Gallery 3

Cocoon - group exhibition

22 April - 3 May 2026

Opening night

24 April | 6 - 8 pm

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday: 10 am – 5 pm (please note last day of exhibition ends at 3pm)

GROUP STATEMENT

Cocoon brings together five emerging artists, whose painting and sculptural practices reflect on themes of isolation, preservation and transformation. The works explore how withdrawal, whether physical, metaphorical or digital can generate renewal. A ritual not borne of external pressure, but a necessary stage of becoming.

The cocoon is neither the beginning nor the end, but a threshold suspended in time. It exists in a state of unresolved potential, a paradox. Within frail shrouds tension builds between safety and suffocation, solitude and isolation, preservation and metamorphosis. What is left behind is a fragile yet enduring record of an invisible process, that archives the beauty of impermanence, growth and decay. 

Cocoon invites viewers to pause in that suspended moment and to reflect on their own thresholds of change, offering a space to imagine what might emerge when we allow ourselves to linger in the in-between.

Artists:
Ellen Jury, Maddie Smith, Jasmine Skutela, Julia De Vere and Georgia Robinson

Ellen Jury

Artist Statement

Ellen Jury’s work offers a reflective exploration of the everyday spaces we inhabit, combining mundane with the surreal to reveal the uncanny that exists within the ordinary. Working from photographs taken in moments of stillness, Jury’s work utilizes banal places that elicit feelings of familiarity as well as an eerie nothingness to depict inescapable feelings of loneliness that are triggered by the emptiness of her surroundings. These works explore the simultaneous beauty and existential dread that accompanies everyday life.

Artist Biography

As a Melbourne based artist practicing painting, Ellen Jury’s work and her environment are very closely related. Her connection with the places she grew up in and the experiences and memories associated proved Jury with the genesis of her work. Having studied painting at the Victorian College of the Arts, completing a Bachelor of Visual Art in 2025, Jury has continued her artistic practice, working from a studio space in Coburg. Since concluding her studies her work has been shown in numerous group shows across Melbourne. Over the last year her practice has evolved to involve large scale paintings inspired by uniquely Australian architecture and the emotional resonance of these spaces. 

Jasmine Skutela

Artist Statement

Skutela’s work explores the tension between the illusion of control - and the anxiety she experiences in crowds. Her limited colour pallet and distorting abstraction of figures captures the surge of the crowd and the small glimmers of detail that often flash by whilst passing someone. Her larger scale works create a portal into crowds she has walked through and invites the viewer to similarly pass through and join the surge of the crowd.

Artist Biography

Jasmine Skutela is an oil painter from Naarm, Melbourne Australia. Having travelled as a child she became aware of how different crowds ebb and flow around her. Having graduated from the Victoria College of the Arts in 2025 she now focuses her paintings on both international and local movements of people she has walked through. She invites viewers to stand still whilst engaging with her paintings and feel the pulse of all of the people they see, trying to ascertain a glimpse of who each person is and what their life is like around them. Having signed with Jacob Hoerner Galleries she now has work in private collections around Australia.

Julia De Vere

Artist Statement

Julia De Vere’s practice offers a visualisation of a conscious simulation. She depicts hallmarks from the digital imaginary in the tradition of oil on wood to confront the antithetical timelessness and transience of cyberspace. De Vere’s incorporation of places and persons known to her in states of obfuscation proposes a conceptualisation of simulation theory at its various junctures of contrivance, continuance, and collapse.

Artist Biography

Julia De Vere obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts. She specialised in painting, moving through various concentrations in subject matter before settling on the internet and simulation theory as her muse. De Vere’s fascination with cyberspace began during pandemic era lockdowns in Melbourne, where she observed the internet as an almighty, intangible archive. The widespread social retreat to such an abstract plane during lockdowns resonated with De Vere’s experience living with a neuromuscular condition. Her visual studies of the internet thereby explore online immersion through her conception of physicality as a state necessitating escape or transcendence. De Vere has enjoyed involvement in several art programs throughout Melbourne, including participation in the Victorian Artists Society, Life Models' Society and practical artistic contributions to Australian charities. 

Maddie Smith

Artist Statement

Smith is dedicated to the portrayal of domestic rituals. Celebration of the everyday activities we undergo as supplementary milestones. Additionally, Smith’s medium is in textiles recontextualising the feminine crafting practises like sewing, cross stitch and embroidery into a fine arts context. 

Artist Biography

Concerned with all things preservation, Maddie Smith is a multi disciplinary artist based in Naarm (Melbourne). Smith was raised around art and prides herself in her textiles practise adapted via osmosis contemplating what behaviours and rituals are autonomic biological responses and what are trained adapted behaviours. Smith explores these concepts through a spiritual lens celebrating and amplifying the smallest of rituals like the act of bathing and sleeping through her ornate textiles practise. 

Georgia Robinson

Artist Statement

Georgia Robinson is an artist rooted in the diverse environments of West Gippsland. Growing up amid the threat of natural disasters, Robinson became attuned to how delicate and emotionally charged our plants and ecologies are. Using flowers as a powerful tool to relay personal reflections, Robinson aims to expand the image further than mere appreciation of forms.

Artist Biography

Born in Warragul, 2003, Georgia Robinson works both in her home studio in West Gippsland (Gunaikurnai) and across multiple sites through her mural practice. Robinson has undertaken a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne (Victorian College of the Arts), graduating in 2024. Throughout her degree, Robinson has been involved in various group projects and has exhibited at places such as Joseph Beuys Cafe, VCA Artspace, MDAP projects and student shows around Melbourne. Recently, Robinson has worked more closely to Gippsland - completing murals at local schools and exhibiting in gallery spaces.