Firstdraft Micro Commissions
Firstdraft is proud to present our inaugural micro commissioned works.
Firstdraft is proud to present our inaugural micro commissioned works.
DEF Collective brings together four Deaf artists developing independent yet related practices across painting, photography, works on paper, sculpture and moving image. Centering Deaf perception, language and lived experience, the exhibition positions Deaf-led practice as a radical artistic framework for visual world building, embodied communication and community encounter.
Gửi mẹ (To My Mother) emerges from a larger body of work reflecting on childhood and family history, where loss has occurred and will continue to occur in the future. The exhibition is an expression of the artist’s love and gratitude toward his mother, who has always loved and cared for him.
You wouldn't remember him (2026) considers the family album and its role in portraying a nuclear family. Though never physically present nor its contents, it is referenced through a series of like imagery. How might this exchange destabilise narratives perpetuated in family albums?
Can the horse girl be reimagined not as a figure of escape, but as one who confronts reality’s terrifying flux—bridging disgust and transcendence?
Join us in our next series of artist professional development workshops in learning about documenting your artwork on video with Jade Boyd.
Join us in our next series of artist professional development workshops in learning about documenting your artwork on video with Jade Boyd.
Join us in our next series of artist professional development workshops in learning about AV Install Basics with Dylan Batty.
Join us on Saturday, the 6th of June, from 2—4 pm, for a workshop on proposal writing from Zoe Theodore.
Join us in to learn about starting an Artist-Run Initiative with Mega.
Join us in the first in our second semester of professional development workshops to learn the basics of exhibition install with Owen Lewis.
Gummamagic is Edward Barns’ second solo exhibition and first Sydney presentation, capturing the animals surrounding his home in Gumma on the Mid North Coast of NSW. Drawn from observing the surrounding environment with his mother, Donna, the paintings reflect the wildlife Ed greets daily, alongside an immersive soundscape created together that brings the landscape to life.
Discord Kittens and Muck Puppies explores sentiments of loneliness, grief and misunderstanding as digital connection feels atomised through quantity rather than quality of contact. What happens when signals are crossed rather than interrupted? What does it mean to feel isolated in a mass culture distilled or distorted through personalisation, algorithms and a lack of shared language? How and where do we find connection when we are struggling to relate to each other?
Paper Feed reimagines the endless scroll as a wind-activated field of drawing, movement and landscape. Through accumulation of analogue mark-making, Kristone Capistrano considers how the handmade image might interrupt screen-based habits of looking, drawing viewers into a slower encounter with memory, presence and the sublime.
Break-even point is a speculative exhibition exploring labour in art, looking at what happens at the intersection of the arts worker/artist experience, and wondering what makes it worth it?
Join us in the first in our second semester of professional development workshops to learn the basics of exhibition install with Owen Lewis.
From pencil to pixel, Small Frame is an assembly of experimental animated works that foreground technique and material in physical space. Curated by Jenn Tran, the exhibition brings together independent animators Jent Do, Milly Yencken, Quinn Franks, Eleanor Evans, and Tiff Yue — artists working and recognised across Australia and internationally.
Having Swallowed a Mirror meditates on the idea that a portrait of someone else is also a portrait of the artist. This exhibition brings together three early-career artists exploring contemporary portrait painting and suggests that the practice of portrait making is a way of looking inward by looking outward.
Moving in (the next world) builds on Come As You Are, Little Umbrella Collective’s online exhibition, bringing the work into a shared physical environment. The exhibition shifts focus from individual practices to collaboration, imagining the gallery as a space of dwelling. Through painting, textile, sculpture and installation, artists collectively shape a home built through care, access and community.
In the Presence of Self (al-nafs) is grounded in repetition as both a meditative process and a quiet act of resistance, drawing on the spiritual tradition of dhikr (remembrance). The work invites the viewer into a space of tazkiyah (purification and contemplation), where the act of creation becomes ritual, discipline, and inner refinement.
Drawing from experiences and knowledges across the Great Ocean, fa’alogo ‘o le temporary obstructions is an offering that echoes from Sāmoa, and into the labours of the dispersed.
Water frames displacement and return in Ballast, a work in conversation with Les Kennedy’s unfinished research into the HMAS Sydney II shipwreck and the familial loss it holds.
Message Depth is an installation that examines the hidden infrastructures shaping contemporary life.