MELBOURNE ART FAIR
20-23 February 2025
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.
ZAACHARIAHA FIELDING
Zaachariaha Fielding is a multi-disciplinary artist originally from the Mimili Community in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, currently working out of the APY Collective on Kaurna land/Adelaide. Having established himself as a critically acclaimed musician, the frontman for duo Electric Fields, Fielding is compelled to create art in whichever form is available to him.
About his work, Fielding shares: “I was raised on desert country in the eastern Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, and come from a long line of multi-disciplinary artists. I am compelled to make work that honours the visual language of my ancient culture. The iconography reflects the way I live my culture in the present, as a constant feature of my world, and visualises how I interact with the beings that populate the Tjukurpa I’ve inherited.”
Fielding’s work has been recognised in major art awards such as the Ramsay Art Prize at Art Gallery of South Australia and the NATSIAAs Awards at Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory. He was awarded as the winner of the Wynne Art Prize, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, in 2023.
His work is held in notable collections both nationally and internationally; including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, ARNDT Collection, Macquarie Group, and Sony Corporation.
SAM GOLD
Sam Gold is a South Australian artist living and working on Kaurna Yerta (the Adelaide Plains).
Sam Gold turned their hand to ceramics in earnest in 2018, bringing over a decade of training in Transpersonal Art Therapy (Ikon Institute), Furniture Design (TafeSA) and studies in Contemporary Art (UniSA, ACSA) to the medium. The pinch-style coiled sculptures and vessels, for which Gold has since become known, push 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. Subtle shifts in form, shape and texture – from the pressure of a thumb to the angle of the wrist – produce a somatic archive; “…your body is the only boundary for clay. You are the profile.”
Gold has been the recipient of the Helpmann Academy Grant and Undergraduate Award for Excellence (2019), the Helpmann Creative Investment Fund (2021), and the University of South Australia’s Australian Ceramics Council Award (2018) and Merit Award for Academic Excellence (2019). Gold has exhibited extensively throughout South Australia, and notably featured in the 2019 Australian Ceramic Triennial, Hobart, and 2021 Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Gold is currently a studio tenant at Mixed Goods Studio and JamFactory Alumni.
Their work has been acquired by the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Powerhouse Museum, and Artbank, as well as private collections both nationally and internationally.
Paul Yore
Paul Yore’s irreverent approach gleans from the material excess and consumer churn of late capitalism, the wasteland of the Anthropocene. Melding political critique with a joyous celebration of queerness, his works are imbued with the festive energy of a Mardi Gras parade at the end of the world.
Entombed within this mosaic sculpture and forming its armature is an upcycled hearse, itself modified from an iconic Australian car, the ‘70s Ford Fairlane, a luxury emblem of masculine productivity and petro-capitalism. The automobile was produced at the height of the oil crisis, a time when limits to economic growth were acknowledged through a recognition of the planet’s finite resources. The artwork’s title, Fuck Me Dead, refers to the car’s former funerary role, signifying the hopeful decay of fossil fuelled transportation and unchecked capitalist expansion.
Yore’s practice transmutes waste and detritus into something charged and talismanic through a kind of queer alchemy. Drawing on rainbow-coloured cacophony of mass-produced consumer trinkets, kitsch Australiana, mature content, and found slogans, artistic methods such as collage, quilting and assemblage all enable a ‘camp détournement,’ a subversive intervention which hijacks existing images and their meanings. Fuck Me Dead belongs within Yore’s arsenal of queer world building as death, too, can symbolically augur change. With its shimmering mosaic surfaces, phallic fertility symbols and blinging LED party lights, outmoded motifs and dead ideas are reborn anew.
This installation 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.