Dear Agnes 2026 artists

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The Dear Agnes contemporary public art program returns to Truganina Explosives Reserve in 2026 with a new cohort of artists and collectives working in different mediums.

Find out about each artist below and save the dates for this year's program - 13 to 29 March. 

Nahbananas

Nahbananas is a multi-disciplinary artist who works across illustration, printmaking and textiles, creating collages and sculptures to explore the interconnections of everything that surrounds us. Her process is intuitive, guided by the materials she works with.

Her work examines the rhythms of daily habits, movements, and contemplation through traditional craftsmanship, experimental techniques, and carefully sourced materials, emphasising environmental impact and connection to our surroundings.

Instagram: @nahbananas

 

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Lee Ramseyer Bache and Ex Ponto

Lee Ramseyer Bache's work explores humanity's subjugation of the living world, the importance of responsible technology, and storytelling of place. His creative practice emerged from a desire to take storytelling through film beyond the confines of traditional cinema and into public spaces. This interdisciplinary approach addresses the evolving nature of public art and the transformative potential of projection technology, as well as shifts in multi artform storytelling. Lee is one of the lead artists at Little Projector Company.

Website: lee-rb.net

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Ex Ponto
is the alias of multidisciplinary artist Ivan Masic, whose work merges music, light, and moving image. Blending ambient textures, deep rhythms, and processed field recordings, he creates immersive soundscapes exploring place, memory, and the spiritual dimensions of sound. His improvised performances with live electronics, processed guitar, and alto sax balance reflection and movement, unfolding with emotion and spontaneity.

Website: exponto.com.au

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Debris Facility Pty Ltd

Debris Facility Pty Ltd works at the overlap of waste management and cultural production, within the framework of a queer corporate entity. Working through non-binary, multiple agencies to produce thousands of artworks, exhibitions, performances, designs, audio, video, text, wearables and other speculations. Operating in narrm for a decayed decade, they have worked with leading cultural institutions, artist run projects, publications, and self-devised projects. Their work is held in private collections and landfill.

Instagram: @debris.facility

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Rachel Hanlon

Rachel Hanlon is an artist working in the field of Media Archaeology, with a focus on obsolete telecommunication technologies and the socio-cultural rituals of connection. Her interactive installations, most notably Hello Machine – Hello Human, explore mediated communication's affective and historical dimensions. Hanlon's artworks stimulate thoughts regarding objects/things in relation to how technologies shape relationships, rituals, and perceptions of self, cementing the telephone as an object that verifies its place within our history as part of our cultural voice. These works reframe obsolete technologies as living cultural artefacts and invite participatory co-authorship from audiences, drawing attention to the interplay between material objects, human presence, and the ephemerality of voice. 

Instagram: @the_hello_machine
Website: rachelhanlon.com

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Alexandra Harrison

Alexandra Harrison is a trained anthropologist who has never practiced and an untrained artist who has practiced for 27 years. She has made visible lots of performance, strange and vanishing treasures. Helen taught her spheres are jewels without edges. Yesterday she learned to use a ride-on mower. Yesterday was long ago. The list of people she would like to thank is very long and comes in the form of a prayer. 

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Kate Hunter and Jem Savage

Kate Hunter is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, improvisation, painting, and sound. Originally trained in theatre, she creates miniature immersive installations and site-specific works that explore listening as both dramaturgical device and research method. Her practice employs painted surfaces, hydrophone recordings, and audio composition to examine relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Art and Performance at Deakin University, Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.

Website: katehuntertheatre.com
Instagram: @katehuntertheatre

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Jem Savage
is a music engineer, instrumentalist and producer based in Geelong, Victoria. His performances and installations incorporate a range of bespoke hardware and software operating across audio/MIDI domains. At the core of Jem’s practice is a commitment to curiosity, invention, and deep listening. He enjoys integrating generative sonic environments and stochastic control ecosystems, allowing for elements of chance and the potential for chaos to shape the audible outcomes.

Instagram: @savagemusics

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Angelique Joy

Angelique Joy is a multidisciplinary visual artist and early career academic, currently a PhD candidate at the School of Art, RMIT. Angelique works with photography, moving image, textile sculpture and virtual extensions of their work to explore neuroqueer and posthuman ways of being and caring. Angelique has published and exhibited their works nationally and internationally, nationally, they have been a Bowness Photography prize, Fisher’s Ghost and Waterhouse art prize finalist.

