‘Playground’
Group Exhibition, Curated by Eliza Fugar
Presented by HAKE House of Art
OPENING DAY | Saturday 12th September, 3pm - 6pm
ON VIEW | 12TH - 26TH SEPTEMBER
LOCATION : HAKE, HOUSE OF ART 275 Harbord Road, DeeWhy, 2099.
Curatorial Statement;
Playground draws upon the thought of Isamu Noguchi, who imagined play spaces as open fields for discovery rather than prescriptive environments. In place of instructing the body to “swing here, climb there”, the playground becomes, as critic Thomas Hess describes, a site for “endless exploration”. Here, play is shaped by curiosity, movement and intuition.
Bringing together artists across an array of disciplines, Playground unfolds as a shifting landscape of possibility. A place where meaning remains open and where each passage through the space offers a new point of departure.
Words and Curation by Eliza Fugar
2am Close
2am close is the material practice of Taylor Brooks, a practitioner based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work centres on making as a mode of thinking, feeling, and relating, exploring principles of embodiment, gesture and how objects negotiate between interior and exterior worlds. Drawing on backgrounds in fashion and industrial design, Taylor’s practice moves between analogue and digital processes to investigate how contemporary manufacturing technologies might preserve, rather than diminish, the emotional and tactile qualities embedded within acts of making. Objects emerge through an ongoing dialogue between phenomenology, material experimentation and craft practice. Working predominantly with cast metals, alongside textiles, timber and knitwear, her practice invites slower meditative forms of participation.
Aaron Fell-Fracasso
Aaron Fell-Fracasso creates immersive abstract paintings through textural and tactile mark-making. By rendering, scraping, and concealing layers of paint, he reveals intricate sensory surfaces that evoke childhood memories and suggest non-linear narratives. In his work, Fell-Fracasso explores the interplay between purposeful and playful expression, employing colour blocking, pattern generation, and direct gestures to guide the viewer across and beyond the picture plane. Based in Dharawal/Wollongong, NSW, Fell-Fracasso holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the University of Wollongong and an Advanced Diploma of Fine Arts from West Wollongong TAFE. A finalist in numerous art prizes, he has work held in the collections of the University of Wollongong, Macquarie University, and numerous private collectors. REPRESENTED BY EGG & DART (WOLLONGONG)
Adriana Beach
Adriana Beach (she/her) is a Sydney/Eora-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, curation, sculpture, design, textile and sound. Rooted in connection to the natural world, Adriana’s work seeks to activate and transform the spaces it inhabits, inviting the audience to engage not just with the art itself, but with the environment surrounding it. Her focus is on creating works that respond to and harmonise with natural spaces as a way of inviting people into an active, reflective experience. Her pieces speak to their habitat and are used to gently draw attention to the surrounding elements—making the environment itself a functional part of the artwork. An invitation to engage with both the immediate space and beyond. Her installation practice is driven by a desire to etherealise and expand environments. Rather than encouraging interpretation of the work itself, Adriana aims to bring awareness to the elements that encompass it—inviting a sense of presence. Through the use of delicate, textured fabrics that move with the wind or respond to light, her installations become living, breathing entities that shift in conversation with nature. Often mounted high or integrated into outdoor spaces, Adriana’s installations encourage the audience to lift their gaze, providing a sense of ease, grounding and comfort. In a world full of distractions, her work serves as a reminder to pause and be present, fostering curiosity and a deeper connection to place.
Ash Holmes
Ash Holmes (b. 1994, Sydney) is a fourth-generation, self-taught artist based on Gadigal Land (Sydney, NSW, Australia). Her large-scale abstract works are characterised by gestural brushstrokes, a refined use of colour psychology, and an intuitive, process-driven approach. Drawing inspiration from nature and landscapes she has recently experienced, Holmes creates delicate yet powerful compositions that merge the energy of Abstract Expressionism with elements of landscape painting to form dreamlike, immersive works. Her practice, grounded in colour psychology, explores the sensory and emotional impact of colour. Through repeated marks and fluid layering of oil and acrylic, her paintings evoke memory, terrain, and shifting light. Holmes invites viewers into a sensory dialogue with the landscape, using harmonious tones and expressive gestures to narrate personal and place-based experiences. Since 2017, Holmes has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally, in 2025, she exhibited at Christoffer Egelund Gallery (Copenhagen), Circle Contemporary Gallery (United Kingdom), and HAKE, HOUSE OF ART Gallery (Australia). She has been a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize, Lloyd Rees Memorial Award, and Premio Combat Prize, and her work is held in private collections across Australia, New Zealand, the US, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Bela Rofe
Bela Rofe is a textile artist and researcher working at the intersection of design, ecology, and material futures. Educated in anthropology and biodesign, she looks to nature as collaborator and teacher, harnessing the techniques of botanical dyeing, biofabrication, and hand-weaving to rethread our ties to Earth. Her works bridge traditional craftswomanship and imaginative bio-futures, positioning material as the starting point to enhance our connection to living ecologies; past, present, and emerging. Bela’s works have been exhibited at Milan Design Week, Dutch Design Week, and published by Springer Nature. After nearly a decade in Europe, she has returned to Sydney to reconnect with the local landscape and showcase its unique expression through pigment, texture, and story.
