Rainbow Stable exhibition: Celebrating Identity: Activism and Ecstasy

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Amy Bartlett is a successful arts worker and an emerging artist whose art reflects the roles of people within their domestic settings and within the greater environment. She focuses on exploring the notions of family, belonging and connection, and is renowned for including floral imagery within her artworks. Since 2014, Amy has exhibited artworks from a range of media including photography, painting, drawing, embroidery and collage in 42 exhibitions. 

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Jenny Bird is a photographer living and working in Nipaluna / Hobart, currently completing a Diploma of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania. Her practice focuses on urban and industrial environments, exploring their textures, rhythms, and quiet narratives. Working across analogue and digital processes, she favours film and darkroom techniques wherever possible, often blending them with digital editing and printing to create layered, atmospheric images. She is drawn to the understated beauty of utilitarian spaces, using photography to reveal moments of stillness, tension, or unexpected elegance within the industrial landscape. Jenny recently participated in a group show focussing on analogue film processes at the Plimsoll Gallery and continues to develop a practice grounded in material experimentation.

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Stella Blackwell is a multi-disciplinary artist based on the North West Coast of Tasmania. Her work is about how being creative heals and propels us. She enjoys collaborating with other artists and community groups to create events that encourage the examination of social stigmas and how creativity can contribute to positive social change.

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Tammy Gordon is an emerging artist who has exhibited paintings and sculptures in a number of community exhibitions and is an LGBTIQA+ ally. In recent years, she has been especially interested in needle felting. Tammy is inspired by a love of the natural world and of relevance to this exhibition and presented artwork, it is noted that she is an expert on the Tasmanian Thylacine. Tammy co-authored the 2017 book Tasmanian Tiger: Precious Little Remains and curated an ongoing exhibition about the history of Thylacines at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.

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Jen Ireland is an emerging Australian artist working in digital illustration and symbolic visual storytelling. Her practice explores themes of identity, emotional resilience, and transformation, often drawing on personal experience to create work that feels both intimate and universal. Through the use of contrast—light and dark, fragility and strength—Jen’s work reflects the complexities of navigating hardship while holding onto hope.

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Emily Jeffrey is a Launceston based visual artist who comes from a long line of creatives ranging from a conjuror, a sculptor, a rapper, writers and illustrators, she naturally grew up with a passion for the arts.

Taking inspiration from simple yet complex moments, she asks how do we define ourselves, how do we express ourselves. What does it mean to ‘be’ when we are alone, and what are we saying, when we choose not to speak.

From scribbles, to charcoal, oils or acrylics, often focusing on portraiture. She relentlessly repeats, hearing is not listening, looking is not seeing, and it is time that we all practiced the difference.

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Knight is a lesbian artist resident in Northwest Tasmania. Her early life was marked by an aversion to the then South African regime. Since migrating to Australia as a teenager, she has treasured the freedom and opportunity afforded her here.

Knight’s lifelong interest in art and music has, at times necessarily been subservient to her professional life in public policy and law. Now making art dominates her life.

When Knight moved to Tasmania in 2022, she established a reputation as an abstract painter. After experimenting with many techniques and mediums, she now favours processes of intuitive painting and optical mixing of vibrant paint colours, in acrylic and mixed media. Her art works explore identity, sexuality, migration, urban life, and outsider art.

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I am a Launceston-based emerging visual artist, working primarily in watercolour paint and organic material on paper. My main areas of interest lay in the subject of the organic environment, the human interaction with this natural world, and the impact and effect it has on the individual’s mental health and state of well-being. For myself, I find it important to explore this distinctiveness of character; I aim to investigate the influence and bearing this relationship with the world around me has on my state of mind, health, wellness and wellbeing. When I focus on this interaction with my natural surrounds, I am able to examine how my mental health is impacted upon, my sense of identity, and the growing state of interconnectedness between the environment in which I live, and my own internal world.

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Tasmanian born Catherine Phillips is an artist and art teacher who has completed Masters degrees in fine art and teaching. Her art practice includes oil painting and more recently, ceramic sculpture. She has been a finalist in several local art prizes, has exhibited artwork at a range of galleries in Tasmania and interstate and has work in local commercial and private collections.

