2026 Finalists - Midsumma Art Award

Medium: Digital video; chalk, charcoal and ink animation on paper, archival audio (3:50 minutes)

Camp with Me imagines a queer romance between William Lygon, the 7th Earl of Beauchamp and 20th Governor of New South Wales, and poet Henry Lawson. When outed, Beauchamp was exiled to Europe after King George V remarked “I thought men like that shot themselves.” Blending archival material, ballroom dance, video and hand-drawn animation, the work slips between fact and fantasy, rumour and romance. At its centre is a waltz, choreographed with queer ballroom company Lead and Follow, allowing Beauchamp a moment of queer love. The work imitates and uses archival materials while reframing national icons through humour and desire. In this work drawing is a tool for reframing the past and imagining alternate queer futures.

With thanks to Lead and Follow Dance, Mathew Nicholson and Shae Mountain.

Audio track features the voice John Doremus from the radio series The Passing Parade produced by Grace Gibson Productions.

Courtesy .M Contemporary, Sydney.

Medium: Instant Photography (Polaroid, Instax, Instax Wide)

This body of work captures fleeting moments of queer and trans joy through the intimacy of instant photography. Created during a time when our existence is politicised, weaponised, and distorted for political warfare, these images act as small but radical declarations: we are here, we are alive, we are loving. Against the backdrop of rising queerphobia and transphobia, joy becomes resistance, intimacy becomes defiance, and tenderness becomes survival. The immediacy of the instax format honours the rawness of the moment—unfiltered, unedited, unrepeatable—mirroring the fragility and resilience of our lives. This work is vital for now, a reminder that even in times of outcry, our joy cannot be erased.

Medium: Found bamboo bird cage, 3D printed bird with PLA and estrogen powder, acupuncture needles, clay eggs, twigs

This work reflects on the layered experiences of cultural displacement, shifting generational values and gender identity. It explores the complexity of reconciling intergenerational heritage and cultural hybridisation, framed through the lens of migratory song birds - creatures that traverse borders, seasons, and terrains in search of sustenance and survival. Yet, in Chinese traditions, songbirds have long served as symbols of masculinity, prized for their beauty, discipline, and refined song, while their captivity complicates the very freedom their song suggests. Its beauty and voice are celebrated precisely through a restriction that denies its nature, revealing the tensions between admiration, control, and the fragile ideals of masculinity. How do we reconstruct the exclusionary machinations, inherited values and societal norms to account for, include, and empower minority identities that do not fit neatly within dominant cultural, gendered, or racial paradigms, so that they may thrive without compromising their complexity or authenticity?

Medium: Paper mache, acrylics paint, fabric

This represents my migration; I am from two worlds, Mexico and Australia. But it could be any duality as a Queer person, I always felt like I was divided in two, a man that has to be masculine or macho, but with a significant percentage of femininity. It is like being a monster with two heads.

Medium: Photography (unique state print)

One of the gifts my mother gave me, is the luxury to be myself. My mother was a seamstress who worked long days and held multiple jobs. The work she did never paid well. Money was tight and to purchase something like cut flowers, to simply decorate the home, was never a consideration. To save money, my mother would knit or sew clothing for us. I don't recall my mother ever creating something just to admire. Her free time was so limited, everything needed to have a functional purpose. My mother’s goal was to provide my sister and I a life of opportunity and choice.

This work, 'Mothers' Gift', is a celebration of the life a mother gifts her child, of what my mother has gifted me. Cut flowers are purchased and photographed on 35mm film. Multiple 35mm images are layered and scanned. The resulting image is printed and pastel pencil is used in areas of the print and then varnished with thread, then sewn into the print. This work is presented as a unique state print.

Medium: Screen-print on paper

'You Are Beautiful' is a celebration of our power to recreate ourselves. In April 2025, I photographed the walls inside 924 Gilman, a punk club iconic to the San Francisco Bay Area with a very active queer scene. By way of a two-colour halftone process print, this artwork depicts a collage created over time on one section of wall by members of the Gilman community. Like they have layered stickers, stencils and other ephemeral graffiti to create the juxtaposition of image and text seen here, together we can collage ourselves into forms that reflect our evolving and often complex versions of what we know beauty to be. Our communities are beautiful and so are we.

