Announcing the cohort of artists joining the Gertrude Studio Program in 2025

Gertrude is excited to announce the 2025 cohort of incoming Gertrude Studio Program artists: Alexandra Peters, David Egan, Gabi Briggs (recipient of Gertrude's 2025 First Nations Studio), Erin Hallyburton, Nadia Hernández, Renee Cosgrave and Roberta Joy Rich. Tarik Ahlip also joins the Gertrude Studio Program announcement from the artist's 2024 selection.

A selection committee consisting of Gertrude staff, a current studio artist, a previous studio artist and an external arts professional convened to assess applications for this 2-year studio program. A panel of First Nations advisory peers convened to select the recipient of Gertrude’s First Nations Studio.
 
These artists were chosen with the aim of supporting innovative artists at key moments in the development of their practices, and representing a broad expanse of creative practices.

Alexandra Peters

Alexandra Peters is a painter and sculptor situated within the field of expanded painting through the interrogation of support structures and framing devices. Peters completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at Monash University, Melbourne in 2022, where she was the recipient of the Monash University Museum of Art Award and the Megalo Print Award. She has undertaken several residencies including Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth, 2023, Megalo Print Studio, Canberra, 2023 and AqTushetii, Tusheti, Georgia, 2018.

Peters' recent solo exhibitions include Blowback, Asbestos, Melbourne, 2024. Recent group exhibitions include Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions, Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2024; And This Time the Well Is Alive, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 2024; Mildura Atrocity Exhibition, NAP Contemporary, Mildura, 2023; Hatched: National Graduate Show, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, 2023; CC: All, Cool Change Contemporary, Perth, 2023; Menagerie, Asbestos, Melbourne, 2023; MADANow, Honours Graduate Exhibition, Monash University, Melbourne, 2022; A Strange World is Afoot Here Already, Propaganda Network, Tbilisi, 2020 and 100 Years of Pirosmani, Niko Pirosmani State Museum, Mirzaani, Georgia, 2019.

Central to David Egan’s work is a commitment to a practice of painting and an ongoing enquiry into acts of looking and the materiality of images. Egan approaches painting as a procedure of ‘colour handling’ and considers the inherent paradox of this term—that colour is a neurological phenomenon which cannot be touched or handled—as fertile ground from which to interrogate some of the conceptual, emotional and spiritual registers of the medium.

Egan has exhibited regularly for the past decade including the solo exhibitions Fountain Gate, Neon Parc (2022); Green Seeks Little Attention, Hayden’s Gallery, (2021); CRYING ROOM, Sutton Projects, (2019); A Moveable Priest, Bus Projects, (2018); Actually Energy Help Light, curated by Helen Hughes, Gertrude Contemporary, (2015); Out Land Look Scape, West Space, (2015); Painting Playing Cards, Substation, (2014) all in Naarm. His work has been included in survey shows such as Thin Skin, MUMA (2023); Painting. More Painting, ACCA (2016); Fabrik; conceptual, minimalist and performative approaches to textiles, Ian Potter Museum of Art and Margret Lawrence Gallery of Art (2016), all in Naarm. His book of essays, Colour Handling, was published by Discipline in 2022.

Egan holds a PhD from Monash University, where he teaches painting.

Gabi Briggs
First Nations Studio

Gabi Briggs is an Anaiwan Gedyura artist, researcher, weaver, and community organiser. Briggs engages with the complexities of race, power, and truth-telling, seeking to restore Indigenous sovereignty and enact self-determination. Her practice reflects a commitment to returning back to Indigenous knowledges specifically through the walking of Country and embracing Anaiwan principles and ways of being and knowing, grounding her practice in place.

Briggs engages with the complexities of race, power, and truth-telling through her art, seeking to amplify Indigenous sovereignty and enact self-determination with an emphasis on slow, considered and meaningful practice. As part of her PhD research, Briggs is undertaking a 100km walk on Country. 

Erin Hallyburton

Erin Hallyburton lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne). Her sculptural practice engages with fat studies and intersectional theory in order to examine the conceptual and material limits of the body, and how these limits manifest in certain sites. Edible and transforming materials enact ongoing processes with the gallery space, unsettling assumptions that objects and bodies are coherent, discrete, and autonomous, and questioning whether there are solid tangible boundaries that separate a body from its surroundings.

Hallyburton completed her MFA candidature at Monash University in 2024, culminating in her solo exhibition Hold me as I Spill Over at MADA gallery (2024). Recent group exhibitions include Entire Days in the Trees, Hair ARI (2024), And This Time the Well Is Alive, Gertrude Contemporary (2024), I wanna be your anti-mirror, Latrobe Art Institute (2024), An Oscuring of Self – A Veil Between Yours and Theirs, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre (2024).

In 2022, Hallyburton participated in the Hatched National Graduate Exhibition at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and was the recipient of the prestigious Schenberg Art Fellowship. 