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I work with Nature to create worlds full of beautiful, hybrid, abject monstrosities that seduce, beguile and disturb. I am fascinated by myths that demonise 'different' and work in distorted realities, photographing under-represented native forests and swamps using a cubist lens, and then combine multi-perspective photographic compositions with sound, voice and resonance motion design to create immersive, embodied, experiences to celebrate diverse worldviews. These audio visual artworks challenge dominant colonial screen myths which cast the Australian landscape as horrific villain and crime scene to be conquered. My Queer cinematic cubist artworks are lived-experience, multi-sensory experiments which suspend disbelief, incite awe, inspire change and empower Nature.

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Carmelo Salvo has been supportive of LGBTIQA+ exhibitions including securing a venue in 2024 for a previous display. As a retired nurse / midwife, Carmelo connects with and cares about people. Artistic hobbies include painting and hand sculpting.

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Zara Sully lives and works near the banks of the Kanamaluka in Lutruwita (Launceston, Tasmania), and spent much of their life on the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri lands of the Kulin Nation. They are first and foremost an artist, and also work as a curator, arts worker, and researcher.

As an artist and curator, Sully’s current practice engages with the pertinence and fluidity of language, drawing on intersectional feminist theory to explore the decentralisation of queerness through performative practice.

Zara is a graduate of Fine Art (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts and Monash University, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. Sully is the Director of Sawtooth ARI.

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Jay Sykes is a 30-year-old multidisciplinary creative and ex-academic based in Blackmans Bay, just south of nipaluna/Hobart. Much of their output is based on their academic thesis (the Nolan Gallery in Salamanca currently displays a number of their biochemistry-inspired abstract paintings), but Jay also frequently makes art about their non-binary and queer identity.

They have exhibited multiple times with the Queer Artists Collective and Artfully Queer. A particular favourite of theirs (and some judges!) is their 2022 work Promising Young Cryptid, a deeply personal exploration of their childhood via old photos and acrylic paint. For Celebrating Identity, they aim to broaden their conceptual scope and honour the rainbow flag.

Jay also writes short fiction and poetry, and has had a number of pieces published in literary journals (as well as their own zines).

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I choose to exhibit under the pseudonym Hope Town to hold space for my art practice. This name embodies my commitment to positively shaping our local communities. I have exhibited my work since 2001, primarily in group shows, in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and across Northern Tasmania. I hold a Diploma of Photography from TAFE Qld and a Master of Creative Media from RMIT.

My highlights include second prize in national Ilford B&W print competition; being invited to join a start up gallery’s stable of artists; my second solo show being reviewed in The Age weekend newspaper; helping to curate and a group art exhibition that was the first public LGBTIQA+ Pride event in the Waratah-Wynyard local council area and being invited to contribute a body of work to a group exhibition at the Devonport Regional Gallery.

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Tasmanian artist situated in Launceston in lutruwita/Tasmania.  I create in a variety of mediums but do favour 2D formats and explore the themes of everyday life as viewed through my Neuro diverse and Queer point of view.  My practice is organic and evolves through the process as I engage emotionally and physically with each piece, giving insight into how I navigate the world around me.

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Stacey Wing is based in the North West of lutruwita/Tasmania. She enjoys sharing her poems at spoken word events across the beautiful island. Stacey has exhibited her poetry and paintings in past exhibitions.

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Sylvie began her creative journey as a classically trained musician, studying violin, then viola throughout her Secondary School years. Whilst she enjoyed immense success with her music, studying at Melbourne University Conservatorium and playing in many orchestras and string groups, Sylvie had a stroke at 18 years old which abruptly ended this musical journey.

After moving to Launceston in 2005, Sylvie began to explore her visual art practice, by studying at the Academy of the Arts, Inveresk. In 2014 Sylvie began mentoring other artists living with disability at Interweave Arts Association, which fostered her connection with both professional and entry level artists. Sylvie has practised art full time since 2015 and continues to contribute and engage with the creative community of Launceston through Interweave Arts, and by sharing her work on social media and her website sylviewylieart.com.au. Sylvie has an enthusiastic following on Instagram with over 100K followers with whom she has developed strong creative relations.