Adrian De Vries is an Australian artist with an abstract painting practice. He approaches the medium playfully to produce experimental paintings and installations. Adrian graduated from RMIT University in 2017 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Distinction) in Expanded Studio Practice. In 2018 he completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) at RMIT University. Since 2016, he’s regularly participated in various group and solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Canberra & Sydney. He’s currently based in Melbourne.

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Adrian is Coordinator in our Stretching and Warehouse Departments. 

These four saplings were burnt and felled in the 2020 fires. They were collected from my friends property near Sassafras, the trunks are mostly intact because they were wet from defending against the fires, but the fire was so intense it travelled underground turning the roots to embers. Strong winds felled the trees, but the trunks survived in recognisable shape with incredible root structures ending in blacked nubs. After drying for four years I have now oiled the wood and brought it back to life.

Suspending the saplings gives a sense of looking up at the tress from underground and imagining what these trees could have become over time. A few months after the fires, I climbed mount Nowa Nowa to see a panoramic vista of the scorched landscape. I was so happy to see vivid green beauty exploding from the blackened chaos.

Alexei is our specialist in acrylic cases within our Furniture Department

My practice navigates between the realms of commercial tableware and narrative art. I am presenting a collection of utilitarian objects, specifically a tea set, crafted over the last year. While this set can be perceived merely as handmade objects for daily use; my approach to ceramics is always rooted in their functionality, intertwined with the memories of my ancestors.

This particular set Bound by Salt evokes memories of my grandmother and the last afternoon tea we shared. During our ritualistic gathering I noticed she had inadvertently added salt to my tea, a sign of her early-stage Alzheimer’s.

The blue lines on the set symbolise the mangrove trees, particularly their roots as well as the blue lagoon where I spent my childhood with my grandma. The woven seaweed signifies the deep bound we shared, the salt that crystallised that moment eternally, and the sea that kept us apart for many years.

This work is not for sale but can take on commissions through the gallery.

Anne is our Front of House Manager and specialist Framing Consultant.

Connor Grogan is an oil painter. His imagery often refers to filmic or photo media that may or may not be real. These paintings are from a larger body of work titled “Hypercene”.

Connor Grogan was born in Dublin Ireland, he studied at the Wimbledon School of Art in London and has lived and worked in Melbourne since2008. He has held a number of solo shows in Melbourne and Dublin, and been included in curated group exhibitions and awards including Banyule Award, NotFair and Imagined Worlds at The Town Hall Gallery.

Connor is Head Framer and Manager of our Framing Department.

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Damien Hinds is a portrait photographer exploring masculinity and queer identity.

Damien is an expert Fitter in our Framing Department and assists Front of House.

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Darren Tanny Tan is a Singapore-born artist based in Melbourne/Naarm. His practice at once examines and betrays notions of history, the body, and their representations. Central to his approach are unorthodox image-making processes that result in the rupturing and obfuscating of images. He holds a Bachelor of Photography and a Master of Contemporary Art.

Darren is an expert art installer in our Delivery & Installation Department.

Elmira Ng
Designed in Hong Kong
Made in Naarm

Elmira's art practise incorporates multi-culturally shared iconographies, visual merchandising and craftsmanship to explore dynamics within global-industrialised supply chains (Capitalism), the division of labour, reification, commodity fetishism, and other economic psychologies and mechanisms that do harm to people.

Elmira assists in our Art Materials Shop, Front of House and cbOne Gallery.

Felix is Manager of Fabrication on our Framing Department, co-curator of Quality in our 1B Studios and unofficial photographer.

Ivo Botev graduated from the National Academy of Art in Bulgaria in2005. During this time he was living and working in London UK. Integrating Art and the craft of cabinet and furniture making, restoring and creating. Australia was next and his career led to Chapman and Bailey. He works primarily in Figurative art, mural painting, furniture making, wood carving, and restoration.

Ivo is our specialist cabinet maker in our Furniture Department.

I was born in Melbourne but largely grew up in the Northern Territory in Central and Northern Australia and moved back to Melbourne around 8 years ago. My recent work explores the shifting landscapes of Melbourne and the everyday detritus left by people living around the city.

Jamie is a stretcher in our Stretching Department.

