Holding Light

Ariella Friend is a multi-disciplinary artist working in an expanded field between painting, sculpture and installation. Her practice explores the intersections between humans, nature, technology and the built environment.

Her creative process begins with research into flora and fauna, using text-based prompts and image searches to build visual archives. By zooming in and out of these images, they transform into compositions of pixels, abstract shapes and colour fields, which she reinterprets in sculptural form. Everyday materials such as found timber and metal are merged with painting and assemblage to create works that exist in the liminal space between fiction and reality.

www.ariellafriend.com.au

Asher Abergel is a designer and maker whose practice sits between functional design and art.

Working primarily with wood and ceramic, Abergel explores how material, form and subtle gestures can evoke memory, presence and human connection. The material often leads the process, with texture, weight and behaviour guiding how each piece develops. His works commonly begin as everyday objects, then move beyond utility to become pieces that invite reflection and emotional engagement.

www.dezionstudio.com

Barak Zelig is a surrealist, multi-disciplinary artist working with hybrids, metamorphosis, and illusion to make social and political comments. Barak studied drawing and painting in Ramat Gan Israel, BA Visual Arts at the Australian National University and Postgraduate Diploma in Design and Animation at the University of Technology Sydney. Barak’s mediums are printmaking, drawing, photography, and mainly sculpture made of steel and found objects. An award-winning artist, Barak exhibits in Australia and overseas. His works can be found in national, corporate and private collections.

www.barakzelig.net

Beck Feiner is an illustrator, designer and author based in Sydney. Her illustrations, stories and social content spotlight social issues, tap into the mood of the moment, and promote harmony, inclusion and diversity. Beck combines bold graphic forms, colour and typography to communicate ideas in a clear and engaging way.

Her creative practice explores identity, Australian culture, and the power of visual storytelling to shape how we see ourselves and each other. Her recent work focuses on community, resilience and connection. In response to the Bondi attack, Beck created artworks reflecting the strength and solidarity of the local community, exploring how visual art can express collective care, remembrance and healing.

https://www.beckfeinercreations.com 

Bibi Solimani is a Sydney-based Iranian Australian artist and Doctor of Fine Arts candidate at the National Art School whose practice explores memory, resilience, and cultural continuity through symbolic imagery. Drawing from her Persian heritage, she works across painting, drawing, and moving image, using objects, architectural forms, and natural symbols to explore how identity and memory endure through oppression, displacement, and rupture. Shaped by a culture marked by centuries of struggle, her work reflects the persistence of light in the face of darkness. This sensibility resonates with Jewish cultural memory, through endurance, survival, and renewal.

https://www.bibisoleimani.com/

Camille Fox is a Jewish artist living and working in Bondi. She has showcased her work in many solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne and internationally, including New York and Jerusalem. Her passion is painting figurative depictions of Egypt and the Levant of yesteryear that now lives only in memory. A series of oil paintings of key Jewish life events and festivals were recently commissioned by the Sydney Jewish Museum and are now in their collection. Her works are in many private collections around the world, including the World North African Jewish Heritage Centre in Jerusalem.

camillefoxart.com

Born in Sydney with mixed Jewish Iraqi, Singaporean and English heritage, David Asher Brook is an award-winning visual artist working in painting, tapestry and video art. He studied Fine Arts at the National Art School and holds a Graduate Diploma of Heritage Conservation from the Sydney University School of Architecture. Significant collections and commissions include the Library of Congress, Washington, the Polish Consulate in Sydney, the Department of Theological and Religious studies at the King’s College, London, and Waverley and Woollahra Councils. David is represented by Fox Galleries Melbourne.

davidasherbrook.com

David Solomons is based in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, and has been painting for several years, developing a distinctive practice across watercolour, oil, pencil and ink.

Drawing inspiration from the surrounding coastline and urban landscape, his work captures seascapes, landscapes, cityscapes and people in motion, alongside portraits and still life compositions.

David has studied under master artists and luminaries: John Haycraft; Thomas Schaller; Chan Dissanayake; Owen Thompson; and John Wilson.

With three successful solo watercolour exhibitions in 2022, 2023 and 2024, David’s work is now held in private collections across Australia, Europe and America.

David Solomons on Instagram

D-Mo is a visual storyteller whose work explores identity, migration, memory and survival through restrained, psychologically-charged imagery. Her practice examines how individuals inhabit space after rupture, and how subtle shifts in perception alter meaning.

Born of Polish heritage and grounded in the Australian landscape, she has cultivated a body of work that bridges personal history with collective experience. Working across portraiture, conceptual photography, installation, and mixed media, she employs pared-back environments and precise spatial gestures to explore presence, absence, and symbolic elevation. Over two decades, D-Mo has established an internationally-recognised career. She is the recipient of the Olive Cotton Award (2021).

d-mo.info

Dr Loy Lichtman has worked as a university academic in the discipline of education for over 25 years, during which he completed a PhD researching a small ‘corner’ of the Holocaust. His art practice spans over 30 years across analogue and digital studio practice, and he has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. He is currently documenting the place of St Kilda in his lived experience.

