Each year, Melbourne Art Fair brings together exciting contemporary artists from across Australasia, both established and emerging – and the 2025 edition is no different.
This time around, there’s the chance to buy contemporary pieces from more than 100 artists (presented by 70 galleries and arts centres), plus large-scale installations, video art, activations, artist talks and more from February 20 to 23 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Ahead of the event’s return, we spoke to three exhibiting artists to find out about their careers, what got them interested in art, where they find inspiration and what to expect from their Melbourne Art Fair exhibitions.
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SIGN UPPaul Yore
Working in tapestry, quilted hangings, reclaimed textiles and mixed media, Paul Yore’s flamboyantly subversive artworks are the product of a collector’s eye, where the stories of objects are celebrated – and continued.
How would you describe your style?
I definitely lean on decorative arts traditions. Camp and kitsch and baroque, or rococo decoration and things like that really inform my style.
How do you approach a piece? Does it come organically from the materials that you’re using or do you have a theme in mind when you start?
It is quite an organic process. Things come into your orbit and oftentimes they’ll be attractive, but it might take many years of it sitting around in a box before it finds its place in a work. So there is this interesting worldbuilding or cosmology that’s happening in the work where things find their place.
I am really a collector – my partner might call me a hoarder, but I did study archaeology at university and, ever since I was a small child, I’ve been interested in collecting objects, whether it was stamps or coins or feathers or shells. My work is driven by the things I find around me.
I’m interested in everyday experiences and relooking at things that have been passed over in our busy lives. I use a great deal of found materials in my work and I’m very aware of the kind of trajectories of production that these objects have had in previous lives and the people who have touched them and maybe worn them if it’s my textile works. I feel like they nonetheless retain this kind of energy and resonance.
One of the roles of art is to allow for that closer examination and even for the viewer to have a magical or joyful or transcendental or nostalgic kind of experience with something that is familiar, but they might not have otherwise looked at in that particular way.
Do you have a favourite medium to work in?
I do work a lot in textiles. I think textiles are a really beautiful material and methodological kind of form. They involve this real kind of slowness and methodical extension of care. As a queer artist, that’s a really important idea for me to reflect upon – not only gendered labour, but also those traditions of community-building and lateral feminist and queer extensions of care and those kind of histories that are embodied in the decorative arts tradition.
What can we expect from you at the Melbourne Art Fair?
Ultimately, my work is really about the viewer experience. It’s nice to be showing in a more relaxed context than a museological context.
I acknowledge that the work, when it leaves my studio, goes out into the world and it has another life and I’m quite comfortable with that. I guess it has a kind of agency or a capacity to be something else, and I really love that idea for better or worse.
In that sense it’s like reversing the flow of how those objects have been out in the world because oftentimes I am rescuing things that literally go into landfill. That is, in some ways, an allegory for queer experience: this idea of survival and reclaiming and allowing things to have a different life.
Thea Anamara Perkins
Western techniques meet a Central Desert context in the portraits and landscapes of Thea Anamara Perkins. The Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist says it’s all about reappropriating visual language to say what she needs to say about Country and the people she features.
How would you describe your style?
Because I’m connected both to the southeast coast, where I grew up, but have also spent a lot of time in Alice Springs and saw what was happening with Central Desert painting there, my style developed out of that context in many ways.
I view the figurative as an appropriation of Western techniques. It’s taking that language, but using it to express what I want to express about Country – it’s playing with familiar languages to say something new. It can speak to people that don’t necessarily have an art background. Beauty can be such a good vehicle to deliver the hard truths.
Your mural Stockwoman contained both a portrait and a landscape. Is there a difference to how you approach each type of work?
They’re two frames of minds. The portraits are interrogating representation. They’re very personal. They’re also delving into memory, there’s a lot of forces at play and they’re very much about that moment of being and they’re quite intimate.
With the landscapes, I’m trying to convey a lot of things that [are] very much about love of Country and place and about my journey of connecting to Alice Springs. That kind of effloresces in the different kind of energy in both of them.
Bringing them together was like traversing those different modes, and putting them into the same thing with really expressive, larger gestures that’s quite dynamic, but with the more restrained mode of working on a portrait to establish likeness meant there was a cinematic notion that came into play.