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Julie Vinci holds a Master of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts. 

Using photography, sculpture, painting and textiles, Julie examines the politicised space of the female body, utilising her own lived experiences as reference. 

Julie has held solo exhibitions since 2002 at Centre for Contemporary Photography, Westspace,TCB ART Inc., Bundoora Homestead and Incinerator Gallery and Five Walls Gallery and has participated in a number of group exhibitions such as Sarah Scout Presents, Counihan Gallery, Craft Victoria and participated in Notfair Art Fair, Fringe Festival and Next Wave Festival. 

Julie was awarded the winner of the No Contest Art Prize and was a finalist in the Naked and Nude Art Prize, Tatiara Art Prize, Gosford Art Prize and the Waverley ArtPrize.

Julie’s work is held in the Justin Art House Museum and private collections around Australia.

Julie is Wholesale Manager in our Art Materials Department. 

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Driven by an interest in ecology and navigating one's enmeshment within it during the contemporary age, Kohl Tyler often looks to the natural world, sciences, archives, and phenomena as starting points in her sculptural practice. Ideas of interconnectedness, life's ephemerality, and notions of ecological grief are explored through a material pursuit. She works predominantly in ceramic sculpture, and occasionally in watercolour and social practice.

Kohl Tyler is an Aotearoa/New Zealand-born artist who’s been based in Naarm/Melbourne since 2018. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Whitecliffe College of Art and Design in 2016 and was awarded the Artist Alliance Graduate Award in 2016. In 2017, she won the Estuary Art and Ecology Award at Malcolm Smith Gallery in Auckland, NZ and in 2024 she won the Omnia Art Prize People's Choice award. She has presented solo exhibitions in Aotearoa and Australia including; All is Ephemeral, FELTspace, Adelaide, SA (2024),sub- super-, Quality, Melbourne, VIC (2024), and Moving Past the Sun, Weasel Gallery, Hamilton, NZ (2020). Recent group exhibitions include Ceramics Now, MARS Gallery, Melbourne, VIC (2024) and Ceramics, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, VIC (2024). In 2022 she presented Offerings, a social art installation held at the UNESCO heritage-listed Carlton Gardens in Naarm, Australia, supported by the City of Melbourne Art Grants. Her work is held in the collection of the Gippsland Art Gallery, VIC and in private collections throughout Australia, Aotearoa.

She is represented by MARS Gallery, Melbourne.

Kohl is a specialist with Jarman Framing and assists in our Framing Department and Front of House.

Lotte Frances is an emerging artist living and working on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country (Melbourne). A graduate of Fine Art Honours from RMIT University in 2020, their work explores the complexities of queerness, loneliness and memory. Lotte’s visual language is playful, yet vulnerable and intimate. Lotte has exhibited locally and internationally including Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Laid Bug in Tokyo, Filet in London, and has recently just completed a residency at La Place Artspace in Barcelona, Spain. Lotte has published two artist books through Stray Pages Press.

Lotte specialises in bespoke stretcher bars in our Stretching Department and Warehouse.

The source material for this series of paintings is my old VHS tapes of music video clips that I recorded off the TV in the mid to late 90s.They were meticulously and obsessively curated videos which sought to document and preserve that time in my youth. Now they are superseded by internet accessibility to all these clips, plus more... thus retrospectively making my hard work redundant and inferior.

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These paintings revisit and reinterpret the tapes, and follows on from my previous series of television image paintings. 
In these paintings I render the VHS aesthetic in all its deterioration and saturation glory, that captures an essence or mood of the songs without the sound. Visually the paintings are random from one to the next as the series resembles a mix tape of songs without the sound.

Luis is the Manager of our Stretching Warehouse.

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Madeleine Palmer is a Naarm based painter born in 1997. Her practice examines the vitality of natural ecologies and how they can be accessed and described through the language of her contemporary painting practice. It considers how the tradition of oral still life painting can be recontextualised through a contemporary lens by redefining the experience of current environmental and ecological issues and its relationship to her as an artist.

By imbuing the quirky forms with an energy that speaks to the essence of fecundity, the subject matter acts as a vehicle for talking about growth, movement and change in the natural world. Even though the work pays homage to the traditions of the still life, it seeks to escape the confines of stillness and rather seeks to capture and convey a sense of vital energy…..an unstill life.

