Melbourne Sulpture Biennale
Paul Yore is currently showing in the Melbourne Sculpture Biennale 2026 ‘Soft Systems’. Melbourne Sculpture Biennale is a non-profit project founded in 2024 in Naarm/Melbourne, dedicated to deepening engagement with critically engaged sculptural practices and creating greater opportunities for contemporary sculptural artists.
In dialogue with Billilla’s architecture, history and landscape, ‘Soft Systems’ considers sculpture as a form of storytelling – one capable of making complex systems visible, material and spatial. The exhibition offers a broad survey of contemporary sculptural practice in Naarm/Melbourne while inviting audiences to consider the often-unseen forces and connections that shape the world around us.
Yore's presentation within the nursery room at Billilla Mansion takes as its starting point, and expands upon, his ongoing Souvenir series wherein mass- produced Australian folk motifs and forms are monumentalised into highly decorative tableaux.
The centrepiece of the presentation is the mixed media mosaic sculpture Big M (2025), displayed alongside several new conceptually and formally related works, a Vegemite Ja r, Foster’s Larger Can and Victoria Bitter Bottle . The suite of sculptures are displayed on spinning platforms, playfully engaging the nursery room as a site.
The presentation is optimistic and affirming, reasserting the primacy and urgency of creativity and the belief that art remains a vital space for expression, acceptance and potentiality by allowing new possibilities for participation, contemplation and meaning. By playfully breaking down hierarchies between high and low cultural forms, Yore attempts to open up a dialogue directly with our own subjective responses as spectators, empowering us to feel curiosity and wonderment.
To this end, the presentation considers the nursery room as an important context for the presentation, animating a multiplicity of potential narratives. An important idea in this context is mimesis and mimicry. As Roger Caillois elucidates in his theorisation of play and games in human development:‘For children, the aim is to imitate adults. This explains the success of the toy weapons and miniatures which copy the tools, engines, arms, and machines used by adults. The little girl plays her mother’s role as cook, laundress, and ironer. The boy m akes believe he is a soldier, musketeer, policeman, pirate, cowboy, Martian, etc. ’ - Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (Les jeux et les hommes, 1958), Pg 21
In imitating pre-existing forms, in this case food products, and exaggerating them into uncanny sculptural objects, the works positions the adult viewer as a child-like figure too, catalysing a critique through a queer lens of the process of learning, language acquisition, consumption, and being inculcated into cultural and social norms. Equally, the work seeks to think about play and mimesis (and therefore creativity and art) as a potentially emancipated space. Mimicry, make believe, role- play, masquerade, drag, parody, camouflage and disguise offer opportunities to resist the expectations of rigid categorisation.
The presentation is also sympathetic to the historical and architectural context of the mansion, drawing upon traditional decorative and applied art methodologies such as mosaic, and resonating with the material and formal conventions of Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement. Both these periods can be understood as reactions against industrialisation and mechanisation, reviving instead time-honoured artisanal techniques.
The biennale is on display at Billilla Mansion, Brighton, Victoria, from 8–25 October 2026.
Pictured (ABOVE): Paul Yore in Melbourne Sculpture Bienniale: Soft Systems, 2026. Installation Photography by Nicholas Mahady.
Pictured (TOP): Paul Yore, Victoria Bitter Bottle, 2026, mixed media assemblage sculpture comprising plastic, glass, crockery, found objects, wood, adhesive, synthetic polymer, fixtures, 90 x 40 x 40 cm