Dr Loy Lichtman on Instagram

Ella Dreyfus is an award-winning visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker whose work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally. Alongside a distinguished 40-year academic career, she serves as Head of Public Programs at the National Art School. Her practice centres on an aesthetics of intimacy, foregrounding the relationship between subject, artist, and viewer. Her recent still-life works document the afterlife of the Bondi memorial flowers, where beauty and decay coexist as vessels of grief and memory. Working with dramatic contrasts of light and shadow, she creates images of sculptural depth and psychological intensity.

www.elladreyfus.com

Gillian Hodes is an emerging ceramic artist who grew up in Zimbabwe and now lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Her practice centres on nerikomi, a technique in which coloured porcelain is sliced and manipulated to draw through clay. Hodes’ works are autobiographical, with layered patterns reflecting her relationship to the world. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from the National Art School (2015) and a Ceramics Diploma from Northern Beaches TAFE (2017). Recently, she has been a finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize, Michael Reid, Sydney (2024) and Emerging World Stage, Clay Gulgong (2024).

https://www.gillianhodes.com/

Gina Debinski has always loved colour and design and this has been reflected in everything she has done throughout her varied career. She now expresses herself through painting. Inspired by observations of everyday life and her photography, her figurative works express a relaxed and relatable realism. Using simple lines and layers of acrylic paint, she builds a familiar scene in a contemporary style, lately focused on water-soaked canvases.

www.ginadebinski.com.au

Hendel Futerfas is a sculptor, painter and mixed-media artist from Melbourne who was raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Futerfas’ practice is deeply informed by his upbringing in a warm Chassidic Jewish family and the spiritual traditions of Chassidic mysticism. His work often reflects the Kabbalistic idea that “the mind is sovereign over the heart in its essential nature,” a guiding metaphor for life and artistic practice: inspiration is realised through reflection, discipline, and careful choice of material.

Alongside his broader sculptural practice, Futerfas creates bronze Judaic sculptures, including works featuring the Chai (symbolising life) and the Magen David. These pieces explore themes of identity, continuity, and spiritual resilience, translating enduring Jewish symbols into contemporary sculptural forms.

hendelfuterfas.com

Izette Felthun is an award-winning Bondi artist who has been sculpting in clay for over 30 years. Her early work was influenced by the highly burnished and decorated blackened beer pots of the Indigenous South African Venda tribe.

The female form has subsequently long been a focus of her work, as much to do with content as it has to do with form.

Her work seeks to combine figurative imagery with the format of the traditional clay vessel.

While the work in this exhibition is a high-fired clay, her addiction of choice is raku fired clay and all the imperfections that accompany the process.

www.izetteceramics.com

Jenny Wiggins’ work is centred on researching her heritage and the Holocaust. Outside National Art School, where she studied Ceramics, her practice is based at home where she has a full ceramic studio to further experiment and research ideas.

She has attended workshops internationally, including Bali and Italy. She will be returning to Montel Castello di Vibio, Italy, later in 2026 for an eight-week residency, focusing on producing an installation of the figures with varying textures.

She has exhibited her work widely, and has won awards for her sculptures.

Jenny Wiggins on Instagram

Julia Meyerowitz-Katz is an expressionist artist who uses lines, textures, marks and colour to interrogate and amplify individual and collective psychological and emotional dynamics. Symbolic content to do with her Jewish identity and experience is integrated into her interest in the formal elements of painting and drawing. Her work invites the viewer to sink into a sensory meditation via a visual journey through layers of marks and movement of surface colour. Julia has used her art practice to explore and represent her experiences of intergenerational and communal trauma, grief and resilience, including post-traumatic growth. She is currently working on a series of paintings and drawings about the structural role of family and community shabbat gatherings to provide containment, stability and continuity across generations. Julia has work in private collections internationally.

https://juliameyerowitz-katz.com.au/artworks/

Leanne Berelowitz is a Sydney-based ceramic artist. Originally from South Africa, she began her practice in Jerusalem, completing formal studies in ceramics and glass. Her work focuses on the theme of change, exploring the unknown and navigating transitions.

Combining hand-building and wheel-throwing techniques, Berelowitz constructs forms from supple clay ribbons to capture a sense of balance within movement. Her pieces range from intricate vessels to forms incorporating the Möbius strip as a metaphor for continuous flow.

Berelowitz works as co-manager and teacher at the Bondi Pavilion Clay Studio, where she is endlessly inspired by the coastal environment and her students.

www.leanneberelowitz.com

Michael Glezerson (Sydney) was first immersed in the world of tools and metal through his father, a panel beater, and developed a deep respect for craftsmanship that would later inform his creative practice. A business entrepreneur who entered the art world at 61, Michael brings maturity, discipline and clarity of vision to his work. He reshapes salvaged scrap metal, his primary medium, into evocative sculptures layered with emotion. Each piece transforms industrial remnants into works that invite reflection and connection. Michael’s journey is testament to the enduring power of curiosity and the belief that it is never too late to pursue one’s passion.

www.artbyglez.com

Michael Puterflam is a filmmaker and founder of Storylast, a documentary storytelling studio dedicated to preserving personal histories through film. His practice centres on the use of video as a medium for memory, reflection and intergenerational connection.

