I believe in the free minded artist who in spite manifestos allows for a journey to take place, unknown, fearful and lonely, driven by a stimulus, recounting memories of his experiences of sorrow, pains, fears, doubts, the conscious and subconscious together, facing the challenge of planning the means of colour, form, space, balance, crescendos, materials, to deliver the essence and the magical poetics.
I completed my Tertiary studies as a scholarship recipient, at the School of Fine Arts Athens Metsovio Polytechnio. I majored in Painting and Theatrical Set Design under the guidance of Yiannis Moralis , Dimitris Mitaras and Vassili Vassiliadis.
As a practising artist I exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, got involved in architectural public projects, theatrical performances , children book illustration as well as Art projects for children.
I’m an independent design professional (creative/graphic) – since 1979 – having worked for some of Australia’s best design studios and managing my own creative consultancies. I have always kept a low profile over the years. I was invited to establish an in-house creative, design and production centre for D&D Global Group in 2001 – one of Australia’s most innovative and progressive cross-media companies. We were successful two years running in winning the prestigious printing industries of America premier print awards – [Benjamin Franklin Award] for best of category for use of environmentally sound materials – Certificate of Merit for special innovation – Certificate of Merit for print and graphic arts self-promotion – and for the first time an Australian print company was awarded – “They said it couldn’t be done” award.
“Creativity is an expression of emotions released to help process moments of uncertainty, fear and joy”
Abstract and Geometric art allows me to evaluate the contrasts of life. This drives my passion. I’m a digital abstract designer and artist exploring my personal truths, and connecting to my inner thoughts and feelings, which relate back to my life experiences.
With a personal and professional commitment to visual expression, I create unique and immersive, abstract digital art.
Geometric Structures – lines, patterns, shapes, and forms, leads me to draw inspiration from my surrounding natural environment – it inspires me to study – the visual perception and power of colour – saturation, hues, lightness, and balance.
My art expresses, hope for the future – it captures an emotional feeling in an abstract contemporary style that creates freedom from reality and reflects originality with an inconsistent and unpredictable nature.
I explore shape, colour, form, function and composition which allows each person’s own experiences, views and vision to interpret my work in their own highly personal and unique way – “it is not a static image”.
Digital Geometric Abstract Artist Original Contemporary, Geometric Abstract Art Digital Fine Art + Wallpaper Murals
Masonik is an Australian multi-disciplinary arts collective, who have performed, nationally and internationally since 2006.
Masonik’s immersive experience creates electronica / jazz-fusion / neo-classical and soundscapes layered with video projections. As Visual Artists, Masonik generates artworks based in graphic design, film, photography, sculpture, installation & theatre.
Masonik were regular contributors for the ABC Radio National show, ‘Sound Quality’ & were invited to record in the ABC studios in Sydney. Masonik has also created long form exhibitions and performances titled ‘Altar’d Lament’. These have been presented across Australia & Athens.
‘Altar’d Lament’ is a multi-disciplinary art installation and performance project. Though the critical locus of the project is the destruction of the cosmopolitan city of Smyrna in 1922, ‘Altar’d Lament’ is a pantheon for Neo-rebetes.
Masonik embarked on a pilgrimage to Piraeus and Athens to confront ‘rebetiko’, a cultural form that can be simultaneously fragile and resilient, both comforting and threatening. Refuge for the exiled, the tradition altered creating a narrative to an open-ended underworld. So was created this Unorthodox Amanes Altar.
Joy is a multi-disciplinary artist with works in puppetry, painting, ceramics, printmaking, digital imagery, and traditional icon painting. Her work explores the patterns, rhythms, and marks of nature in painted and printed forms and more recently from coffee cup ‘reading’ pattern imagery.
In her painted works, she abstracts the natural forms to a series of graphic units of strokes and lines. With these units she uses a technically simple form of printmaking and painting to build complex layers of colour, depth, and movement. Moving away from representing the natural world in natural pictorial form, she deconstructs imagery using repetition of marks to create moving surfaces of colour which allude to energy fields, wave systems and other unseen patterns within the natural world.
Joy (Economos) McDonald studied Fine Arts at Sydney University (1970s) and graduated at the Australian National University in Visual Arts in 1997 after teaching for several years in NSW. Now residing in Melbourne Joy has continued her art career in abstract imagery both digital and on canvas.
Her work is in several collections both overseas and in Australia, in the collection of the Canberra Museum and Gallery and in corporate collections. She spent time in Canberra on the Board of ANCA (Australian National Capital Artists) was a member of Craft ACT where she often exhibited as an APM, (Aust. Professional Member) her last solo there being in 2013.
