FEATURED ARTIST
Each month, The Novocastrian features a Newcastle-based artist through a short, conversational video interview. These conversations focus on how artists think, observe, and work, offering insight into the ideas and processes that shape their practice. It’s a way of understanding the thinking behind the work – and the values that sit at the core of this website. Rachel Milne is our first, with a new Featured Artist to follow each month.
Graham Wilson
Graham Wilson has been making art for most of his life. He studied printmaking in Newcastle, worked across woodcut, screen printing, etching and lithography, trained as a stonemason, carved stone at a cathedral in Norway, and has spent decades making work that connects landscape, memory and environmental concerns.
For Graham, being an artist is less about deciding to become one than continuing something that begins naturally.
PREVIOUS FEATURED ARTISTS
Justin Lees
For Justin Lees, art and racing are deeply intertwined. Growing up beside Newcastle Racecourse in Broadmeadow, with his father Max Lees a major figure in the racing industry and his brother Kris continuing the family tradition, the rhythms, colours and memories of the track have been part of his life from the beginning. Working across painting, photography and increasingly sculpture, Lees draws on this personal history to explore family, place and memory through a practice that moves freely between abstraction and figuration.
Jen Denzin
Newcastle artist Jen Denzin creates immersive, wacky environments that are strange, playful and slightly unsettling.
Drawn to awkward moments, mismatches and the feeling of not quite knowing what is happening, her work invites audiences into spaces where the familiar becomes odd.
Shaped by Hunter TAFE and Newcastle’s supportive arts community, Denzin’s practice has grown through experimentation, opportunity and a willingness to let things unfold.
Jono Everett
Jono Everett is a designer, furniture maker and sculptor based at The Soap Factory in Mayfield East. After decades working across design, furniture and making, he is now turning more seriously toward sculptural work, using found roadside chairs as the starting point for monochromatic wall assemblages that explore home, memory, history and the quiet poetry of discarded objects.
Braddon Snape
Braddon Snape is an established Newcastle-based artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation and public art. Working across a diverse range of materials, Snape is known for conceptually rich works that balance a minimal visual language with a deep sensitivity to material, site and process. His investigations into inflated steel bring together control, risk and chance, creating sculptural forms that feel both highly resolved and physically alive.
Peter Gardiner
Peter Gardiner is a Newcastle painter whose practice has developed over more than four decades. Born in Geelong, he moved to Newcastle to study at art school and has remained deeply connected to the city ever since. His work reflects a long, sustained commitment to painting, shaped by years of making in studios, garages and sheds across Newcastle.
Moj Habibi
Dr. Mojgan (Moj) Habibi is an Iranian–Australian conceptual installation artist, academic, and founder of the Moree Arts Community Centre. Based in Moree and Newcastle, her work focuses on ceramics, sculpture, and mixed media exploring themes of identity, memory, and cultural connection.
Bridie Watt
Bridie Watt is a Newcastle-based artist working primarily in painting and drawing. Her work draws on the colour and forms of the natural world, with birds and other fauna recurring throughout her imagery, and she also works across performance and collaborative installation projects.
Watt has exhibited in solo and group shows since completing an Honours degree in Painting at the University of Newcastle in 1996. She is a resident artist at The Creator Incubator in Hamilton North and has created a number of public murals across Newcastle.
Jacquie Garcia
Jacquie Garcia is the Newcastle-based artist behind Leiluca Ceramics, creating functional and sculptural stoneware from her studio at The Creator Incubator in Hamilton North. Shaped by a lifelong love of making and formal study at Sydney’s National Art School, her practice draws on the colours and textures of the local landscape, beach, lake, and foliage, translated through carefully tested glazes and a calm, precise approach on the wheel.
Kara Wood
Kara Wood is a Newcastle-based mixed-media artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation and assemblage. Trained in ceramics and fine art at Newcastle Art School, she has spent more than 25 years developing a body of work that centres on women’s rights and challenges assumptions, power structures and the status quo.
Dino Consalvo
Dino Consalvo has been painting for more than five decades. His work is grounded in material curiosity, experimentation, and a deep commitment to making things that last. In this conversation, Dino reflects on process, painting as a form of refuge, and the quiet decisions that continue to shape his evolving practice.
Rachel Milne
Rachel Milne is a Newcastle-based oil painter whose practice is grounded in close observation, working from life, and a deep commitment to the traditions of figurative painting. Her work focuses on structure, tone and colour, often finding quiet intensity in everyday interiors, streetscapes and fleeting moments of light. We chose Rachel as The Novocastrian’s first Featured Artist because her practice reflects the kind of work the platform exists to support: thoughtful, locally grounded, and rigorously made.
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