Boundless; From patio to parlour,
urban to rural,
and everything in between: Scattered Grounds

📅 20-30 August 2026  
📍Palangi Gallery
Level 1/59 Flinders St, Surry Hills NSW 2010
🥂 Thu. 20 August  6-8PM

Living in the digital age of rapid advancement, urbaness around the world now possess a universal demeanor engulfed with screens, glass, and steel. Where infinite geometrical duplicates are puzzled in congestion, it constantly pendulates us between estrangement and belonging, as if a fish is out of water. Seeking a sense of belonging, a fade of topographical identity inspires individuals to find existential values in enduring personal and earthly memories. Such liminal spaces that possess minute moments, stimulations that may occur of a sudden but last everlastingly—allow one to engross oneself in a flash of sheltered embrace.

We present Scattered Grounds—holding the initiative of growth, exchange, and discourse. This exhibition brings together emerging artists affiliated with Sydney College of Arts (SCA, USYD), University of New South Wales (UNSW), and Parsons School of Design New York (TNS, NYC). Gathered across a transnational scope, these responses explore the complex interlock of land and memory, channeling themes of home, natural sublime, nostalgia, and more. Whether the bustling metropolis, the underground, the outdoors, or the indoors, tightly packed or loose, artworks enact as retrospective scaffolds, a self-portrait paving a sense of self. From distinct minds and regions, audiences are invited to step inside each of their 'memoryscapes,' to be strayed in the moment, and to inhale the stillness among the hurtles that alters the hollow gaze of ‘where we are’ into a passionate one—that might lead us to seek character in them.

Tracing familiarity among the estranged, this exhibition provokes a gradual pull to ask one:

Where is home?
Where do I belong?
Where am I?
Where should I be?

…and to constantly pendulate between estrangement and belonging. Answers are never fully given; they simply break the uniformed silence to polyphonic reminiscences.



Artists
Amber Koroluk-Stephenson
Annabelle Demarino
Emilia B. Levin
Emily Beattie
Felixe Rives
Gemma Anderson
Kim Anh Ngo Bui
Lana Ryles
Lige Qiao
Olive Burgess
Xanthe Kibble

Curators

Bomi Park
Judy (Yigu) Pan

*Refer to the catalogue to explore more about the project & to  view the full list of works*

📘 VIEW CATALOGUE




For all enquiries, please contact: 
Bomi Park E. audrey030321@gmail.com | M. +61 494 412 414 
Judy Pan E. panxiaoyi9@gmail.com | M. +61 451 457 016

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Acknowledgement of Country

We would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we meet today, and pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.

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Amber Koroluk-Stephenson    

Amber Koroluk-Stephenson is an artist, curator, educator and arts worker based in southern lutruwita/Tasmania. Working across painting, collage, sculpture and installation, her practice explores notions of identity, place and belonging to consider\ how cultural meaning is made, shared and sometimes lost. Drawing on the intersections between natural and built environments, and the blur between history, fifiction and popular culture, her work speaks to a fundamental human need for connection. Through material and narrative, she seeks to make visible what is overlooked. 
 

In these paintings, the magical ruby slippers worn by Dorothy Gale in the 1939 fifilm The Wizard of Oz have been conjured into the 1840’s colonial landscape painting by William Porden Kay, the last known colonial depiction of emus in Lutruwita/Tasmania before they were hunted into extinction by European settlers. The contrasts between the fantasy of cultural memory in popular culture and the histories of violence and extinction in Lutruwita/Tasmania since colonisation are further emphasised by the use of word play: Brooding hints at the care of incubating eggs, while also suggesting an atmosphere of somber and menace. Similarly, Fertile Grounds suggests a place for the colonial projection of empire through the myth of terra nullius. Contrasting cultural myths complicate questions of home and belonging for KorolukStephensonas a fifirst generation Lutruwitan/Tasmanian of recent migrant ancestry. In thinking through inherited legacies alongside current debates about re-wilding and de-extinction of species, these works consider the destructive impact of colonial power and the Anglo-European problem of belonging in the face of such histories.

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Annabel Demarino  

Annabel Demarino is a Shanghai born, New York based illustrator exploring the intersection of chaotic, creepy, and cute. Her artwork centers around character design and collectibles such as sticker making, keychains, and toy design, alongside digital illustration and graphics. With striking colors and chaotic layered compositions, she explores themes of cuteness, sex, and spirituality with a sickeningly sweet charm.
 

I fell in love with graffiti because it allows me to be seen, to become a physical part of any space. What started as placing small stickers across my college campus for friends to spot turned into batch printing stickers to paste around the city. Sticker graffiti allows my art to merge with the cityscape, demanding itself to be seen by people who may never know me, but in this way witness me nonetheless. New York’s streets become an infinite art playground, placing my work in front of thousands of strangers every day.