She was a finalist in the Fleurieu Biennale SA in 2008, and again in three categories with two high commendations in 2011. She received a Rosalie Gascoigne Award from the Capital Arts Patrons Organization (CAPO) Canberra and a recipient of two grants from artsACT 2011 and 2012 for a Centenary puppet stage production and children’s book in 2013 titled, The Very Sad Fishlady, which was performed at THE STREET THEATRE. This story, and its subsequent production, was inspired by her Greek heritage with connections to Kastellorizo, in the Dodecanese Islands of Greece.
In her early artistic career, Joy began as a puppeteer with Peter Scriven’s Marionette Theatre, The Tintookies which toured Australia’s country towns. Here she worked with Michael Salmon, the well-known Melbourne children’s author. Joy has had over sixty exhibitions (ceramic, painting, and prints) and several solo exhibitions in Canberra and Sydney. She lives with her Husband James McDonald, PhD, who is an academic and a historian, specialising in Classical Greek and Canberra history.
Constantine Nicholas (HatziYiannakis) was born in Perth, Western Australia and currently lives in Sydney. He is a 3rd generation Greek Australian. His ancestry is from the isle of Kastellorizo where his grandparents and many others migrated in the early 1900s escaping foreign occupations, and seeking a new life in Australia. Most landed in Fremantle, and other parts of Australia and stayed. Nicholas has always questioned his identity which has been an ongoing theme in his work. He creates rich and layered works, installations and digital projects. His work offers fragments, of text and imagery, citing colonial, aboriginal and commercial references which the artist uses to question his Australian identity. “An ongoing theme in my work is to use historical journals (other’s truth), maps and illustrations to present a ‘point of view’.
His new line of work since 2020, harkens back to very early works, are more abstract and less referencial in nature. ART LINES explores space, digital photography and drawing to create rich coloured abstract line-scapes. Visit lynkfire.com/Artcons9
Nicholas has participated in more than 70 exhibitions in ANZ, APAC and USA. Represented in Public and Private Collections in AUS, NZ, APAC, US, EMEA.
‘A gesture in visual art is an expression of an idea or meaning which is presented and performed through the somatic effect on material and site. In other words, it is an expression of the body’s temporal rhythm, as well as a record of the body’s interaction and encounter with material and space.‘ Emmy Mavroidis
Born in 1965 in Melbourne, Emmy Mavroidis is a Master by Research candidate at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at The University of Melbourne. Currently, she is conducting research focusing on Drawing: Gesture, the Body, and Movement. At the Faculty of Fine Art and Music, The University of Melbourne, she earned a Master’s in Contemporary Art in 2020. Following her completion of her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) degree at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1986, she earned her Diploma in Education in 1992.
She founded Nyora Studio Gallery in 2003, a thriving arts centre in Melbourne. Emmy teaches & mentors other artists through the Nyora Gallery Resident Artists Program as well as holding exhibitions and workshops on drawing and sculpture.
2021-current Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts Master of Fine Art, by Research 2019-20 The University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts Fine Arts & Music, Master of Contemporary Art 2003 – current Nyora Studio Gallery Director, Melbourne 1991 The University of Melbourne, Institute of Education. Diploma of Education 1984–1986 Victorian College of the Arts Bachelor of Fine Arts, Painting
SELECTED PRIZES AND AWARDS 2023 Artist in Residence at DRAWinternational Caylus, France 2022 Recipient of The University of Melbourne, Stuart Black Memorial Scholarship for excellence in drawing. 2020 Winner of the Arnold Bloch Leibler Award, Yering Station Sculpture Award, Yarra Glen, Victoria. 2020 Grant awarded, Nillumbik Shire Council. Time of COVID-19, Art and Cultural Development, 2019 Montalto Sculpture Prize, Finalist, Montalto Vineyard and Olive Grove, Red Hill, Victoria 2018 Lorne Sculpture Biennale Small Sculpture Prize, Finalist, Lorne, Victoria 2016 Winner, Yering Station Sculpture Award, Yering Staff & Directors Choice Award, Yarra Glenn, Victoria 2015 Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize, Finalist 2014 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize – Semi-finalist 2013 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize – Semi-finalist 1985 Clifton Pugh Drawing Prize, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Victoria 1985 The Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria Award, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Victoria
Born in Paphos, Cyprus. Living in Melbourne Australia, Barbara’s art practice is an emotive, intellectual, and philosophical investigation of life and place in the modern world. Exploring her inner consciousness and how it interacts with her external surroundings. There is a constant push-pull effect of anarchy and control. The aim is to find balance within the chaos of these two spaces and discover what results. An ongoing theme within the artist’s practice is the study of the human condition. Examining our value system as a society and on a personal level. The use of colour is a critical part of her dialogue analysis. Engaging in an unspoken language through a spectrum of colours, form, scale, materials, and physical space.
