South West Biennial 2026

Andy Quilty is a multidisciplinary Western Australian artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, printmaking, and socially engaged art. Rooted in the suburbs of Perth where he grew up, Quilty’s work is shaped by an acute sensitivity to the marks — psychological, cultural, and material — that individuals and communities leave upon their environments. His studio practice is defined by energetic, tactile gestures in charcoal, ballpoint, aerosol and enamel, creating images that probe the tensions and uncertainties of contemporary Australian life. Through these works, Quilty investigates the ways identity is inscribed on the body, environment, and society, capturing the subtle and often uneasy traces of class, community, and belonging in suburban Australia.

Central to Quilty’s practice is his ongoing commitment to community-based and participatory projects. Working extensively across schools, Aboriginal art centres, youth programs, and prisons, he develops collaborative frameworks that enable participants to shape their own visual languages. These socially engaged projects — such as his recent cross-campus initiative with outer-suburban high school students — foreground the lived experience of marginalised communities, giving visibility to everyday gestures, marks, and materials often overlooked within mainstream cultural narratives. For Quilty, these projects are not ancillary to his studio practice; they are a critical extension of it, revealing the reciprocal way in which artists and communities imprint upon one another.

Within the curatorial framework of Tracework, Quilty’s practice offers a compelling meditation on the trace as both a physical and relational phenomenon. His drawings register the immediate, bodily trace of hand to paper, while his community projects map the social traces—stories, movements, constraints, aspirations — embedded in outer suburban life. Whether through the residue of a dragged tire or an improvised print made from a discarded takeaway box, Quilty’s works attend to what remains after contact: a record of lived experience, shaped through encounters with people, place, and material.

In Tracework, Quilty’s contribution highlights the ways art can reveal the subtle imprints that accumulate across personal and collective histories. His practice demonstrates that traces are not only marks left behind—they are acts of connection, collaboration, and care, articulating the often unseen narratives that define the social and cultural fabric of regional and suburban Western Australia.

Amber Cronin and Tom Borgas are South Australian artists whose collaborative practice moves fluidly between sculpture, spatial installation, social practice, and performance. Their work is grounded in a sensitivity to material presence and the unseen forces — ecological, emotional, sonic, and atmospheric — that shape lived experience. Together, they create installations that exist as both physical structures and temporal events, revealing the subtle ways environments carry memory and meaning.

For Tracework, Cronin and Borgas present A Weight To Entice Buoyancy, an installation and performance work that explores the delicate tension between gravity, voice, material, and collective breath. The work engages the Bunbury Bel Canto Singers, whose voices activate the sculptural environment, transforming the installation into a living, resonant field. Their vocal presence becomes a trace — an ephemeral imprint that moves through space, disperses, settles, and lingers in ways both perceptible and intangible. The choir’s involvement anchors the work in community and place, embedding the installation with the voices of Bunbury itself.

Within the curatorial frame of Tracework, A Weight To Entice Buoyancy foregrounds the idea that all forms — whether sculptural, sonic, or communal — are shaped by interwoven traces of encounter. The sculptural elements reference weight, balance, and suspended tension, while the choir introduces buoyancy through sound: breaths expanded into song, vibrations moving across surfaces, harmonies imprinting emotional resonance into the room. These interactions reveal how traces can be atmospheric rather than material, carried through air, reverberation, and collective presence.

Central to Cronin and Borgas’s contribution is their attention to the relational trace — the way individuals, communities, and environments leave marks upon each other. Each iteration of the work becomes a unique composition, shaped by the singers’ gestures, rhythms, and breath.

Through sound, form, and community engagement, A Weight To Entice Buoyancy becomes a meditation on what lifts us, what anchors us, and what remains after the moment of encounter passes. In Tracework, their installation stands as a powerful reminder that traces are not only left on surfaces — they are carried in bodies, voices, atmospheres, and relationships that continue long after the final note fades.

Rooted in a long-standing investigation of memory, identity, belonging, and the unseen emotional architectures that shape human experience, Olga Cironis works across sculpture, installation, photography, object-making, and video in a rich multidisciplinary practice. Born to Greek parents in Czechoslovakia and migrating to Australia as a child, Cironis has built a practice that continually returns to the intimate materials that hold our stories: blankets, fabrics, natural fibres, found objects, and personal artefacts. Her work asks what is carried, what is concealed, and what remains after the events that shape us — both individually and collectively.

