Craft Victoria’s annual Fresh! exhibition is now on view, showcasing the work of eight recent graduates in contemporary craft and design. At the exhibition opening on 5 March, five prizes were awarded, including the InteriorsAu Emerging Maker Prize.
Established in 1993, the program celebrates emerging Victorian practitioners working across textiles, ceramics, glass, metal and other mediums. Each year, a panel selects graduates whose work culminates in an exhibition at Craft Victoria’s Melbourne gallery.
Awards were announced at the official opening, including the InteriorsAu Emerging Maker Prize, which was awarded to Madelyn McKenzie. The annual prize recognises outstanding emerging talent and the recipient receives a profile published on architectureau.com.
This year’s exhibition features eight graduates:
Madelyn McKenzie is an emerging artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, working primarily across ceramics, sculpture, and installation. Her practice explores the relationship between materiality, memory, and embodied experience, using clay as a responsive and intuitive medium through which personal and sensory knowledge can be accessed and transformed. She recently completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at RMIT University while also participating in Craft Victoria’s Fresh! Fellowship Program in 2025.
Camille Ferguson is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist creating installations in stained-glass and printmaking, blending traditional craft with contemporary thought. Their sculptures avoid and subvert the control instituted by traditional forms and processing of materials, and act as a means to explore queerness and bodily politics. For the artist, glass and printmaking are important mediums to explore embedded histories and become a way to push against traditional use in a desire to queer both space and material.
Meg Kelso is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist whose practice is a reciprocal dialogue between contemplation and material storytelling. Working across print-making, photography, painting, and sculpture, she employs a methodology that prioritises chance and repetition. This approach mirrors the fugitive and fallible nature of human memory and the volatile, contingent essence of geological forces – both of which are subjects of research in her current work.
Siobhan Murphy is an artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, whose work examines the intersection of craft, decorative arts and fine arts. Combining her inherited passion in textiles with metalwork, Siobhan uses traditional techniques such as knitting and hairwork to examine the similarities between these opposing mediums, as well as cultural ideas held around their respective crafts.
Flynn Parker-Greer is a Naarm/Melbourne-based emerging artist whose practice is grounded in craft and expressed through the language of jewellery and objects. Their practice is aesthetically influenced by the sharp lines, geometry, and repetition found in architecture and design, and explore construction, precision, and spatial interplay through industrial fabrication, traditional jewellery techniques, and computer-aided design.
Emma Salmon is an artist and costume designer of Nyikina and Celtic descent living and working on Wurundjeri land. Her work tells stories of ancestry, family, and community and is expressed through abstracted, intuitive, and memory-based processes guided by honesty and sustainability. Through her practice, she seeks catharsis and truth telling, challenging prescribed ‘Australian’ identities, settler-Indigenous relations and mystifications of Indigeneity. Emma was the costume designer for Three Blak Ravers (The Motherless Collective, YIRRAMBOI 2025), scenic artist for Soul of Possum (Brodie Murray, 2025) and The Whisper (Brodie Murray, 2024) and set and costume maker and designer for Poems of a Transsexual Nature (Quak Theatre, Deadly Fringe 2025).
Erica Wells is a textile artist based in Naarm (Melbourne) who repurposes discarded objects and textiles into three-dimensional works. Her practice incorporates traditional craft techniques including weaving, sewing, knitting, crochet and embroidery, bringing renewed life to unwanted materials. Erica’s practice is concerned with the effects of climate change, loss of biodiversity, and the influence textile practice has to inform and educate within contemporary fine art.
Lou Wheeler is a Naarm/Melbourne based emerging metalwork artist with a special interest in ancient and traditional craft practices. Lou was trained by their father in traditional ironwork and is a third-generation gold/silver/blacksmith with extensive experience in machining, toolmaking and engraving. Lou’s practice prioritises fundamental yet demanding techniques such as hand-engraving and forging as a means of exploring skill and craft within their broad body of work.
Fresh 2026 is on show at Craft Victoria until 28 March.
