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Meet the Artist Behind the Other-Worldly Butterflies and Insects in Mecca’s 2026 Holiday Artwork Tai Snaith It started with Tai Snaith pouring inks and watercolours in her Abbotsford studio – soon it’ll be all over your holiday gifts. In partnership with Mecca, we chat to the Melbourne artist about the joyful commission and being part of the NGV Triennial. The season of giving takes a more colourful, whimsical turn each year thanks to Mecca’s festive holiday packaging. Whether it’s a Kris Kringle gift at a work party or a present for your sister hidden under the tree, the packaging takes…
Meet Tai Snaith: The Artist Behind Our Wildest Holiday Yet! Words by Romy Erdos The most wonderful time of the year is here – the moment MECCA reveals the artist whose work will light up our stores and adorn countless gifts, from Friendsmases to family lunches, Kris Kringles to work mingles. And this year, things are getting a little wild. “I hope that it makes people feel like they can be their weird selves, with all their imperfections and nuances and celebrate their own wild chorus within,” says Australian artist and author Tai Snaith of the Join the Wild Chorus…
Robson Rak design an expressive home in Melbourne with surprises at every turn Designed around the owners’ art collection, this two-bedroom home turns the constraints of downsizing into a creative opportunity, pairing heritage details with bold flourishes. Photographed by Anson Smart. Architecture, Interior design, furniture, art procurement and styling by Robson Rak. Saskia Tillers September 30, 2026 – 8:28AM Downsizing needn’t mean limiting or losing sight of personality. Instead, it can provide an otherwise unforeseen opportunity to consolidate, curate and flex creative muscles. Never has this sentiment rung truer than at Celine, a Victorian home in Melbourne’s leafy eastern…
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Mixing prints with paintings and tapestry, Nicholas Thompson Gallery presents a very tasty show of mid-career work by Alun Leach-Jones (1937-2017). The focus is a 1988 tapestry Revisited Objects which is flanked by the screenprint which it was developed from, and small woven preparatory test samples. Its worth visiting the show just for the opportunity to inspect this stately tapestry close up, and see exactly why the Victorian Tapestry Workshop is so respected internationally. With the original composition interlocking forms were surrounded by a thin Manganese blue line and sat within a Cobalt blue surround, although in the subsequent tapestry these were converted…
Works from Tai Snaith’s ‘Flotilla (there’s no dignity in haste)’ series of slugs have been acquired by the Shepparton Art Museum. The Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) holds the most significant collection of historic and contemporary Australian ceramics in regional Australia. The collection strives to encompass all aspects of ceramic production in Australia and be comprehensive in its representation of major trends, developments and important periods of production. Tai Snaith’s slugs have previously been exhibited with Nicholas Thompson Gallery at Spring 1883 (2025) and Heide Museum of Modern Art (2021). Installation image by @alicehutchison_photography
Judith Van Heeren is exhibited in Groundswell at Castlemaine Art Museum until the 19th of July. In order to effect change, you need a groundswell, a groundswell of opinion, a surge of emotion, a desire for new thinking. This exhibition celebrates artists who want to build a groundswell for change whether that be environmental, cultural, personal or political. This exhibition has evolved from earlier projects celebrating the women who worked together to found the gallery in the early 20th century. Like them, any of the contemporary artists in this exhibition value networks, community connection and participation. Contemporary local artists include: Arkeria Armstrong,…
Antonia Sellbach is exhibited in ‘The Concentric Influences of Sol LeWitt: Foundations, Pivots and Place’, opening at RMIT Gallery on 5 June 2026. Instigated and directed by Dr Irene Barberis (RMIT School of Art), this exhibition emerges from her long-term friendship and mentorship with the esteemed American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. In the 1960s, LeWitt revolutionised the definition of contemporary art by presenting the simple but radical idea that a work of art’s concept is more important than its form. RMIT Gallery is delighted to centre this exhibition around a LeWitt wall drawing; the…
Nicole Kelly is a finalist in the 2026 Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with her painting ‘Bird Hour’. “I have visited the arid zone of remote Fowlers Gap Research Station in NSW, 110 kilometres north of Broken Hill, continuously for the past six years. Bird hour is an accumulated response to these visits, celebrating the variety of bird life and visually shifting desert landscape. Reflecting on our binding relationships with the landscape and a love of the land, the painting reveals an ongoing attempt to portray reality in a way that liaises not with literal…
Congratulations to Betra Fraval who has been awarded the acquisitive Beckett Local Prize at the 2026 Bayside Painting Prize with her work ‘Taking flight’. The Bayside Painting Prize is Melbourne’s premier annual painting prize. The finalist exhibition brings together a broad range of artists from across Australia, both established and lesser known, whose varied approaches to the painted medium conveys the breadth and diversity of painting in Australia today.
Although she emigrated from the Netherlands to Australia as a young child, Judith Van Heeren appears to have inherited a cultural affinity for the dark, moody still lifes of the Dutch Masters, an art historical legacy she has long admired. Borrowing from this visual language, her paintings elevate Australian flora, imbuing them with the gravitas, beauty and mystery more commonly associated with European flowers in 17th-century still life painting. With a practice spanning more than three decades, Van Heeren is presenting her first solo exhibition with Nicholas Thompson Gallery in Melbourne. Known for her small oil paintings that reward slow…
Tai Snaith will be exhibited in the forthcoming NGV Triennial from the 13th of December 2026 to 11 April 2027. Featuring more than eighty ambitious and thought-provoking projects, including major new commissions, the 2026 NGV Triennial offers a global journey through contemporary art and design. Unfolding across all four levels of NGV International, the fourth NGV Triennial brings together the work of some of the most respected artists and designers from around the world, while amplifying the voices of emerging talents. Spanning painting, video, sculpture, installation, fashion, textiles, ceramics and design, the exhibition places contemporary works in dialogue with the…
Wendy Stavrianos’ exhibition ‘Early Works from The Gathering Series’ has been reviewed in The Age today, Sat 4 April 2026, by Tiarney Miekus ‘Wendy Stavrianos has been painting for nearly 60 years. She empathically yet acutely grasps landscapes and has captured the reality and mortality of climate change while rendering scenes that are natural, psychological and mysterious. This exhibition features her “gatherer” paintings from the 2000s. They are influenced by Jean-Francis Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), capturing the hardship of rural workers via three female labourers who gather leftover grains, giving dignity to the women and the landscape. In one painting,…