Bella Layone
Bella Layone is a Syrian multidisciplinary visual artist based in Sydney, working across installation, sculpture, painting, photography, and video. Her practice is grounded in material experimentation and abstraction, exploring the emotional and psychological dimensions of space. After studying Psychology and Fine Arts in Syria (2014–2016), Layone relocated to Australia at the age of 20, where she continued her artistic education. She completed a Diploma of Screen and Media (2020), a Diploma of Arts Screen and Production at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (2021–2022), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School, Sydney (2025). Layone has exhibited in group exhibitions both in Australia and internationally, including Proof of Place at Schmick Contemporary (2026). She has been recognised as a finalist in the Blacktown City Art Prize (2024) and the Burwood Art Prize (2024, 2025). Her practice reflects on themes of displacement, identity, and transformation, using abstraction and material processes to navigate the tension between presence and absence.
Caitlyn King
Caitlyn Jade King is a Western Australian born, Sydney based ceramic artist whose practice explores the possibilities and contradictions of clay as a material. Working predominantly with unglazed clay, Caitlyn creates forms and structures that might traditionally belong to other materials, particularly metal. Her work explores repetition, pattern, structure and movement, with a particular interest in the tension between clay’s perceived permanence and its capacity for change. Through interconnected and modular forms, Caitlyn challenges the expectation of ceramics as fixed and resolved objects. Her works can shift, move, break apart and be reconfigured, allowing a single piece to exist in multiple forms. The appeal lies in this impermanence, the belief that nothing, not even something fired to stone, has to stay as it is.
Eliza Fugar
For Eliza, the allure of a tactile practice lies in its capacity to fuse visual elements that unfold into their own language. Working across painting and sculpture, each work is imbued with a contemplative ambience where ephemeral fragments surface intuitively. Layered mark-making and suspended forms evoke a space between material presence and reverie, suggesting fleeting memories or elusive landscapes. Eliza’s works are meditations. They float somewhere between daydreaming and poetry. Curatorially, Eliza transforms spaces as though listening to their latent rhythms, orchestrating experiences that evolve as reflective journeys. Her distinct choreography opens pathways for audiences to encounter artworks in both intimate and immediate ways, cultivating moments of introspection where art’s vitality resonates as a living, enduring dialogue.
Emma Creasey
Emma Creasey is a painter based in Naarm/Melbourne. Through intuitive mark-making and layered compositions, she builds visual worlds populated by figures, animals, shifting landscapes and abstract forms. Images and motifs often repeat across works, with meaning formed gradually over time. Her work holds states of ambiguity and tension, with tenderness sitting alongside unease, and familiarity slipping toward something stranger. Drawing from fragments of literature, film, music, historical material, memory and imagined experience, her practice sits somewhere between diary, dream and invention.
Erica D'Ali
After completing a Master of Fine Art at the National Art School last year, Erica D’Ali (b.2000) was a finalist for the Burwood Art Prize and presented her first solo exhibition at 8 Wall Gallery. She has since exhibited in numerous group exhibitions across Sydney, including at Airspace Projects and Curl Curl Creative Space. In 2024, she undertook a residency in Japan. The past continues to be reworked as a site of new knowledge. Within my practice, ancient ruins and fading frescos are remediated through an intuitive process of drawing and printmaking. Although historically and geographically distant in subject, my approach is emotionally charged and overtly present. Gestural marks and the space they occupy demonstrate raw moments of thinking. The lineage of art history melts within contemporary consciousness.
