Paul Yore
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
We’re excited to share that Paul Yore is a finalist in ‘STILL: National Still Life Award’ for 2025, presented by Yarrila Arts & Museum in Coffs Harbour, NSW.
‘STILL: National Still Life Award’ is Yarrila Arts and Museum’s national biennial acquisitive art award. Established in 2017, STILL aims to recognise excellence, diversity and innovation in contemporary still life practice while broadening the interpretation of this enduring genre.
An exhibition of finalist works will be presented from 6 September to 9 November 2025 at Yarrila Arts and Museum, Coffs Harbour, NSW.
Pictured: Paul Yore, Big M (Strawberry) (installation view), 2025, mixed media assemblage on board comprising plastic, glass, wood, synthetic polymer, adhesive, and fixtures, 128 x 54 x 54 cm. Photography by Sam Roberts
We're delighted to share that Paul Yore is a finalist in the Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award for 2025, congratulations Paul!
The Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award, established in 2009, is organised by the Art Collection and Galleries Unit at Deakin University, Victoria. The award celebrates contemporary sculptures from artists around Australia, culminating in an exhibition of finalists' work held in August to October each year at the Deakin University Art Gallery.
The finalist exhibition will be presented from 27 August to 10 October 2025 at the Deakin University Art Gallery, Melbourne Burwood Campus.
Pictured: Paul Yore, Vegemite Jar (installation view), 2025, acrylic yarn needlepoint, cotton thread, and board, 18.5 x 15 x 15 cm, ed. of 5 + AP. Photography by Sam Roberts
SOUVENIR
The word ‘souvenir’ refers to memory, that vital faculty of the mind that allows us to form our identities, communicate, and create relationships with each other and the world around us. Seeking beauty and wonderment in the familiar, this exhibition brings together a collection of sculptural works that mirror popular Australian images, engaging memory, nostalgia, and our collective cultural histories. Adapting traditional craft methodologies across assemblage, mosaic, appliqué and embroidery, Paul Yore monumentalises humble mass produced motifs into highly decorative tableaux, allowing new possibilities for participation, contemplation and meaning. By playfully breaking down hierarchies between high and low cultural forms, Yore opens up a dialogue directly with our own subjective responses as spectators, empowering us to feel curiosity and wonderment. Optimistic and affirming, this exhibition reasserts Yore’s belief that art is an important space for expression, acceptance, and potentiality.
Hugo Michell Gallery are thrilled to return to Melbourne Art Fair 2025, presenting the work of two early career South Australian artists; Sam Gold and Zaachariaha Fielding, and Paul Yore as part of BEYOND 2025.
Sam Gold, Mmm I like your flow, humble little flow, 2025Stoneware porcelain and enamel, 102 x 36 x 11 cm irreg. Photography by Connor Patterson.
Sam Gold is an emerging ceramicist, who pushes the structural and conceptual capacity of clay. As objects, they materialise a kinship between Gold’s physical body, their psychological and emotional self, and the clay body, allowing Gold to explore states of futility, failure, resilience and grit, porousness yet inscrutability.
Zaachariaha Fielding, Untitled (672-24AS), 2024-25, acrylic and mixed media on Belgian linen, 199 x 294 cm, photography by Sam Roberts
Zaachariaha Fielding is a multi-disciplinary artist who hails from Mimili community on the APY Lands in far north South Australia. Fielding comes from a long line of multi-disciplinary artists and after a successful music career over the last decade, he now explores the visual language of his culture through painting.
Paul Yore’s installation ‘FUCK ME DEAD’, a vibrantly mosaiced hearse, upcycled and modified from an iconic Australian car, the ’70s Ford Fairlane, will be presented as part of Melbourne Art Fair’s 2025 BEYOND sector, curated by Anna Briers, Curator, Len Lye & Contemporary Art, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (Aotearoa), in collaboration with STATION.
