Cover image: Hatched 2026 opening night. Image by Kate Ferguson.

For 35 years, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts’ Hatched: National Graduate Show has been one of Australia’s most significant platforms for emerging artists. More than a graduate exhibition, it offers artists a space to test ideas, reach new audiences and begin building professional careers.

Running until 4 October 2026, Hatched 2026 brings together 21 artists from 20 tertiary art schools across Australia. Curated by Mia Palmer-Verevis, the exhibition spans painting, installation, sculpture, ceramics, drawing, photography, moving image and printmaking, with works exploring identity, ecology, labour, memory and belonging.

Rather than presenting a single overarching theme, Palmer-Verevis sees a common thread of inheritance.

“Some artists are honouring what they’ve inherited, while others are turning it on its head.”

Across the exhibition, artists consider what has been passed down through families, landscapes, institutions and cultural systems, while imagining new ways of understanding the world.

Bodies, desire and the politics of flesh

Thomas E. Brown’s Flesh Painting I, II and III explore the complicated relationship between sexuality, gender, desire and shame.

A Curtin University graduate from Western Australia, Brown combines references from anatomical and pornographic imagery to create paintings that hover between abstraction and recognition. His soft, airbrushed surfaces simultaneously reveal and obscure the body, creating works that feel both seductive and unsettling.

“The core idea is trying to approach that balance defined by desire, where something is able to transition between carnal desire and complete disgust,” Brown says.

Although informed by queer experience, Brown is interested in broader questions about how society understands bodies and sexuality. He argues that cultural attitudes toward intimacy continue to be shaped by inherited values, regardless of whether people have religious backgrounds.

“I didn’t even need a religious upbringing to feel oppressed by those values,” he says. “They’re just so baked into everything.”

This work marks Brown’s shift from oil painting to airbrush, a medium that intensifies the tension. Its soft, atmospheric quality creates a haze across the surfaces, obscuring and revealing at the same time. The works appear almost dreamlike, yet their references to anatomy and sexuality remain.

“The only thing I would say they explicitly are is a painting about the frustration of having a body and everything that comes along with that.”

The quiet power of repetition

Melbourne artist and Victorian College of the Arts graduate Mary Shaw transforms PICA’s gallery walls with thousands of blue ballpoint pen marks in The Work Won’t Do Itself.

Drawn directly onto the gallery walls over five days, the work responds to PICA’s history as a former school and reflects on learning, labour and repetition.

“The materials, the method of creating the work, the place it’s exhibited in and how it’s exhibited are all equally important,” Shaw says.

The familiar ballpoint pen becomes a tool for exploring artistic practice rather than simply making an image.

The repeated marks recall handwriting exercises, suggesting that creativity develops through persistence rather than perfection.

“Practice isn’t about getting it perfect,” she says. “It’s about doing something over and over because you want to understand it better.”

Shaw’s broader practice has evolved from practical necessity. Years of moving between share houses and making art with limited resources led her to use inexpensive, portable materials. Rather than treating these constraints as limitations, she embraces them as the foundation of her practice.

An energetic dialogue with nature

University of Western Australia graduate Tai Kelly’s Umwelt: Talk to the Flowers explores communication beyond the human world.

The installation features native everlasting daisies housed inside transparent chambers, where changes in heat and moisture cause the flowers to open and close. Visitors are encouraged to speak to the flowers, with the moisture in their breath becoming part of the interaction.

“I realised they closed in the shade and opened in the sun. That’s when I thought, ‘I can do something with this,'” Kelly says.

The work encourages viewers to consider relationships between humans, technology and plant life.

“It’s about forming kinship with different species that we can’t normally communicate with.”

Alongside her visual arts practice, Kelly performs as a DJ under the name Creatures of Chaos, and hopes to combine music, sound art and environmental installation in future works. Her installation gently reminds audiences that humans exist within responsive ecological systems rather than apart from them.

Mining and lost objects in the Western Australian outback

Jessica Shannon’s In-Tension and Allowing the Dust to Settle examine Western Australia’s relationship with mining through materials drawn directly from the Pilbara.

Shannon grew up in the Kalgoorlie Goldfields before moving to Perth, following her father’s work as a mining shift boss, while her mother was an artist who founded The Prospector newspaper.

“I’ve sort of always lived in that kind of mining space,” she says.

After studying design and later working in the mining industry herself, Shannon returned to study Visual Arts at TAFE, where she began transforming industrial materials into artworks exploring labour, landscape and environmental responsibility.

In-Tension suspends discarded snatch straps collected from Pilbara highways. Once used to secure heavy loads, the worn straps become reminders of the unseen systems supporting Australia’s resource industry.

“I started wondering what they were holding,” Shannon says.

The objects became metaphors for the procedures and infrastructure underpinning mining.

“They’re a metaphor for all the procedures and things that we have in place to protect people and the environment.”

Her practice was also influenced by the practical realities of working fly-in, fly-out mining schedules. Travelling between mining swings with only 10 kilograms of carry-on luggage meant she became used to bringing back her found materials sparingly.

In Allowing the Dust to Settle, Shannon works directly with Pilbara pindan earth, allowing the landscape itself to leave traces across the canvas.

Rather than presenting mining as either heroic or destructive, Shannon explores its complexity through materials that already carry histories of labour and place.

Her own journey also reflects a different pathway into contemporary art. Returning to study as a mature-age student, she admits she initially questioned whether her work belonged in Hatched.

That doubt makes her recognition even more significant. Shannon received one of the 2026 Dr Harold Schenberg Arts Awards, taking home $15,000 for Allowing the Dust to Settle and In-Tension.

Looking towards Australia’s artistic future

Alongside Jessica Shannon, the 2026 Dr Harold Schenberg Arts Awards were presented to Tabitha Glanville and Lychandra Anastasia Gieseman, recognising the strength and diversity of emerging contemporary practice.

Visitors are invited to vote for their favourite artwork in the Audience Choice Award.

Voting is open throughout the exhibition and closes on Sunday 4 October 2026, with the winning artist announced after the exhibition concludes.

Across Hatched 2026, there is no single vision of Australia’s future. Instead, the exhibition presents artists asking urgent questions about bodies, identity, ecology, labour and belonging.

35 years after it began, Hatched remains vital because it captures artists at the moment their practices begin to expand beyond the studio and into public conversation.

Rather than offering definitive answers, these artists invite audiences to see familiar subjects differently.

That may be the exhibition’s greatest achievement: showing that the next generation of Australian artists is already asking the questions that will shape the conversations ahead.

Hatched: National Graduate Show 2026