Present Matter(s) | Gallery Boot | Exhibition & Panel

Participants

Jessie French
Jessie French is an artist and experimental designer pioneering a post-petrochemical future through material innovation. Her practice explores the aesthetic and ecological potential of algae-based bioplastics, envisioning a world beyond conventional plastics. Through works that interact with light, transparency, and transformation, she invites audiences to engage with materiality in new ways while addressing the urgency of sustainable alternatives.In 2021, French founded Other Matter®, a design studio dedicated to developing and commercialising non-petrochemical materials for architectural and interior applications. As an extension of her artistic inquiry, Other Matter serves as a platform for rethinking material production and consumption within a circular economy. In 2024, the studio developed a groundbreaking, sustainable alternative to traditional PVC signage, marking a significant step toward scalable, real-world applications of her research.By merging art, science, and design, French’s work challenges conventional narratives around materials and sustainability, demonstrating the possibilities of regenerative design in a rapidly changing world.

Sean Brickhill
Sean Brickhill is a designer/maker from Naarm, Melbourne Drawing inspiration from architecture, Visual art and Sculpture. Sean aims to bring a fresh take on furniture design and functional art. He believes strongly in form over function but knows not to neglect the importance function carries in design. He aims to create engaging ways to convey traditional functionality in his work.

Ro Noonan
Ro Noonan is a Melbourne based artist that works between sculpture and painting. He has an innate preoccupation with materials, in particular the excess and the bi-products of construction: cut offs, supports and general debris. The selection process is an everyday experience, drawing attention to the details in textures, scuffs and general wear and tear. In bringing together these rejected elements, Noonan tests their ability to co-exist. The works are gradual in production, built slowly with a process that ricochets between struggle, failure and intimacy.

Indy Heath
Indy Heath, who works under the alias Spiraro, is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist working across textiles, sculpture, biomaterials, and lighting. Their work explores the material life of textiles, both living and lived, through a heightened sensory experience.They work with natural pigments derived from rust and plant matter, biomaterials such as seaweed and bacterial leather, and found objects such as metal and discarded textiles. By interweaving these elements into sculptural pieces, they question how future materials might coexist with those of the past. Blurring the line between organic and human-made, their work sits in the tension between what is grown and what is discarded. With a heightened sensorial experience of the world, Indy’s approach to making is rooted in sensory engagement, creating works that invite touch, sight, smell, and sound as ways to connect. Their practice extends beyond the studio into curation and facilitation, bringing others into dialogue with biomaterials and sustainable materials through group exhibitions and hands-on workshops.

Nicholas Aylward
Nicholas Aylward is a South East Queensland based designer and maker, With an interest in the manipulation of timber and metal, informed through his rural upbringing in Bangerang country where Nicholas developed his appreciation for the essentialism of the environment. Alongside his practice Nicholas continues to develop and seek inspiration through architecture as he works in the professional field.

Dusken
Dusken is a Melbourne-based furniture design and fabrication studio. With a background in architecture, they focus on cultivating rigorous design thinking, meaningful design outcomes, and realising those outcomes through contemporary technology and local materials.

Dalton Stewart
Dalton Stewart is a Naarm (Melbourne)-based designer whose multi-disciplinary practice explores the overlap of architecture, design, and visual art. Guided by an experimental approach to materiality and form his work engages critically with traditional and digital processes and fabrication. He explores deconstruction, reuse, and unconventional fabrication techniques to create objects that traverse a spectrum of oppositions—fragility and robustness, abstraction and functionality.Stewart’s practice seeks to layer and reveal stories, histories, archaeologies, and material processes that are often overlooked. Through a tectonic approach to design, his one-of-a-kind material assemblages reconsiders the significance of materials as both subject and medium, revealing new design languages through bold form-making. Investigating the physical nature of these materials and their relationship to the human scale, he broaches the complex histories and cultural significance of their use within the built environment.He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts (2016), where he was awarded the John Vickery Scholarship, and a Master of Architecture from the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne (2024), where he received the MacDonald Scholarship. His work has been exhibited at leading galleries, fairs, and institutions in Europe and Australia.

Annette Allman
Annette Allman (b. 1959, Wellington, Aotearoe/New Zealand) is a Naarm/Melbourne based visual artist working full-time from her studio in Brunswick, Australia. She obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Tasmania.Starting as a figurative and portraiture painter, Allman has vastly expanded her mediums and practice to best express the conceptual drive and development of her work. Her works include painting, metalwork, glass, ceramics, textiles, animal waste, taxidermy, glass and bronze casting. Informed by her former years working as a clinical psychologist; psychology, spirituality and the intrapersonal play key themes across her numerous bodies of work with strong commentary on feminist and current socio-political issues.Allman has presented multiple solo exhibitions and contributed to various group exhibitions. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including Winner of the Mandorla Art Award, Finalist in the Shirley Hannan Portrait Prize, Finalist in the Blake Art Prize, and Finalist in the Heysen Prize for Landscape.Annette’s current focus is large scale paintings, enabling her to better explore her artistic commentary on big issues surrounding climate and human impact. Allman strongly aligns with artist Sherrie Rabinowitz’s notion that we must create on the same scale that humanity has the capacity to consume and destroy.