Artists

Kelly Manning is a queer wadjula artist from Naarm (Melbourne), whose multidisciplinary practice spans printmaking, painting, sculpture, and installation.

Shaped by a childhood in a military family, her work is informed by nomadic living, resilience, and a survivalist mindset. Manning critically engages with the Anthropocene, examining consumerism and environmental collapse while acknowledging her own complicity within systems of petrochemical dependence. Her practice draws on ancient and inherited knowledge to navigate environmental crisis. Working with salvaged and single-use materials understood as a form of ancestry, Manning treats matter as collaborator through assemblage, layering, and mark-making.

She has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally, including as a finalist in the Castlemaine Experimental Print Prize and in Decoy at VCA Artspace (2024), and was awarded 4th place in sculpture at the Florence Biennale (2023). Her work has been featured in Artist Profile (Issue 55), and she has undertaken residencies in Venice, Vietnam, and Australia.

In Residence at Bundanon

This residency proposes wearable architectural structures made through collagraph and discarded Tetra Pak printing. The prints function as blueprints and skins that are cut, layered and assembled into modular forms that can be worn, carried or inhabited. Disposable material becomes stable, structural and protective. The works draw on actively risk-averse strategies and mythical creature–like modes of survival, where conflict is avoided through camouflage, disguise and decoy. Sitting between garment, shelter and ruin, these forms imagine survival not as isolation, but as collective architecture that is porous, mobile and responsive to place.