Maddie is Front of House and consultant for our Framing Department.

Mark Chapman is Founder and Director of Chapman & Bailey.

Natalie Tromiuk is a Naarm/Melbourne based visual artist. She graduated from the Master of Contemporary Art at the Faculty of the VCA, University of Melbourne in 2016 where she was awarded the Ursula Hoff Institute Inc Drawing and Printmaking Award and the Faculty Graduate Student Assistance Grant. She graduated from the Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours at The University of Ballarat (Federation University) and was awarded the University of Ballarat Travel Award in 2005. She has held numerous exhibitions across Melbourne, including at Kings ARI in 2017, Trocadero in 2019 and most recently at Five Walls in 2023.

Natalie is a fine art materials specialist in our Art Materials Shop.

Nicholas Aplin’s work is inspired by urban landscape, and the flux of city environments. He is interested in Brutalist architecture, notions of utopia/ dystopia and finding beauty in the ordinary/ overlooked. His work often focusses on the interplay of the natural environment and the man made, be it buildings, signs, fences and roads.

Nicholas is an expert art installer in our Delivery & Installation Department.

Nik Kennedy hosts a number of alter-egos in the underground Noise/Grind sound arena. You may know them as Spasmoslop, Clogged, Spew Balloon, ESP Mayhem, Holy Boner or Umbilical Tentacle playing gigs regularly in Melbourne and Japan.

Nik is specialist fabricator in our Furniture Department.

At last! You can retain and organise your favourite elastic bands, thanks to this purpose built device.

Pat specialises in custom framing and fabrication in our Framing Department.

Paul's journey as a potter started as a ne art student. Facing financial troubles, he could no longer afford oil paint. At this time he began using any materials he could find. Stumbling upon a construction site full of clay, he began researching processing, pit ring and hand building. After graduation he set up a studio as pottery became his main media of choice.

Painting is always a long process, a winding road. This painting is the second of a series of works each painted over a year. Still life where the empty space is just as important as the objects, and an exploration of colour and painting in grisaille as a colour blind artist.

Paul is the specialist at mounting and matting works on paper in our Framing Department.

Talitha Kennedy consistently works with black leather for its tactile corporeality and macabre context to embody the fraught intimacy with the natural world. Her hand stitched soft sculptures simultaneously lifeless and budding with new growth personify natural forces in a constructed world. Stitching is translated into drawing in Talitha’s work on paper where intuitive ink markings follow the wrinkles and slopes of crumpled paper to conjure things in flux such as decay, cobwebs or fleeting shadows.

Talitha has shown installations, sculptures and drawings widely throughout Australia with solo shows including Artisan Brisbane, Stockroom Kyneton, Chapman & Bailey Melbourne, MARS Melbourne, Umbrella Townsville and NCCA Darwin. She has been in numerous curated group shows across Australia including Legacy: Reflections on Mabo which toured nationally through Visions Australia, Fecund: Fertile Worlds an Artback NT Touring Exhibition and recently Symbiotic Ecologies at Delmar Gallery, Sydney.

Photography by Darren Tanny Tan

Talitha is cbOne Gallery Manager and assists our Front of House.

My work is deeply inspired by David Abram’s philosophy in “Becoming Animal,” which emphasizes the interconnectedness of humans with the more-than-human world. Abram’s exploration of animism and phenomenology informs my artistic approach, encouraging a re-engagement with the sensory and sentient aspects of our environment. Through my art, I aim to dissolve the perceived boundaries between humans and nature, highlighting the vibrant, expressive qualities of the living world. This work seeks to awaken a sense of wonder and reciprocity with the earth, inviting viewers to perceive themselves as integral participants in a dynamic ecological tapestry.

Tara is the Manager of our Delivery and Installation Department.

Ying Huang is a Manchurian-Chinese-born Australian painter and printmaker. She studied at RMIT and majored in printmaking. Since then, she has held a number of exhibitions. Ying’s illustration style painting tells the story of her rescued greyhound Kiddy, a creature who shows her curiosity about other tiny little creatures.

Ying is our specialist in ornamental moulding and frame restoration with Jarman Framers in our Framing Department.