Kristone Capistrano
Kristone Capistrano is a Filipino-Australian artist working across traditional and experimental drawing. His practice explores mortality, transience and contemporary figuration, visualising paper as a metaphor for skin and mark-making as a form of human touch: a vehicle for generosity and care. In a world of increasing AI and automation, Capistrano creates works that are decisively tactile, handmade and analogue. The death of his grandmother led him to use Filipino brooms and household tools as alternative instruments for drawing—an homage that unites mark-making, sweeping and erasure with shared memories of labour, sacrifice and hospitality embedded within the Filipino imagination. Capistrano has exhibited in Australia and Asia, and has undertaken residencies at Bundanon Art Museum, Emerging Islands (Philippines), Tong Lau Space (HK) and the Sheen Center (NYC). Commissions include Orb: Anima, White Rabbit Gallery (2026), 101 Graham Street, PHIVE, City of Parramatta (2022), and forthcoming permanent public artworks for the new Bradfield Station (Western Sydney Airport line), set to open in 2027. Upcoming projects include a short film to be presented at the Sydney Opera House by Blacktown Arts (October) and a group show in Yuchengco Museum, Manila (December).
Lucy Anderson
Lucy Anderson is a Brisbane based artist who works predominantly with oil on found pieces of pine. Since graduating in 2012 from Queensland College of Art, Lucy has held solo exhibitions and been part of various group shows and art prizes in Australia including receiving ‘highly commended’ at the 2018 Moreton Bay Art Awards and Belle Art Start. Her works are part of private and public collections including Queensland University of Technology.
Rachel Rutt
Rachel Rutt’s (b.1990) work observes humanity’s instinct for the nomadic and migratory, polarised against outcomes of alienation and isolation borne innate to the experience of Diaspora. Assimilation and adaptation, strained by the necessity of refuge, unearth a hunger for existence exceeding mere survival. Can the process of evolution redefine belonging? Does the landscape transform in response? This catalyst is the subject of Rutt’s curiosity. Comprised of woven mediums, whose warp and weft are manipulated to emulate the pathways of physical migration, the interplay of colliding worlds, chance, harmony, and adaptive reaction, Rutt’s work pays homage to both personal and shared experiences of Diaspora through the universal mechanism of weaving. Silken transparencies provoke memories and interpret history, conveying a rhythm persistent in spite of chaos. Rutt was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Taiwan and Japan before immigrating to Australia in 2005. In 2013 and 2014 she studied hand weaving at the Hand Weaver’s and Spinners Guild of NSW and has since practiced as an emerging artist. REPRESENTED BY CHINA HEIGHTS (SYD)
Sarah Wadey
Sarah Wadey is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sydney/Eora. Drawing on her background in printmaking, Wadey’s current body of work reflects the warmth and pull of objects and their trace residual energy, through a means of heat-based image production. Combining the archival image with found object, she foregrounds the idea of the ‘minor history’, emphasising personal and collective narratives that sit at the periphery, disregarded until drawn forward. Reconfiguring these fragments, often through laborious process, situates each work within a larger narrative. An avenue into this way of seeing is structured through her installation methodology, which focuses on motion as the root of emotion and draws a singular moment out through time, requiring sensorial engagement or feeling through. Reduced, even with-holding, Wadey places value on the process of locating meaning, of taking the time for recognition, recall and association making. Wadey is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art at the National Art School.
Tia Madden
Tia Madden is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator based on unceded Dharug land in the Blue Mountains. Her practice is concerned with the poetics of illegibility; the potential for abstract marks to behave communicatively when framed or misread as language; and complex histories of sign-systems exceeding and predating the meaning-making frameworks imposed upon them by colonial powers, scientific traditions, or occult and mystical beliefs. By combining traditions of abstraction with the materials, rules, and aesthetics of writing systems, she creates vessels for communication: interfaces that—part speculative-fiction and part riddle—might only speak in a world outside our own. It is in doing so that she unsettles assumptions surrounding how meaning is constructed, interpreted, and culturally authorised.
Zara June Williams
Zara June Williams is a Gadigal/Sydney-based artist working across collage and painting. Drawing from a personal archive of found and made materials, her practice explores memory, time, and the cyclical nature of matter through processes of layering, erasure, and the repurposing of acumulated fragments. Williams completed a Master of Fine Arts at the National Art School in 2018. Awarded the Lift Off Award upon graduation, she relocated to Germany, where she lived until 2021. She was an artist-in-residence at Pilotenkueche in Leipzig in 2019 and at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, in 2022. Her work has been exhibied in Sydney and internationally.
'in spite of it’ by 2am Close
152 x 6 x 6 cm
Sterling Silver, Cast Recycled Aluminium, Cast Aluminium.
ENQUIRE HERE
This piece is an original by 2am Close, created in 2025 for the HAKE HOUSE group exhibition ‘Playground’ - curated by Eliza Fugar.
Please find shipping information for this piece, or please enquire here.