Barbara has exhibited in Australia, Hong Kong, London. Her artworks are held in both private and public collections throughout Australia, Asia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America.
Jenny Dumont has travelled to many countries over the years to paint and view the work of past and present masters. She worked as an artist and teacher during her time living in Greece, Canada and since 2008 in her Bayside art studio in Melbourne Australia. Originally trained in Graphic Design but greatly inspired by the Surrealist movement with artists such as Dali, Man Ray and Duchamp. She went on to blend and create works that explore several different mediums and styles from modern acrylics and traditional oils to abstract inks and resins.
Her journey with resin as an art medium began in 2014 with works executed on custom made round boards and canvas. Inspiration came mainly from nature especially flowers, the beautiful local Bayside beaches, and the landscape of this earth in general. She mixes inks, pigments and powders with clear resin which is then poured in layers to create a composition that is fluid, has depth and is rich in colour and visual texture.
Jenny’s artist journey reflects her love of Surrealist ideals of juxtaposing images, mediums and methods. These attributes are an influence on her style and belief that, ‘not all needs to be as we know it’. Whilst working with and teaching resin, she began experimenting with the creation of art through furniture. Leaning on her experience as a wood and metal craft teacher, her love of art and mixing mediums, Jenny sourced home furnishings with unique architecture and their potential for metamorphosis. Each piece is lovingly restored, reinvented, and adorned with a piece of resin art, one of a kind and unique to that piece.
Today, Jenny is a full-time artist, Secondary teacher and entrepreneur. She continues to work with mixed media, experimenting with the vast boundaries this medium has to offer. She stands by the belief that, ‘an artist should not be branded but be a conduit, a forever evolving fluid medium’. Private collections of her work are held in Greece, Singapore, Canada, United Kingdom and Brazil.
Exhibitions:
1999 Pylaia Art Gallery Greece
2003 Matticks Farm Art Gallery Canada
2004 Vancouver Island Food and Wine Festival
2009 Canterbury Art Show Melbourne
2010 Beaumaris Art Group2014 Art for Life
2013-2021 Bluethumb Art Gallery
2015 Antipodean Palette Steps Gallery Carlton
2015 The Bayside Art Show
2015 Mingara Art Gallery Phillip Island
2015 Emerging Art Gallery Windsor
2015-2016 Without Pier Gallery Bayside
2017 Beaumaris Art & Craft Exhibition
2015 November issue of Inside Out Magazine
Bachelor of Education in Art and Design, Melbourne University (1985-1989)
Secondary Art and Design teacher, Arts coordinator, State examiner and mentor for VCE art students (1990-1992)
Professional exhibiting artist and teacher (1993-current)
Co-founder of Steaming Ink Design Partnership (advertising, graphic design and photography)
Pasakos reflects scenes of the Melbourne Docklands. It holds many experiences for the artist from his childhood, cultural identity, and reflects a sense of home. These elements form the foundation for the artist. Most of his works to date are part of an ongoing personal journey to endeavour to understand belonging and identity. Deep connections are made between the two worlds of his Australian upbringing and Greek heritage. He often visits the Melbourne Docklands to collect his thoughts and to view the maritime landscape, to seek his own iconography, narrative, purpose and understanding of sense of place.
The Docklands is an historical area with much significance to the Australian contemporary landscape, which came into prominence during the Victorian Gold rush of the 1850s as a very busy Melbourne shipping hub. Portraying the Melbourne Docklands is to continue the narrative of travel and discovery. During his travels overseas, he has often considered the valuable migrant stories. His works reflect these powerful experiences as they act as reminders of the fragility of our sense of self in the world, and the way in which that sense of identity may develop and spawn new cultural identities that change or shape values of other cultural frameworks. His methods are in Printmaking, Drawing and in Mixed Media. Works can be seen as surreal and atmospheric. They are often rich in colour and evoke a sense of mystery. They can be quite dark and with this brings a personal insight of the artist. As a practicing artist, Pasakos has been involved in many collaborative projects, print exchanges and exhibitions that has allowed him to produce other thematic works that have enriched not only his own techniques and methods but his practice and narrative. Pasakos grew up in Melbourne and now lives in Ballarat, a rural Victorian city. He studied Visual Arts at Monash University, Melbourne. He has a Bachelor of Visual Arts Degree, a Post Graduate Diploma in Printmaking, a Graduate Diploma in Teaching, a Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Education and a Master of Fine Art majoring in Printmaking & Drawing.
