Cover image: Germain Chan, It’s the Revelation. Supplied

According to Associate Curator Mia Palmer-Verevis, Hatched: National Graduate Show is a “crystal ball” for Australian contemporary art, showcasing as it does the next generation of artists – in this case, 23 graduates from 20 tertiary art schools across Australia.

She says this year’s exhibition features diverse works that are unified by a focus on “urgent issues,” challenging dominant perspectives and documenting the conditions of contemporary society. The artists explore the relationship “between the inner self and the outer world” with a critical and inquisitive approach.

Additionally, she emphasises that the show, which is presented for the first time outside of the PICA galleries in a temporary exhibition space provided by PICA’s partner ISPT, is shaped by the artists’ work and highlights the vital role of arts education in fostering bold new visions. She believes that by investing in these emerging artists, the exhibition ensures a “diverse, critical and courageous” future for Australian art.

The afternoon I visit, two gallery staff sit at a small table resembling a boat adrift in a sea of concrete. A handful of other viewers drift like ghostly staffage from painting to installation to sculpture to video, some stopping to gaze out one of the windows which open onto a layered cityscape of buildings in various stages of growth and decay, the sweeping rain threatening to dissolve all.

As we walk amongst the art which mediates between our own inner selves and the outside world, some of us with the catalogue as our guide, we make meaning (ours) from the meaning (theirs).

While Tom Duffy, Gosha Heldtz and Madi Jones powerfully surface ideas of colonialism and intersectionality via traditional media such as painting and drawing – I particularly enjoy Heldtz’s nod to Nolan and Warhol in Still Here – Germain Chan and Samuel Chan (no relation) tackle the “grand” Western genres of large-scale religious painting and marble sculpture head-on. Where the former artist’s It’s the Revelation possesses an anarchic energy, cartoonish heads bouncing around like pinballs, the latter simultaneously synthesises and explodes ideas around gender, race and religion.

Many artworks focus on the body via installation, live performance and video. Even Chloe Catto’s otherwise static installation Ritualised Dross, comprising “industrial detritus and quasi-anthropomorphic handmade artworks” reads as an ensemble dance work of “discarded objects.” Another installation, Elsa Mona’s Like a Mother unpacks “endurance, femininity, monstrosity and ecological decay” while echoing in its Marian overtones the aforementioned religion-tinted/tainted works above.

One of the most powerful and rhetorically convincing critiques of colonialism in the show is Marcus C. Payne’s, Yorkshire Tea, comprising a transparent room on the floor of which are broken teacups and saucers, their contents messily spilled like the innards of small animalsas the sound of online content perpetuating “masculine ideals of productivity” floats above. By contrast, Mandana Eizadi’s beautiful, intimate Blueprint of Resilience: A Calendar of Courage uses recycled teabags to chart the passing of time since she escaped an abusive relationship.

Speaking of intimacy, Grace Yong’s meditative video her name, an anthology shows Yong writing a letter using traditional Chinese calligraphy and poetry (the two have always been intertwined) to recount “her great grandmother’s experience of changing her name out of respect and filial piety.” Karen Zipkas’s deeply intimate expression of despair over the tornado-fuelled destruction of a local forest in Victoria can also be seen as a form of calligraphy. Her Reflections on Inversion series derive from using a camera obscura in situ to project the images of the devastation over which she painted haunting, ghostly images which speak directly to the tragedy of loss and the transience of life.

Formally, this surreal, luminous space, and the exhibition it houses, is the opposite of the camera obscura. Functionally, it is the same, focusing our attention so precisely on the exceptional work of our next generation of artists that we emerge with our senses heightened, our consciousnesses expanded. What more could one ask of art?

Hatched: National Graduate Show 2025

Until 5 October 2025

Times: 12pm–5pm

Forrest Chase, Level 3, Wellington Street, Perth

Free entry

Voting is now open for the Hatched National Graduate Show’s 2025 People’s Choice Award which closes on Sunday 29 September. Cast your vote here.