Website: angeliquejoy.com

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Dylan Martorell

Transience, improvisation and collaboration form the basis of Dylan Martorell’s music-based art practice. Housed within the conceptual framework of musical diaspora, his work is drawn to ways in which music travels through space and is affected by changes in geography, climate, culture and materials to become an agent for cross-cultural reciprocation. Focusing on the use of site-specific gleaned materials and incorporating elements of upcycling, DIY culture, robotics and alternative power sources, Martorell’s projects focus on concepts of transience, sustainability and community based group dynamics.

Martorell has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally including major projects, biennials and residencies in Thailand, India, Indonesia, UAE, Taiwan and Singapore.

Website: dylanmartorell.com
Instagram: @dylanmartorelll

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Joanne Mott

Joanne Mott is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the interconnections between art, ecology, and community. Working across sculpture, installation, new media and site-responsive forms, she investigates how art can cultivate empathy for the living world and reveal the poetics of place. Informed by ecological and sustainable frameworks, her projects often engage through interactivity, positioning public space as a site of reflection and shared transformation. Engaging with Land Art, Environmental Art, Ecological Art, and Bio-art, Mott’s work reimagines how we inhabit, attend to, and care for our environment. 

Website: joannemott.com
Instagram: @joannemott.art

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Hot Mulch (Kate Hill and Isadora Vaughan)

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Kate Hill
operates an expanded ceramic practice to consider the central matter of this practice—clay soil—in relation to its entanglements with cultural and material politics. She works with clay both inside and outside the studio, through sculptural processes involving raw and low-fired clay together with found and repurposed materials, as well as through situated, socially engaged practices in clay soil environments. Situated projects often incorporate collective practices of gardening and walking, together with the audiovisual mediums of sound and video. Through her expanded ceramics practice, Hill maintains an interest in modes of working which are cyclical, porous, and collective.

Website: kateehill.com
Instagram: @_katehill_

Isadora Vaughan’s current work engages with the concept of novel ecosystems—drawn from the fields of environmental conservation and restoration—as a framework for examining the systems of value that shape our experiences and interactions with the material world. Central to this inquiry is her studio-based sculptural practice, which serves as a point of convergence for exploring material encounters within the local environment, a landscape situated between remnant waterways, heavy industry, and suburban development.

In this context, materials function not merely as passive substances but as carriers of complex political and cultural values. Their presence reveals the limitations of conventional approaches that treat both living and non-living matter as static or predetermined. By considering novel ecosystems as dynamic material assemblages, her work investigates how such entanglements can be spatially articulated through sculpture, offering a means to critically engage with the changing ecologies of the contemporary landscape.

Instagram: @isadora.vaughan

Jonathan Sinatra

Jonathan Sinatra is a significant contributor, teacher and facilitator to the Australian and international Contact Improvisation community from 1993 to present. Jonathan Sinatra has over 25 years of professional experience in dance making and teaching. Principal dancer with Australian choreographer Russell Dumas' of Dance Exchange (2001-present). French choreographer Xavier Leroy in 13 Rooms (Sydney 2012). Melbourne International Arts Festival with Becky Hilton (2010) and Eleonore Didier (2014). Europena Contact Improvisation Teachers Exchange (2010-2012). Selected residencies: Room to Create, City of Yarra (2019); Dunmoochin Arts Residency (2012-2014). Educator: Contemporary Dance Lecturer, VCA (2020-present). Teaching Artist for ArtLife dance program for people of mixed ability Footscray Community Arts Centre (2010-present).

Instagram: @jonathan_sinatra

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Emma Lyn Winkler

Dancing around themes of death and futility, Emma Lyn Winkler's practice explores the intersections of collage, painting, ceramics, and animation. Her process layers personal photographs, developmental diagrams and a found imagery database to create works shaped by personal narratives of anxiety and mental health. Through medieval-inspired ceramics, nonsense diagrams, fragmented paintings and slapstick animations, Emma encourages viewers to find humour in the inevitable.

Website: emmalynwinkler.com
Instagram: @emmalynwinkler

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Portrait photography by Matto Lucas except for Hot Mulch, Ex Ponto and Kate Hunter.

Top photo: Artists Vivienne Tate and Catherine Magill performing as part of Dear Agnes at Truganina Explosives Reserve in 2023.