Medium: Camera. Computer code. Screen. 

Tracing Colour reflects on the interplay between identity, space, and visibility through a queer lens. As a gay person of colour and refugee, I am attuned to how environments shape us and how we leave traces in them. The work transforms live video of the audience into fluid, painterly colours, requiring movement and engagement to generate its ephemeral imagery. Viewers’ bodies become co-creators, highlighting the mutual shaping of self and surroundings, and the ways our presence disrupts or enlivens space. The resulting blurred, vibrant images evoke the fleeting, layered nature of identity and community, capturing the energy of bodies inhabiting space together while foregrounding the queer, diasporic perspective that informs my practice.

Medium: Latex, expanding foam, cement, & acrylic tint

Self-Portrait (Successive States) is a sculptural series exploring transgender abstraction, where a work is understood by how it behaves rather than how it looks. Each piece takes the form of a roly-poly-like object—playful, weighty, and defiant. Built from expanding foam and cement, their latex skins layer over thirty coats to conceal any identifying markers, evoking the grotesque as both dysphoric and vulnerable. These works reflect how trans bodies are perceived by heteronormative society, while subverting that gaze through bizarre, tactile invitations to interact.

Some sculptures self-right when pushed, while others remain off-balance. This unpredictability unsettles expectations and mirrors the uneasy, non-linear realities of trans experience. Situated between queer abstraction and participatory art, the series reimagines portraiture through capacities rather than likeness. In provoking touch and play, it transforms portraiture into an encounter with embodiment itself—unstable, resilient, and always becoming.

Medium: Polystyrene, pigment and plaster

Kelly Manning is a multidisciplinary queer artist working across sculpture, installation, printmaking and drawing. Her practice addresses trauma, systemic violence and the Anthropocene shaped by settler-colonial activity, while emphasising resilience, survival and hope. Using salvaged plastics, pigment, natural elements and experimental printmaking, she explores the entanglement of human maltreatment with ecological adaptation. Her sculptural wall works suggest armour, protection and fragile security, while wearable motifs reference mutual aid, escape routes and queer community support. Chains evoke mortality, precarity and mutual aid act as metaphors for motion, resistance, and persistence.

L'ORGAN'S BROOCH I & L'ORGAN'S BROOCH II consider a Plan B, connection and emergent communities. Made from polystyrene, pigment, Kodachrome ink and plaster mouth stencils once used for saint statues, these works examine institutional violence, trauma, othering and resistance. Manning’s practice is underpinned by survival strategies and collective care, gestures toward more inclusive futures.

Medium: Oil, wax, ink and glass beads on linen

A few months ago we sat at a bar, I listened to her talk about her facial feminisation surgery.

6 weeks on, she was swollen and hopeful for a different version of the future – only it isn’t just self-acceptance but compromising with the perception of others. She listed things that would be different: To make new friends and have the choice to disclose herself if and when she knows it’s safe. To go to the servo without the attendant searching for ways to justify his assumptions about her body. To go to Eden, not as the snake or the apple.

Jade is my partner of ten years, documenting her medical transition is a regular part of my practice. Her transness is important to me as subject because both transness and queerness are things we weren’t taught and had to be learnt through feeling and listening.

As we plan our future we orient ourselves east. Towards an Eden that is both the small fishing town where she grew up and a place of bodily boundaries where under lore we are othered. To be trans or queer in rural Australia is to forgo the anonymity and protection through community awarded by the city, but it’s also to have faith in people and parts of our culture that we are afraid of.

Medium: Giclée print on Cotton Rag

"Blue is for boys, pink is for girls" - this gendered colour coding has uncertain origins but was firmly in place in Western society by the mid-20th century. Around this same time, to demonstrate your taste and sophistication as a middle-class homeowner, you might have decorated your walls with reproductions of Old English Master paintings. A popular and suitably refined choice was Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, or perhaps Thomas Lawrence’s  Pinkie. Even better: one of each! You probably also considered hanging a Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly print to signal your appreciation for modern art and embrace a new and distinctively Australian national identity. How cultured you were! Old Masters Moonlite blends my fascination with Western art history, queer identity, and the myth-making at the heart of Australiana. The work follows a fictional narrative centred on a whimsically reimagining of Australia’s infamous queer bushranger, Andrew George Scott - better known as Captain Moonlite. In this chapter of my historical remix, Moonlite pauses his outlaw life to pose for portraits by the English Old Masters (c.1885/1985). 