Through intimate interviews, archival photographs, and cinematic storytelling, Michael creates long-form documentary portraits that capture the lived experiences, identities and values of individuals and families. His work explores themes of memory, legacy, belonging and the ways personal stories shape collective identity. By documenting voices and experiences that might otherwise be lost, his films aim to create meaningful records that can be shared across generations.

storylast.com

Munganbana Norman Miller is an Aboriginal artist of the Jirrbal, Bar-Barrum, and Wadjanbarra Yidinji tribes of the Atherton Tableland. Working primarily with acrylic on canvas and lino prints, his abstract practice explores the spiritual and environmental narratives of the Great Barrier Reef and North Queensland rainforests. An artist for over 30 years, he has received awards including international recognition for his art book Reef and Rainforest. He co-founded Indigenous Friends of Israel in 2017 with his wife Barbara, believes art is a powerful medium for healing and reconciliation, and visited Bondi Beach to express his condolences after the events of 14 December.

https://munganbana.com.au

Naomi Ullmann‘s art practice investigates contemporary social issues, often in a playful, yet questioning way. History, migration, environment and belonging have long been underlying themes in her work. Employing both old and new technologies, her recent work has explored fate, chance, and technology gone awry. As an interdisciplinary artist, she has experimented with a diverse array of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, shadow projections, photography and video.

www.naomiullmann.com

Paul Blackmore is an Australian photographer whose work sits at the intersection of documentary practice and fine art, with a focus on people, place and cultural identity. Working across portraiture, landscape and long-form photographic essays, Blackmore’s projects engage deeply with social and environmental narratives, often developed over extended periods.

Blackmore’s award-winning work has been exhibited widely in Australia, Europe and the United States, and his photographs have been published in international magazines. He lives and works in Australia, continuing a practice shaped by curiosity, endurance and a slightly stubborn belief that photographs can still tell important stories.

https://www.paulblackmore.com/

Rocco Rosa is a young artist based in the Blue Mountains, working across watercolour, acrylic, pastel, and charcoal. His practice is driven by curiosity, observation, and sensitivity to the people around him, with portraits exploring character, connection, and quiet emotional detail. In 2021, he was selected as a finalist in the Young Archie competition at Penrith Regional Gallery. In 2025, he became a finalist in the Young Archie, associated with the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His portrait of his teacher was also selected for My Awesome Australian.

https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/young-archie/2025/754/

Sande Bruch is a Jewish artist and the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She is a painter, collage and textile artist, whose practice incorporates recycled materials in her visual art.

Living in Melbourne, Sande has been a resident artist at Fire Station Print Studio, Armadale, since 2019 and has a strong connection to Sydney, where she lived for over thirty years.

Sande works with recycled clothing and paper with monoprints, woodblocks and linocuts, collage and hand stitching.

Sande Bruch on Instagram

Sue Saxon is an award-winning artist and educator whose practice interrogates visual culture, antisemitic imagery and the ethics of representation. Her major works, including Stereotype/Other, Ultima and Other to Me, critically examine how hatred is visually produced, sustained and transmitted, and the consequences that follow. Saxon and Becker’s sustained and productive collaboration began with the intricate, labour-intensive process of hand-piercing eggshells, and developed further during Saxon’s 2012 Waverley Artist in Residence, culminating in The Bondi Twitch – A Field Guide to the Noses of the Waverley District. This project, deeply grounded in local community engagement, explored the historic and contemporary demographic fabric of the Waverley community through the lens and language of birdwatching.

https://sue-saxon.com/

Jane Becker’s award-winning practice engages with queer and Jewish identity through history, memory, language and material culture through finely wrought, research-driven processes. Her work balances intimacy with critical reflection, often incorporating text, drawing and archival material. Becker is currently developing RETURNING, a hybrid graphic memoir that combines historical and genealogical research to trace a family decimated by the Holocaust, reckoning with displacement, injustice and the enduring presence of the past.

https://janebecker.com.au/

Wendy Lessick Bookatz is a storyteller in pigment, photography and videography. Her goal is to create a body of work that is both authentic and socially engaged, contributing to the wider conversation about how art can open space for commemoration. She recently returned to painting portraits, which she views as an act of witness, honouring the complexity of human experience, and preserving memory.

https://www.wendybookatz.com/

Yelena Revis’ artistic practice is centred on the intersection of structural rigidity and organic fluidity. She is interested in how the human spirit navigates ‘fracture’ – moments of profound disruption or trauma that break the geometric order of people’s lives. She is currently fascinated by the concept of resilience as a physical force.

Using a high-contrast palette and a mix of sharp, architectural forms against lush, visceral textures, she explores the tension between tragic events and the persistent, defiant bloom of life that inevitably follows. She aims to capture the weight of history alongside the lightness of survival.

https://yelenaartstudio.com/