Sean Meilak Australian - Maltese

Sean Meilak’s practice spans sculpture, installation, painting, drawing and art in the public realm. His work layers place and identity through personal and collective histories, drawing from his Maltese and Italian ancestry and referencing a wide range of aesthetic movements, recontextualised in a language of abstract and architectural forms, taking a metaphysical approach to create new narratives and intersections. Meilak’s work often reflects the diasporic experience combining traditional and contemporary materials and techniques such as the Baroque plaster technique of scagliola and those of the everyday to explore his ancestral connections and western suburban Melbourne upbringing. In 2024 Meilak these connections took form in his installation, Set Pieces in the inaugural Melbourne Sculpture Biennale: The Burden of Objects, Villa Alba, Melbourne. Meilak’s visual art practice has expanded to deliver art in the public realm including a large-scale sculptural installation Made for Melodrama 2022, for Beyond the curated section of the Melbourne Art Fair 2022 and Pastel Pools - Public Art commission ACU Melbourne in 2023. 

Dr Jo Scicluna is a Naarm-based artist, completing her PhD (Fine Art) at Monash University in 2021. Through a critically engaged, site-responsive lens and a socio-cultural emphasis, Scicluna’s ongoing research explores expansive material and conceptual approaches to photographic landscape practice. Drawing upon her experience as a first-generation, settler-colonial Australian, and the cultural complexity this entails, Scicluna’s photo-sculptural works reconceive and recast the landscape surface as a productive interface through which to draw out, work with and counter the unresolved tensions underlying colonised lands. Her most recent practice is grounded in multiple invitations to respond to large-scale regions and municipalities to produce large scale commissions such as Where The River Takes Us (City of Banyule, 2024) and Where The Land Lies (Gippsland Art Gallery, 2019) developed in conversation with Traditional Custodians. Shortlisted in multiple national awards and winning the Brother McCarthy Award for Works on Paper in 2022 (Omnia Art Prize) and Excellence in Conceptual Photography Prize (CCP) in 2014, her works are held in private and public collections across Australia.