July 29 - August 29
FELTspace Graduate Award (FELTgrad)
The FELTspace Graduate Award Program is an annual initiative, which provides three outstanding Visual Arts graduates the opportunity to present their work at FELTspace during the highly competitive August period, aligning with the South Australian Living Artists Festival. FELTspace offers this award to a graduate from the Bachelor of Visual Arts degree from each of the South Australian tertiary providers: Adelaide Central School of Art, Adelaide College of the Arts - Tafe SA and Adelaide University.
Encouraging the development of new work, each recipient is allocated one of FELTspace’s three galleries that best suits their practice, and receives mentoring throughout the course of the program from an artist or arts professional of their choice, the FELTspace Committee and an industry leader to bring their exhibition to fruition. FELTspace will provide assistance to the individual by way of: covering gallery hire fees, promotion of the exhibition, SALA registration and supplied professional documentation of the exhibition.
Through the Graduate Award Program and associated mentorships, FELTspace aims to provide a supportive platform to assist and advocate for the establishment of emerging, sustainable and experimental practice of promising visual artists in our local arts industry.
Front Gallery
Nick, Notch, Outlet.
Sue Last
Artist Statement
My practice explores the inherent qualities of everyday material that I collect whilst exploring my world. I seek out the accumulated history and material memory of these objects. After an intense period of reflection I sculpt, assemble and create a range of sculptural forms by experimenting and employing a range of techniques. These include casting in various mediums, modelling in clay papier mache and assembling the found and made objects.
My inspiration comes from connections formed as I travel and observe my surroundings. I photograph and find treasures from the bush and seaside, rubbish tips and domestic hoards. I give the objects the reverence and respect they deserve, and with this recognition and new purpose, a vital materiality is acknowledged that allows for the formation of a new Story.
Bio
Sue Last is a South Australian Visual artist working in the fields of sculpture, drawing and installation. Her work reflects an interest in the natural world, regeneration and reuse and the endless possibilities that this creates.
A starting point for her creations is bricolage; she collects and sources found materials. Last wants to tread softly on the earth, minimising her impact on the world. Her work creates small other worldly installations that have a shared context using repurposed objects and sculptural technique that utilise recycled materials.
Last graduated from Adelaide Central school of art in 2025. Her work in the graduate show was awarded the FELTspace graduate award. Since then, Last has exhibited In the Fringe, in the Artists at Work exhibition at Mrs Harris’ shop. Last also participated in a collaborative sculpture, titled “Leaves” exhibited in the Palmer Sculpture Biennial.
Back Gallery
Holding Patterns
Millie Nearmy
Artist statement
Holding Patterns is an exhibition that visualises a simultaneous intensity and aimlessness. The works struggle to reconcile the relationship between a longing mind and an inactive body. This disparity is a result of one’s gaze turning too far inward and thus being unable to face the world. Inertia builds and inhibits the possibility of experience. We reduce ourselves to a set cycle of behaviours. We repeat without resolution; we become stuck in a holding pattern.
The face and body are used repetitiously as the grounds for these cycles to take place. The push and pull between the internal and external becomes visible. Every compulsive thought, every overslept morning, every scan of the mirror. No face or body ever fully present or readable. As these tensions rise within the work, they are reflected on, mediated, and given form through paint.
Bio
Amelia Nearmy is a 21-year-old emerging visual artist located on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. She graduated from the University of Adelaide in 2025 with a Bachelor of Contemporary Art. For her work in the 2025 Graduate Exhibition, Crescendo, Nearmy was awarded the John Christie Wright Memorial Prize and FELTspace Graduate Award.
Through a constant stream of drawings, notations, photographs, and collages, Nearmy attempts to observe and catalogue, with the eventual hope for understanding. Primarily, she works with oil paint and inks. Her interest lies in figurative painting, informed by the works of Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, and Luc Tuymans.
Nearmy’s graduate body of work, titled No Longer/Not Yet, used portraiture to explore how young people negotiate personal identity in modern society. Framed by the philosophy of the late Mark Fisher, these works used paint as a way to force form upon troubled identities. Fisher’s ideology posits that the world’s rapid globalisation and computerisation have flattened our experience of temporality and geography. It has left individuals unable to grasp the present and unable to pursue a meaningful future. Thus, society becomes haunted by spectres of the past, and by prospective lost futures. Nearmy is particularly interested in the ways in which this loss of direction is affecting the younger generations.
This sentiment continues to echo through Nearmy’s work as she engages with themes of identity and isolation. Future works will aim to explore this further by expanding beyond conventional portraiture. Nearmy continues to develop her painting and drawing practices with the goal of synthesis between the two.
FELTdark
Rinse &
Ann Gillespie
Artist statement
A form slowly gathers, growing, reaching and taking shape before returning to the ground. Resisting completion, it never settles.
Working with unfired clay, gravity, water and touch shape the form. Like care, it develops through continual acts of attention and response, each gesture answering the last. Rather than following a predetermined outcome, the work unfolds through an ongoing practice of noticing, adjusting and tending. Time is marked by return rather than completion.
The work asks us to pause and notice the quiet traces of care that sustain everyday life, yet are so often overlooked.
Bio
Ann Gillespie is an emerging Australian contemporary artist based in Adelaide. Working across sculptural ceramics, video, installation, and performance, her practice is shaped by lived experience of care and explores the relationship between materiality, time, and relationality.
Using unstable materials such as raw clay, Gillespie creates works that embrace transformation, repetition, and impermanence. Her broader practice examines the often unseen, feminised, and ongoing labour of care, considering how material processes can embody its rhythms. Through gestures that are responsive rather than fixed, her work reflects on interdependence and the quiet endurance of everyday care. Gillespie graduated from Flinders University with a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Visual Arts) and received a Chancellor's Letter of Commendation. She was awarded the Helpmann Academy Major Exhibition Award, leading to a solo exhibition at MARS Gallery (Melbourne), received the FELTspace Graduate Award, and was nominated for the Hatched National Graduate Show.