Medium: Acrylic with texture medium on canvas

Water refuses fixed borders. it moves, leaks, reshapes, and resists containment. This work thinks about queerness in the same way. Not as a category to sit inside but as something that is moving, alive and radiant.

In many queer spaces labels work like passports, a way to be verified as belonging. For some people that is safety, but for others it becomes another kind of policing. A soft border that decides who is queer enough, or performing queerness the ‘correct’ way. I’ve always felt my identity as something fluid, and I don’t want to be flattened into one readable form so others can feel certain about where to place me.

If most of the body is water, then fluidity isn’t a metaphor. It’s literally biological. Identity can’t be reduced to a checkbox without losing its shimmer, its refraction, its ability to change direction and reflect new light. This work imagines queerness outside categorisation, not something that must be proven or declared, but something elemental and already present within the soul.

Medium: Digital Photograph archival giclee prints on 310gsm smooth cotton rag print

The DYKE events produced by ShitList Productions at Pony Club Gym have nothing to do with gender and everything to do with celebrating culture and history. Whatever happened to the Dyke Bar / Club? In fact, whatever happened to Dykes? As the patriarchy has held strong and sturdy, Dyke bars / clubs have dwindled into an almost non-existence. DYKE events are a chance to revel, revere and rage with both performers and DJs. Each event embraces community participation and runways such as BUTCH, Double Denim and this photo from the Leather Runway.

Medium: Oil and acrylic on pine

Patiently waiting on a delicate spider's web amidst droplets of glistening morning dew. A fragile, delicate creature, disguised as a cruel villain.

My Queerness waited patiently for as long as I can remember. I shooed it as an inconvenience or a pest, mistaking it for something cursed.

I did not accept (nor understand) my Queer self until my early 20s. Throughout my teens I steered towards societal pressures and norms, peering out at a contrived life planned before me. I felt a hiccup of dread, accompanied by tinges of shame, guilt, and uncertainty.

My process of acceptance shifted my life drastically, and suddenly with that came an understanding that something I vilified from a distance was truly one of the most precious parts of me. This painting examines that shift and plays on the notion of beauty in the under appreciated.

Medium: Photopolymer print, resin-coated plant stems 

FrangiFanny is a series of photopolymer prints that combines botanical photography with bodily imagery using digital collage. The interaction of these concepts bloom conversation of gender binary norms, sexualisation and the juxtaposing yet symbiotic relationship of nature and the natural with the artificial and human.

Each print leans against the wall on supports made of preserved plant matter, protruding from the wall with a dewy drop wetting the tip. 

The 2D and 3D divisions that segregate printmaking and sculpture are rejected, allowing the prints to perform as an object. 

My prints flourish by using creative install techniques, opposing conventional methods of install that confine prints to a frame or neutral materials. 

Medium: Looping video series

Alana Taylor is a Melbourne/ Naarm based director and producer whose work explores intimacy, identity, and the quiet power of human connection. With a background in advertising and film, Alana brings a sharp visual eye and deep curiosity for real stories to every project. Alana’s work has spanned commercial campaigns, documentary projects, and experimental video art, each driven by a desire to create space for honesty and visibility. Her practice often celebrates underrepresented voice both on and off screen. Love Phones continues this pursuit - an ode to the beauty, humour, and ordinariness of queer love.

Medium: Mixed media collage. Paper, embroidery and mixed media on cotton

Bed Head is a series of works I created that delves into queer hookup culture and its prevalence within some queer spaces including my own. This series is a personal documentation of meetups that I have experienced where anonymity, discretion and vulnerability are often navigated and mediated to form a connection. Queer men often have to navigate the culture of hookups and anonymous sex to forge connections within queer spaces.

The Bed Head series are works charged with desire, vulnerability and immediacy, the viewer has stumbled on something that has just unfolded. The works are mounted on unmade bedsheets to give a sense of presence and aftermath. I hope the viewer feels not just an observer but a participant in the act of looking.