Artists

Petalia Humphreys is an artist living and working on Gubbi Gubbi Country on the Sunshine Coast, Australia.

From small-scale hand-crafted paintings through to large site-responsive art installations and video works Petalia Humphreys celebrates the legacy of material and a genealogy of artmaking, creating playful and illusory works that remap the familiar (and familial). Her works are concerned with spatial sentience, exploring transitional moments that exist between the physical and conceptual. Petalia has exhibited at the Institute of Modern Art, Metro Arts, Brisbane Powerhouse, Outer Space, Webb Gallery and Melbourne’s Five Walls. She has been commissioned for multiple public art projects on the Sunshine Coast, exhibited widely in galleries throughout regional Queensland, consulted for arts policy writing and worked as a teacher of Visual Art and Design in secondary and tertiary education. Petalia is founder and director of Studio 26, a project that curates opportunities for mentoring, critical conversation and exhibitions.

In Residence at Bundanon

During her residency Petalia will study Bundanon’s architecture, examining how the body navigates through constructed and natural intervals in space. She will explore the Shoalhaven riverscape, capturing still and moving images to create mesmerising and hypnotic works that challenge our spatial awareness. Interested in conversations between architectural and natural sites, interspaces, and how shifts in perspective challenge our spatial awareness, the vernacular of Bundanon’s architecture will inform a series of three-dimensional paintings created using locally-sourced mis-tint paint.