Since 1991 Pasakos has regularly exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia and internationally. His works are represented in public, private and university collections. Pasakos is a Visual Arts Lecturer at Federation University Australia teaching into Printmaking, Drawing and Studio Practice.
Global conferences – Peered Review Papers admitted and accepted – exhibitions:
International Print Conference, IMPACT – International Multi-disciplinary Printmaking, Artists, Concepts and Techniques
Sophia Xeros-Constantinides’ art-making was re-awakened as a mother of two. Once Sebastian and Bianca were both at school she was able to study Fine Art part-time as a mature-aged student at Monash University, Caulfield Campus. Prior to this, Sophia had seen her dear mother, Maria Xeros Colbert, learn to paint at summer school in Melbourne in the 1960s, under the direction of artists Robert Grieve and Dawn Westbrook, and later Sophia saw Maria extend her embroidery skills to new heights at the Embroiderer’s Guild, Victoria.
Through her clinical work as a Medical Doctor and Psychological Therapist treating pregnant women and new mothers, Sophia started to explore the visualisation of women’s reproductive experiences. This led Sophia to use drawing, printmaking and collage in her post-graduate art-making, to create her own visual metaphors for the complex and often traumatic reproductive experiences that women reported to her and to others. Sophia’s own maternal grandmother, Yiayia Evdokia, lost her first-born babe-in-arms Eleftheria when they had to flee Smyrna before the catastrophe in September 1922. Later, Evdokia had thirteen more pregnancies but only five babies survived to grow as children and adults.
In her Collage work, Sophia explores the female form and questions what it is to be human. Her art-practice is characterised by appropriation and juxtaposition that manifest in her collage works on paper and in her prints and drawings. These works challenge integrity and identity, recall surrealistic and uncanny forces and give expression to alternative realities.
Since completing her PhD, Sophia has taken up Painting in oils and gouache. For this she has ventured to Europe, and back to England, where she had lived for eight years, in her secondary school years, in Birmingham with her aunt Margaret Ryle and her dear Uncle Nick. She finds inspiration in the traditions of European art, in figurative painting, in colour and in representing the interface between Nature and (Western) Culture.
QUALIFICATIONS 1998-2001: Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University 2002-2005: Masters of Fine Art (by Research) Monash University (Thesis Title: “Procreative Bodies Envisioned: A Visual Exploration of Female Reproductive Experiences.”) 2006-2017: Doctor of Philosophy (Fine Art)(by Research), Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University. (Thesis Title: “Strangers in a Strange Land: Envisioning the Darker side of Motherhood.”)
ART THERAPY PUBLICATION ‘Myself as a Tree: The enabling power of an Art Therapy intervention in clinical work with post-natally distressed women-mothers’ in “Therapeutic Arts in Pregnancy, Birth and New Parenthood” Edited by Susan Hogan, Routledge, New York, 2021.
SELECTED PRIZES / AWARDS 2012: Mayoral Art Prize Maroondah City Council (acquisitive) 2006: Prize-winner (acquisitive) textile art in Fabricate 2006, Embroiderers’ Guild, Vic 2002: Australian Postgraduate Award
SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2016: Bitter-Sweet Embrace PhD Exam Exhibition, Monash Uni, MADA Gallery, Caulfield 2013: More Earthly Delights, Catherine Asquith Gallery, Collingwood 2012: Earthly Delights, Jackman Gallery St Kilda. 20-page catalogue, Earthly Delights 2010: Bedlam: The bitter-sweet embrace of motherhood, Maroondah Art Gallery, exhibition of collage, drawings and digital prints. 28-page catalogue, Bedlam 2009: Gestate – AAIMH/Marcé Conference Solo Exhibition, University of Melbourne 2006: Running with Pigs – Solo Exhibition exploring peri-natal loss, P.O. Gallery, Ballarat 2005: Concoct – Masters Fine Art by Research Exhibition, Monash Faculty Gallery, Caulfield 2001: Template: Beginnings & Becomings-An exploration of women’s experience in relation to reproduction, Women’s Bodies/History Conference, University of Melbourne