What’s been interesting and good having both of the practices is it keeps you limber, you’re not getting too rigid in one kind of area.
How would you compare your practice and your style now to when you first started?
My goal was always to have a distinctive style that was true to myself, and I think that taking the approach of getting in there and working it out for yourself and not being too prescriptive from the outset is important for that.
A big thing is confidence, and it’s just getting more familiar with the mediums and what I want to do with them. And trying things with scale.
I’m just very intuitive and compulsive with what interests me, but I also really like to push myself too, like being in a constant state of evolution. It’s always good to be in that experimenting kind of phase – I don’t think it really stops.
What can we expect from you at Melbourne Art Fair?
It’ll be a landscape at this stage and it is going into this newer, kind of looser style that I’ve been working on that’s bringing together a lot of things. It’s a series of memory mirages – small paintings on this idea of mirage and figments of your memories and thoughts – and then in that process they got incredibly loose. I’m really excited to share these works.
Earlier on, it could be quite confronting having people respond to my work, especially because they’re very personal. Now it’s a funny thing because when it leaves the studio, it’s a release. I think if you don’t relinquish it, then you can miss out on some fun, interesting things in the wild.
Zaachariaha Fielding
Both the 2023 winner of the prestigious Wynne Prize and vocalist for music duo Electric Fields, Zaachariaha Fielding grew up in Mimili in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands and sees art as a reflection and extension of the self, the land and the cosmos.
What are your artistic influences?
Ngura is what Anangu people call “land”. It’s a Yankunjara word. And I’ve grown up hearing our traditional songs in my community, Mimili. So there’s a songline for all of these creatures and they’re not separate to us. Humans have this real weird thing, that we’ve adopted from the Western world, on what you should be or how you separate yourself from land. What has been just beautiful for me to experience at a young age and in my community is the push and pulls, and the relationship between men and water and land. A lot of my artwork and my music is drawn from that place.
Also what I’m so grateful for is to work alongside my colleagues, my elders at the APY Collective here in Adelaide, and to just sit in where they go with their memory and their songlines. They influence the composition when it comes to the visual arts, and I also lock that memory [for] singing in the studio.
You’re talking about interconnectedness. Do you feel you need a boundary as well?
I think with the boundary thing, it’s to be safe and also to have a conclusion. But Anangu brain and the Western brain are very different: in Anangu culture, the only energy and entity that gets to experience that is Ngura alone.
I think the first people and the model that originated from this continent first had no boundaries – the senses were limitless and there was a sense of freedom, there was a sense of expanding. And the question is “Why?”, but I guess you need to shepherd your people.
“Why” is an essential question for artists, isn’t it?
Yeah. And it’s exhausting. So that’s why I [thought], “I’m okay just to be a temporary thing.” You’re in and you’re out.
Were you ever conscious of choosing an art career? Because it feels like you were always an artist before having a career.
I am yes, there’s the visual and the music, but also I’m from a long line of powerful women and powerful men – that is my foundation before I became anything. And then everything that I am from that feeds into the practices that I do.
I am slowly learning more about myself and I’m evolving. I’m painting. I’m sound. I’m sorrow. I’m joy. I’m everything and nothing at the same time.
My canvases are all my children, they come from the one mind womb and I come from that. And they will outlive me physically, but I will always be of the vein of those words. And they’re an extension of each other, the works that come from me, and they’re an extension of the external world as well.
What do you plan to show at the Melbourne Art Fair?
Landscape. I’m showing harmony. I’m showing the uniqueness, my care for my Country, my curiosity and my anger towards decision-making. I’m going to share music as well through my canvases. I’m only a reflection of you. I’m a mirror. I’m mirroring everything. That’s my job. I feel comfortable doing that. That’s all I can do as a living thing.
The environment’s amazing. Just to be in the space of people’s storytelling and where they come from – again, referring to the same consciousness – just to be around that is a powerful thing. The real reason we’re here is to commune with other artists and I appreciate this.
Melbourne Art Fair runs from February 20 to 23 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Use the code BROADSHEET20 to receive 20 per cent off tickets, Friday to Sunday. Get your tickets now.
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