Paul Yore, Fuck Me Dead (installation view, Carriageworks), 2022, mixed media assemblage comprising funeral hearse, found objects, glass, shells, LED lights, acrylic paint and plastic flooring, 592.5 x 379 x 149 cm
Melbourne Art Fair will be open from 20–23 February 2025 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Pictured (Top): Pictured: Zaachariaha Fielding, Untitled (671-24AS), 2024, acrylic and mixed media on Belgian linen, 166 x 151 cm, photography by Sam Roberts
‘BECOME WHAT YOU ARE’ brings together a suite of the artist’s intricate textile works, interrogating popular culture, nationalism, neo-liberalism, consumerism, and sexuality. Drawing on a vast array of recycled materials, forms, texts and images, Yore’s work deploys laborious and time-honoured craft methodologies such as embroidery, quilting, mosaic, collage, and bricolage. These experimental works engage in a kind of queer and linguistically deconstructive free association within which a plurality of meanings is made available.
The exhibition also features selected garments drawn from the collaboration Yore made with celebrated fashion house Romance Was Born for their 2023 winter collection entitled Stronger Together. These one-off couture pieces combine Yore’s bold vernacular with signature Romance Was Born techniques such as hand beading and sequin work, appliqué, and upcycled vintage fabrics including crochet blankets, military uniforms, and floral silk quilts.
‘BECOME WHAT YOU ARE’ is on display from 11 November to 10 December 2023.
ARTIST NEWS
Paul Yore’s ‘WORD MADE FLESH’ is now showing at Carriageworks as part of Sydney Festival and Sydney World Pride.
‘Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH’ is a new architecturally-scaled installation, anarchically composed of improvised makeshift structures, mixed media sculpture and found objects, collage and assemblage, painting, video, and pulsating sound and light. Conceived as a cacophonous, kaleidoscopic ‘gesamtkunstwerk’, ‘WORD MADE FLESH’ imagines a queer alternative reality.
This work has been curated by Max Delany, in collaboration with Paul Yore and Devon Ackerman, and will be on display at Carriageworks from 5 January to 26 February 2023. Visit the Carriageworks website for more information.
Sydney Morning Herald: Paul Yore's delierious Word Made Flesh pulls into Carriageworks
Concrete Playground: 9 of the best Sydney Festival 2023 Events
City Hub Sydney: Carriageworks on track for Sydney WorldPride
Pictured: Paul Yore, WORD MADE FLESH (installation view), 2022, Carriageworks. Photography by Zan Wimberley
We are thrilled to announce the launch of Paul Yore’s major survey exhibition ‘WORD MADE FLESH’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
Presented as part of ACCA’s Contemporary Australian Solo Series, ‘Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH’, curated by Max Delany, is a comprehensive survey encompassing the full scope of Yore’s work—appliques, quilts, tapestry and needlework, banners and pendants, collage and assemblage, and largescale narrative and history paintings, as well as a major monographic publication. The exhibition will be constructed maximally as a gesamtkunstwerk, presenting work over the past fifteen years, alongside a major new room-scaled sculptural installation to be developed for the exhibition.
‘Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH’ will be presented at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art from 24 September –20 November 2022.
Press Coverage
The Australian Arts Review: Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH
Sydney Morning Herald: Shaped by breakdown and brush with police, Paul Yore takes aim at modern life
ArtsHub: Paul Yore battling controversy with love and labour
Art Guide: Paul Yore on beauty, cooking and chaos - and why he's ultimately an optimist
The Guardian: Penis straws and obscene quilts: the artist turning junk into a queer church
NBC International News: 15 LGBTQ art shows that are spicing up global museums this fall
For artwork enquiries contact mail@hugomichellgallery.com
Hugo Michell Gallery is thrilled to announce that Paul Yore will be presenting a major exhibition at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) as part of their 2022 program.
The exhibition Paul Yore: Word Made Flash, curated by Max Delany, will encompass the full scope of Yore’s work—appliquéd quilts and needlework, banners, painting, collage and assemblage—drawing on the vernacular of visionary and psychedelic art, Greco-Roman forms, medieval tapestries, the decorative excesses of rococo style and trash culture. The exhibition will be constructed as a ‘gesamtkunstwerk’, with an ambitious new immersive installation presented alongside selected works from the past fifteen years, accompanied by a major new monographic publication.
A prominent queer artist whose iconoclastic works engage with the histories of ritual, queer identity, popular culture, nationalism and neo-liberalism, Paul Yore’s garish yet playful works recast a vast array of found materials, images and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux, suggesting hybridity, contradictory meanings, or an overturning of stable categories altogether.
Paul Yore: Word Made Flesh will be exhibited at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Victoria from September 17 – November 20, 2022
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