News

Congratulations to Sam Gold who has announced as the WINNER of the Wollongong Art Prize 2025!

Judged by Dr Kristen Sharp, Gold's winning work explores care, fluidity, and resilient storytelling. The large-scale hand-built stoneware sculpture, finished with enamel, uses coiling and layering to resist fixed edges, carrying collective stories and asserting presence.

Wollongong Art Prize is an acquisitive national prize, open to all Australian artists. Now reimagined for a new generation, the competition invites submissions from artists working across all mediums. With a strong emphasis on accessibility, inclusivity, and community engagement, the prize seeks to showcase the breadth and vitality of contemporary art practice.

The finalist works will be on display at Wollongong Art Gallery from today until Sunday 1 March 2026.

Once again we congratulate Sam and all the other finalists!

Sam Gold, Lungs swollen with warmth from the mouths of exploding stars, 2024-25, stoneware and enamel, 150 x 190 x 18 cm. Photography by Connor Patterson

We’re delighted that Julia Robinson is featured in the new publication ‘Textiles x Art’, written by Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson, published by Thames and Hudson.

Textile art has surged into the spotlight, shedding its long-standing association with domesticity and craft to take centre stage in galleries, biennales and critical discourse. Authors Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson explore this vibrant resurgence, and the way artists across the globe are embracing traditional techniques like weaving, embroidery, quilting and dyeing, while pushing them into bold new territory. Far from decorative or nostalgic, these works speak to urgent contemporary themes: identity, gender, migration and environment.

This global survey of forty-four artists reveals the shifting boundaries between craft and fine art, and the expressive power of cloth in the hands of today's most boundary-pushing creatives. Textile art isn't just having a moment, it's reshaping the conversation.

Pictured: Textile x Art by Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson, 2025, Thames and Hudson. Image courtesy of Thames and Hudson

Please join us for the launch of Georgia Spain’s ‘And suddenly, an iceberg’ and Kate Mitchell’s ‘BIG HAG NRG’ at Hugo Michell Gallery on Thursday 30th October, 6-8pm. 
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GEORGIA SPAIN
And suddenly, an iceberg

‘And suddenly, an iceberg’ explores language, mythologies, grief, time and the slipperiness of memory. About this body of work, Georgia shares: “I felt a deep desire to turn inwards. That desire became the current running through this body of work — a process of mark making, writing, excavating and unearthing, and most importantly allowing the work to reveal itself. It is both story and evidence — a diaristic trace of what it means to feel deeply, to be uncertain, to live in the wake of longing or sorrow…”
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KATE MITCHELL
Big Hag NRG

‘Big Hag NRG’ reclaims the figure of the hag as an older woman who sits beyond the usefulness of patriarchy and is therefore powerful, unruly, and free. The exhibition gathers spell-objects that appear still, yet are charged with action, energy, and presence.

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Hugo Michell Gallery are proud to partner with Bird in Hand Winery for this opening event.

Hugo Michell Gallery acknowledges the Kaurna people as the traditional custodians of the Adelaide region, and that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still as important to the living Kaurna people today.

Pictured Above: Georgia Spain, The Echo, 35.5 x 41cm

We’re excited to share that Richard Lewer will be presenting a major solo exhibition ‘I Only Talk to God When I Want Something’ at Geelong Gallery in November 2025. 

‘I Only Talk to God When I Want Something’ brings together key series that reflect Lewer’s lived experience of Catholicism and the rituals and moral framework that underpin it. From Confessions (2024) comprising 106 painted panels created through a participatory project whereby Lewer heard and then painted the personal confessions of gallery visitors, and Seven Deadly Sins (2023) interpreting the age-old sins of sloth, wrath, greed, envy, gluttony, pride, and lust through iconic art historical images (by artists such as Francisco Goya, Edouard Manet, Jan van Eyck, and John Brack), to Stations of the Cross (2007-08) recording the fourteen stages of Jesus’s crucifixion, the exhibition reveals Lewer’s connection to and interpretation of the faith system under which he was raised. 

Extending on the exhibition’s themes, a new series of paintings commissioned by Geelong Gallery and inspired by the Last Judgement will be premiered. As Geelong Gallery Director & CEO Humphrey Clegg says ‘Richard Lewer is one of Australia’s most loved and significant contemporary artists. His ability to examine, reflect upon, and represent our shared experience of the contemporary world around us through his artwork makes him an artist that everybody should know.’⁠

Richard Lewer’s ‘I Only Talk to God When I Want Something’ will be presented from 15 November 2025 to 1 March 2026 at Geelong Gallery.

Pictured (above): Richard Lewer, Envy (After Edouard Manet), 2023, acrylic on brass, 100 x 100 cm. Photo by Christian Cappuro