For Tracework, Cironis presents an installation that draws on her ongoing engagement with the blanket as a material and metaphor, extending her decades long exploration of wrapping, concealing, and protecting objects and bodies. In recent years, Cironis has shifted from domestic or second-hand blankets to the use of emergency blankets and other materials associated with crisis, displacement, and vulnerability. This evolution foregrounds the object not simply as a container of memory, but as a residue of disaster — an index of survival, trauma, and the fragile boundaries between safety and exposure. Emergency blankets, with their thin, metallic surfaces and utilitarian associations, carry the trace of urgency: the hurried gesture of covering, the need to preserve warmth, the improvised care offered in moments of collapse.

They hold the echo of bodies once wrapped within them, standing as stark reminders of the crises — environmental, social, and political — that increasingly define contemporary life.

Within the curatorial frame of Tracework, Cironis’s installation illuminates how material can operate simultaneously as evidence and metaphor. The blanket becomes a site of trace: a surface where touch accumulates, where histories of displacement and protection are embedded, and where personal and collective memory converge. Her installations often evoke the aftermath — what is left when the body is gone, when disaster recedes, when only objects remain to register the emotional and physical imprint of experience. In this way, her work occupies the space between presence and absence, marking the silent residues that shape our sense of self and belonging.

Cironis’s practice is an act of deep listening — to the stories imbued within materials, to the unspoken histories of care and trauma, and to the fragile connections that bind us to one another. Through her sensitive handling of the blanket as both object and symbol, she reminds us that traces are not only marks left behind, but also gestures of protection, mourning, and memory. Her contribution to Tracework underscores the quiet yet profound ways in which the remnants of disaster can reveal the intimate, human traces that endure long after the event itself has passed.

Jacobus Capone is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice merges performance, moving image, installation, drawing, and sound to explore the profound emotional and elemental
forces that shape human experience in relation to the environment. Working across remote areas, Capone uses the human body as a site through which grief, devotion, memory, and the temporal rhythms of the natural world can be revealed.

For Tracework, Capone’s practice resonates with the exhibition’s core ambition: to consider how art captures the marks, residues, and gestures that shape our encounters with the world. Whether through a body imprinting itself into an environment, a repeated action etching meaning into time, or the trace of breath crystallising in cold air, Capone’s practice offers a sensitive meditation on what is left behind after an act of endurance in the environment.

Capone’s contribution to Tracework foregrounds the idea that traces are not always material. They can be temporal, atmospheric, emotional, or relational. His practice asks viewers to recognise the subtle marks that shape us: the way water can hold memory, the way repetition becomes meaning, the way the body forms histories in relation to time and place. In this sense, Capone’s work bridges the intimate and the elemental, offering a powerful articulation of how we navigate the vastness of the world while leaving behind traces of our own inner landscapes.

In Tracework, Capone stands as a poignant reminder that every gesture — no matter how small — enters into conversation with time, land, and memory. His practice invites audiences to slow their gaze, listen for what remains, and sense the quiet, lingering echoes of endurance that shape the contours of both self and environment.

Sharyn Egan is a Whadjuk Nyoongar artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, painting, and large-scale fibre works grounded in cultural knowledge, lived experience, and deep relationship to Country. Removed from her family as a child and raised in the New Norcia mission, Egan’s practice is shaped by themes of memory, resilience, loss, and reclamation. Her works are acts of cultural continuance — honouring Nyoongar knowledge systems while creating new visual languages that speak to survival, belonging, and the ongoing strength of First Nations people.

Egan’s practice makes visible the physical and cultural traces that endure across generations. Weaving is itself a trace-based practice: each strand holds the memory of the hand that guided it, and each completed form becomes a record of movement, rhythm, relationship and care. Her installations map the traces of lived cultural knowledge — knowledge that survived through rupture, erasure, and colonisation, carried forward through practice rather than inscription. Egan’s woven forms embody these layered histories, acting as vessels for memory while asserting the ongoing presence of Nyoongar identity and its deep entanglement with place.

For Tracework, Egan presents an installation that centres her longstanding engagement with weaving and natural fibres. Weaving, for Egan, is both a material practice and a cultural gesture: an act of joining, gathering, and binding that reconnects people to place through materials and making. Each fibre is handled through repeated movements of looping, twisting, tightening and releasing — gestures that memorialise touch, time, and continuity. In Tracework, her pieces recall balga (grass-tree) trees, linking our current moment to the ecological systems and ancestral stories that have shaped Nyoongar Country for tens of thousands of years.

Egan’s contribution to Tracework emphasises that traces are not always marks left behind — they are also threads that continue forward through collective making. Through weaving, she creates pathways between past and future, human and non-human, memory and renewal. Her work invites audiences to consider how stories, identities and cultures persist through touch, repetition, and communal practice, offering a powerful meditation on what endures, what is carried, and what is continually remade.