This series captures this unapologetic playful energy into a portable form. It consists of 5 prints documenting my sticker graffiti across Brooklyn, layered with physical sticker collage of my original characters “Squonuts” (a collection of cute and aloof square donuts) on top. Sprawled in chaos across each composition these stickers dominate the blank space, amplifying visual noise into a colorful cuteness overload.

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Emilia B. Levin    


Emilia B. Levin is a New York–based artist currently studying at Parsons School of Design, pursuing her BFA in Fine Art with a minor in Museum and Curatorial Studies. Emilia’s work explores themes of childhood, memory, and nostalgia, primarily shaped by her experience with frequent moves and perception of a home base. As a second-generation Russian American, she is particularly interested in moments of cultural dissonance, currently in how identity can form between place and inherited traditions.
In my recent works, I draw on the visual language of childhood, experimenting with illustration inspired by the Soviet-era cartoons I grew up watching. These references serve as both a personal archive and a cultural lens through which I revisit formative experiences. I reimagine personal memories of family life as dreamlike compositions, using humor, distortion, and shapes to delve into mirage-like childhood recollections.

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Emily Beattie

Emily Beattie is a glass sculptor that focuses on concepts of the domestic and familiarity. Exploring these concepts in a way that plays on the uncanny nature of presenting the domestic through glass in different forms. Emily pushes the bounds of how glass can be used as a medium to create works that give both the notion of fragility and danger whilst also presenting strength and resilience through these pieces.

Through drawing on their own experiences each piece created becomes an exploration of the artists own past and experiences. In a effort to share and connect with viewers through a presentation of these domestic notions both universal and individual.

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Felixe Rives   

Felixe Rives is an artist working on unceded Bigjigal and Gadigal land with a practice that ranges from painting to immersive installation. Having migrated from France at the age of 6, she responds to the ephemerality of home, exploring the subtle signs within daily experiences of this global transience. Through processes of documentation, using site specific performance, and projections, she focuses on our relationship with the home and its permeability into public space. Exploring embodied space, memory, and connections to material she comments on the effect of capitalism and consumerism on the grounding purpose of home.



Her paintings on Perspex capture shared domestic spaces through an exploration of our perception of space, it’s shifts, limits and expansions, aiming to provide the visual experience of stepping into familiar domestic spaces. She reflects on the way our minds may distort perspective. Her use of Perspex as material allows her to implement a reflective quality to specific parts of the painting, incorporating these expansive qualities of space that may be experienced in a home. This reflective element also allows the viewers to assume a playfully spectral presence in the work and break the boundaries between the two-dimensional painting and the three-dimensional space it shares with the viewer.

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Gemma  Anderson  

Gemma Anderson is a multidisciplinary artist. Gemma is process driven and works predominantly with the colour blue. Having completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UNSW Art & Design in 2019, Gemma has since returned to university to complete her Honours degree this year.




In this work, blue functions as stimulus, medium and method. Influenced by Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, what began as an intuitive attachment has become a way of thinking through experience. Blue operates as a controlled processing tool, it is a lens through which lived experiences can be revisited and held in relation to one another.

Writing through blue, painting with blue, redacting text into the painted forms with blue pencil, and writing again, each process informs the next.  Rather than representing experience, these repetitive acts become a means of processing it. 

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Kim Anh Ngo Bui

Nothing Special but So Special explores the complex relationship between memory and identity through a personal lens. Centred on childhood memories, the series translates recollection onto canvas in a way that captures its transitory, fragmented nature, some memories remain vivid and fixed, while others turn foggy or vanish entirely.
Using a deliberate, monochromatic palette, I depict specific objects and subjects to symbolise memory's selectivity: certain details stay sharp while others fade, shaped by time and experience.

Faces blur, surroundings dissipate, creative choices that mirror the universal process of forgetting and evoke a nostalgia tinged with melancholy. The title captures the series' central paradox. To an outsider, these memories may seem mundane or unremarkable. To me, they hold profound personal significance, fragments of a past that shaped my identity and upbringing. The work invites viewers to consider what may seem "nothing special"
to others but carries great meaning in their own lives, honouring the fragile balance between
holding on and letting go.

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Lana Ryles   

Lana Ryles is a contemporary Australian symbolic painter based in Sydney whose work explores the relationship between neuroscience, perception and the numinous.

Ryles is an artist and scholar whose practice bridges neuroscience, philosophy and visual art. Her work investigates how neurological processes shape perception and consciousness, exploring the ways inner experience may be translated into visual form.

Drawing on lived experience of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE), her paintings examine heightened perceptual states often described as numinous-like auras. Influenced by the writings of Rudolf Otto and his concept of the numinous, the mysterious and wholly other dimension of experience, Ryles develops a symbolic language of grids, spirals and geometric forms that register altered states of perception.