Nadia Hernández

Nadia Hernández’s multi-disciplinary practice reflects a process of bearing witness to the loss of home and the symbolic power of memory and memorialisation. Informed by her experience as a Venezuelan woman living in Australia, and positioning herself both within and outside the Venezuelan diaspora, Hernández makes art as a means to connect with a sense of place that exists beyond psychic and geographic boundaries. She negotiates complex narratives, weaving the personal and the political, to create a highly recognisable visual language expressed through colourful textiles, paper constructions, paintings, music, installations, sculptures, and murals. Her works weave together the complexities of memory, despair, hope and reconciliation, reminding us that these opposing sensations often co-exist.

Hernández was chosen to participate in the Fountainhead Miami Residency (2024) in partnership with the Human Rights Foundation Art in Protest Residency. Recently, she was the recipient of both the Creative Projects Fund Grant from Creative Victoria and the Arts Projects for Individuals and Groups Grant from Creative Australia to continue developing her installation En todo tiempo. She will also be participating in the upcoming DESA Residence (2025) in Bali, Indonesia. Hernández is a finalist in this year’s Sir John Sulman Prize (2024), her second year in a row, having been selected for the significant award in 2023. She was also a finalist in Australia’s most prestigious art prize for contemporary artists under 40 years, the Ramsay Art Prize (2023); the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize (2023); the inaugural Ellen José Art Award (2022); the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (2021); Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award (2021, 2019); Create NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship (2020); John Fries Award (2019); and Fisher Ghost Art Award (2021, 2017). Hernández was the winner of the Grace Cossington Smith Art Award (2021) and the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize (2019).

Recent significant exhibitions include a major two-person exhibition, Speech Patterns: Nadia Hernández and Jon Campbell, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (2022), and group exhibitions: Soft Power, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (2023); Like a Wheel That Turns: The 2022 Macfarlane Commissions, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2022); In the fibre of her being, Fairfield City Museum and Gallery (2021); and Miffy and Friends, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane (2020); Hernández was commissioned to develop an immersive educational program and exhibition as Shepparton Art Museum’s EduLAB artist (2020). She was a recipient of the Bundanon Trust Artist in Residence (2019). Her work is held in the collections of Artbank, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth as well as in many private collections. She is represented by STATION.

Renee Cosgrave

Renee Cosgrave is a visual artist based in Narrm, from Aotearoa. She is Māori (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāi Tūhoe), Irish and Scottish. Her practice explores painting, drawing, raranga (Māori weaving) and collaboration. Cosgrave’s works reflect on her Tūrangawaewae (homebase) and culture through colour, pattern and gesture.

Cosgrave's recent exhibitions include Pink Heat, Haydens Gallery, (2023), Serotonin, Futures Gallery (2022), Whanaunga (with Aunty Dorothy Nilson), Blak Dot Gallery (2022), Ahi Mahana (with Kori Miles), Sutton Projects (2019), False Feeling, Fern Tree Community Centre, presented by Constance ARI (2019), The Hunch (with Merryn Lloyd), Incinerator Gallery, (2016). Upcoming projects include Much like cooking a meal (with Merryn Lloyd) at the La Trobe Art Institute.

In 2019 Cosgrave was awarded the MECCA M-Power NGV Arts Mentoring Grant. She has been a finalist in the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (2022), the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery (2021), and received a City of Melbourne Public Art Commission (2012). She is represented by Haydens Gallery, Narrm.

Roberta Joy Rich

Roberta Joy Rich is a multi-disciplinary artist also working as an educator and sometimes a curator. Often drawing upon her lived experiences as a diaspora Southern African kaapse woman, Roberta utilises language, text, video, archives, photo-media, satire, spatial practices and storytelling as platforms to interrogate constructs of race, gender, imperialism, Western singularity and notions of authenticity. With a focus on communal knowledge systems, alterity, socio-political histories, positionality and popular culture, much of her installation and mixed media projects explore resilience, power, memory, belonging and truth-telling. She is interested in critical fabulation and anarchiving as processes for unearthing silenced and emergent narratives, and the possibilities they conjure. Roberta's work aims to deconstruct colonial modalities whilst proposing empowering sites of collective self-determination.

Rich has exhibited projects locally, nationally and internationally including Wits Art Museum, Gallery MOMO, Firstdraft, Urban Theatre Projects, Metro Arts, Institute of Modern Art, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, FELTspace, Blak Dot Gallery, Arts House, Footscray Community Arts and La Trobe Art Institute.

Tarik Ahlip

Tarik Ahlip has a background in Architecture and works across sculpture, film and verse. Recent projects include the short film Paradise, commissioned by West Space (Melbourne) as a solo presentation; Kara Toprak is his most recent solo presentation at Schmick Contemporary (Sydney). He is currently working on a nature documentary and a short film project to be shot in Istanbul.