installation. It is a re-imagining of four Eastern European characters that Cubric played as an actress for various UK television and stage productions.
Artist Professional Development Program
Artwork install 101 will be a hands-on introduction, covering the end-to-end processes of installing and deinstalling 2D artworks in a gallery setting.
Jingwei Bu will present a one-on-one, silent tea ceremony ritual. This objectless performance invites individual audience members to enter the tea room and sit opposite the artist on a stack of A4 paper, still and present. Together, they share the quiet ritual and the passing of time, creating a space for reflection, intimacy, and presence.
Mitchell Davis, David Horton and Martin John Oldfield
I Am Not My Father is a multigenerational collaboration exploring the complexities of fatherhood. Each artist brings personal experience—ranging from nurturing relationships to those shaped by absence, neglect, or trauma—into a shared conversation through textiles, sculpture, video, and an original score.
Sue Jo Wright
Labyrinths of Signs is a textile installation body of work by Sue Jo Wright, which explores the journey of identity, belonging, and the discovery of community.
Belinda Yee
This exhibition responds to the idea of 'Digital Genocide,' a term coined by Muneera Bano, Principal Research Scientist in Ethics and AI at the CSIRO. It names a hidden violence: the systematic disappearance, distortion, and underrepresentation of cohorts of women in the data that feeds machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Jingwei Bu
We Tea is an immersive installation developed through Bu’s ongoing studio-based tea ceremony practice since 2022. Rooted in intimate gatherings with friends, family, and visitors, each session becomes a durational act of presence where the slow rituals of making and sharing tea quietly document shared time and space.
Grow your collection and nurture the future of contemporary art 🖼️
We are delighted to announce that the Firstdraft Fundraiser is back and will be online from Monday 28 July and in-person from 1 - 3 August!
Naoise Halloran-Mackay
Naoise Halloran-Mackay explores ideas of shelter and the ways in which we may build, seek, or offer it.
Fergus Berney-Gibson
Intricate Rituals traces the uneasy space between boyhood and manhood—where affection becomes obscured by expectation, and kinaesthetic desire is tangled in myth. Through a darkened installation of four sculptural assemblages, the exhibition reframes domestic masculinity as a series of obscure and sacred rituals.
Joseph Burgess, Kiera Brew Kurec, Alex Tálamo, Nebbi Boii, Dana Albattrawi & Wirren Ward-Lowe
This exhibition considers the function of art in articulating opposition, fostering solidarity and imagining alternative futures.
Emily Greenwood
The series of prideful Tongan flags recontextualizes the Eurocentric standard to fit the Pasifika diaspora’s post-colonial framework. Continuing to unravel ancestral histories through a post-colonial lens as a forgotten Tongan excluded from the culture of the ancestors the work juxtaposes contemporary punk sub- cultural influences from the postmodernist period with ancient ancestral history.
Tay Haggarty & Annie Monks
Make your body-safe, usable eco pleasure toy while exploring sensory pleasure and the Indigenous practice of inner deep listening through clay.
Jack Hodges
In an era of increasing polarisation, political, cultural, social, and economic, a question arises: why don’t those seeking genuine change engage more with those who think differently? People often voice their beliefs within familiar circles, both online and in person, reinforcing opposition rather than encouraging understanding.
Tay Haggarty, Abbra Kotlarczyk, Tiana Jefferies, Seren Wagstaff, Amy Sargeant & Annie Monks
Garden Variety Dykes is a group show inspired by the PDF of the same name; ‘Garden Variety Dykes: Lesbian Traditions in Gardening’ edited by Irene Reti and Valerie Jean Chase in 1994. This exhibition dives into queer ecologies, puts forward questions surrounding the continuation of a queer linage in climate activism and explores sapphic yearning in the garden space.
Nelson Nghe
Nelson Nghe aims to illuminate the often "invisible" nature of gambling harm, especially its impact on loved ones. Through evocative found objects and images, Nghe reimagines hidden domestic moments, exploring the emotional toll that gambling harm inflicts on those indirectly affected.
FPS is a peek behind a sheer curtain, gazing into the close relationships between the global military industry and the video games that work closely with them. First Person Shooters (FPS) is the genre of choice for military shooters, allowing one to play from the first-person POV of a soldier looking down the sights of a gun and pulling the trigger.
carolyn craig
ALGAEIC INTENT investigates the ways in which Algae thrive in the wreckage of capitalism (it grows in response to the excesses of agriculture and suffocates fish via depletion of oxygen) and how this can operate as a mirror/reflective distortion of our intermingled biological actions and porous relations to matter.
Cecilia Sordi Campos
Motherhood and fertility have been extensively represented in creative practice for both their pictorial qualities and in the documentation of lived experiences. These representations continue to play an important role in shaping public perceptions of womanhood, while infertility is underrepresented, silenced or deemed contentious – often framed in terms of lack or failure.
Dean Qiulin Li, Zi Qin & Jincheng Deng
This project reassembles everyday life scenes in a conned space to generate an analog of a nocturnal urban park, reflecting the ongoing colonisation of the late night.
Erin Hallyburton
Press against; Soften into explores fat as a material, an identity and a form of embodiment. The exhibition responds to conventions in contemporary art that distinguish between normal and fat bodies.