​She describes this territory as the neuro-numinous. The term defines the intersection of neurological processes and numinous experience. Her paintings function as templates for perception, translating neurological experience into structured symbolic form and exploring the point at which scientific understanding and numinous experience converge.

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Lige Qiao  

Lige (pronounced “leeghe”) is a Gadigal-based emerging artist (and curator, sometimes) who constantly contemplates suburban landscapes. Their practice revolves around the lived experiences in industrial environments in Northern China and the embedded migration and displacement in family histories. Trained in painting, they now primarily work with video and performance, frequently combining these mediums to investigate the relationship between machinery and body and what is in between. They love the internet and hope the internet loves them back. Their current research interest lies in the power structure of languages and Chinese internet vernacular.

Lige completed a one-month residency in Chongqing, China, and had their first solo exhibition titled Metrical Promenade. Lige’s work have been shown at various group exhibitions across so-called Sydney. They participated in a one-night live showing after a two-week performance residency at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists in 2025. They reviewed SCA’s grad show New Contemporaries 2025 for Mass Memo. Their painting received a highly commended award from the Jenny Birt Awards in 2024. Lige graduated with a first-class honours degree in fine arts from UNSW A&D in 2024 and hold a master’s degree in curating and cultural leadership.


This work was made during my residency in Chongqing from December 2025 to January 2026. During my residency in Chongqing, I noticed that many construction sites are covered by green mesh to protect them from the rain. The large green textiles in relation to the landscape reminded me of the use of green screen in digital media. In post-production, the green screen gets replaced by video or image. But Chongqing’s construction sites utilised the typically erased presence of green to cover the industrial materials, which reverses our usual expectations of the colour green. I relate to the resurfacing of green as I think it is a way to recentre the process of making, especially in digital art.

This work was developed as a way to rethink labour in digital manipulation. Stemming from my same interest in the exteriorisation of process, I replicated Photoshop's default transparent layer in painting while having the “subject” of the work printed through the printer. By painting the checkered tiles that represent transparency, I draw on the often-overlooked editing process in digital art to emphasise the value of process in artmaking. As someone who frequently works with both digital forms and painting, this work also serves as an experiment in contemplating the relationship between the machine and the body, as well as questioning the conventional priority given to the final result in digital media.

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Olive Burgess  

Olive Burgess (b.1994) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her work connects seemingly disparate things in order to draw out connections which western systems dismantle and deny. A research-based practitioner, her recent practice explores the weather, time, and place within broader contexts—leaning specifically on feminist and postcolonial landscape theory. Her work engages with place and the body as interconnected ways of knowing the self. Burgess lives and works on Gadigal, Wiradjuri and Awabakal land, however she grew up on a river and a farm on Birpai country.

Since graduating from Sydney College of the Arts in 2024 (BVA Hons 1), Burgess has had works shown in numerous group and prize shows across Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Newcastle and Ireland. In 2024 she was awarded the Fauvette Loureiro SCA Travel Scholarship which funded a research project and Residency in Ireland. Since then she has also undertaken further residencies at Megalo Print Studio, Canberra and The Corridor Project, Cowra. In 2025 her work Gradually and then Suddenly was the winner of the SHAC Works on Paper Prize. Her recent solo shows include The Weather and What Is (2026) at Platform, Canberra, and Can You Hear the Talking? (2025) at SHAC, Robertson. 

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Xanthe Kibble

Xanthe Kibble lives and makes on unceded Gadigal land. She is looking up, down, out, and around, combining analogue and digital techniques of photography with drawing and sculpture. She is learning HTML and in the process of writing her website. Xanthe Kibble holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (2026) from the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts.

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Bomi Park    

Bomi Park is a gallerist and curator based in Sydney, Seoul and Cambridge/ London. She currently studies History of Art at Cambridge University, graduated the University of Sydney with a Bachelors majoring Art History and minoring in Visual Arts, and studied Design History and Practice at Parsons School of Design, New York. She participated and worked with international events and institutions such as Sydney Contemporary, Sydney Biennale, Melbourne Art Fair, Affordable Art Fair, Aotearoa Art Fair, Chau Chak Wing Musuem, World Trade Center (WTO) and the Elizabeth Sutton Collection. Passionate in art international administration and operations, she continues to be involved in both public, creative and commercial sectors of the art industry. 

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Judy (Yigu) Pan)  

Yigu Pan is an emerging curator currently studying Curating and Cultural Leadership at the University of New South Wales. With a background in gemology, she previously worked in China's gem and jewellery industry, contributing to major international exhibitions and public events, including the China International Import Expo (CIIE). After studying abroad, she is exploring belonging and art valuation systems with different cultural perspectives.