Gallery 2

Curator group exhibition - Interior/Exterior

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)

CURATOR STATEMENT

Tammy Honey

Interior / Exterior brings together a group of artists whose practices explore the shifting relationship between inner and outer worlds. Through painting and watercolour, the exhibition considers the spaces we inhabit both physically and psychologically and the subtle ways these realms overlap.

The works in this exhibition move between the intimate and the expansive, reflecting on themes of personal memory, emotional landscapes, domestic space, architecture, and the natural environment. Interiors may suggest solitude, reflection, and the private self, while exteriors open outward to public space, landscape, and collective experience. Yet the boundary between the two is rarely fixed; it is porous, constantly negotiated, and shaped by perception and experience.

Together, these artists examine how internal states can be projected onto the external world, and how the environments around us influence our sense of identity, belonging, and place. Windows, thresholds, bodies, landscapes, and constructed spaces become sites of transition — moments where interior and exterior meet.

By bringing these perspectives into dialogue, Interior / Exterior invites viewers to consider where the inner world ends and the outer world begins, and how these spaces continually inform and reshape one another.

Artists:
Almay Jordaan
Lata Shetty
Nataliia Hudenko
Raphael Chambers
Shae Raelle
Vittoria Cugno

S. Raelle

Artist Statement

The theme Interior / Exterior serves as a foundational pillar for S. Raelle’s practice, reflecting the friction between the artist’s internal world and the external landscape. Raelle, a Melbourne-based painter and RMIT Fine Arts graduate, utilises obsessive introspection as a generative daily practice to navigate the psychological landscapes of lived experience. Her work seeks to extract a raw, deeply personal atmosphere, using the elemental landscape as a container to gain insight into the interior world of the figure.

Following the suicide of a close family friend, painting became a vital act of reflection and a form of salvation. For Raelle, grief carries a certain solidity into the everyday; her practice is built upon the baseline of coming to terms with the roles we play in others' lives and how we choose to carry ourselves forward. By navigating visual dualities such as light and dark, or salvation and damnation, she transforms intense emotions into a broader conversation about survivor’s guilt and the human experience.

Raelle’s process-led methodology involves a gestural, full-body application of paint, allowing for a sense of "control in surrender" where the medium itself guides the outcome. This physical act smelts lived experience into something that reaches beyond the self, suggesting that memory is not only internal, but something held by the world around us. Ultimately, the work explores a liminal space where the body and the earth are inseparable, suggesting that our personal histories are perpetually echoed and absorbed by the environment itself.

Artist Biography

S. Raelle is a Melbourne painter focused on utilising obsessive introspection as a generative daily practice, having recently graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT. Her work explores the philosophical and emotional connections between personal trauma and the elemental landscape, seeking the primal act of painting as a means to cosmic understanding. By navigating visual dualities such as light and dark or salvation and damnation, Raelle’s work transforms intense emotions into a conversation.

Following the suicide of a close family friend, painting has become a vital way of reflection and a practice that acts as a form of salvation. Here, memory creates an unreachable but persistent place that can only be feared or longed for. She aims to find control in surrender by allowing the application of paint to guide the outcome. Art has given Raelle a voice that reaches into the tales of history and smelts lived experience into something that reaches beyond the self.

Vittoria Cugno

Artist Statement

Vittoria Cugno specialises in figurative and representational oil paintings. Her snapshot-based paintings depict fleeting, candid and everyday interactions of human connection, expressing a sense of momentariness. Vittoria uses vivid colours and experimental painting techniques to express emotion and the sensations experienced in the captured moment, finding reverence for these brief moments amidst the chaotic noise of our capitalist world.

Artist Biography

Vittoria Cugno (b. 2001) is an emerging Italian-Australian artist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. In 2024, she completed a Bachelor of Art (Fine Art) (Honours) Degree at RMIT University, and has since appeared in many art prizes and group shows. Notably, she was a finalist in the 2024 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, partook in an artist residency at La Maison de Beaumont in Provincial France, exhibited in the Discover: Young Talent Platform at the Affordable Art Fair Melbourne in 2025, and most recently exhibited in Australian Galleries for their 2026 emerging artist group show titled “Prelude”. Vittoria continues to be inspired by the bright colours of contemporary life and honours these fleeting moments in her paintings.

Nataliia Hudenko 

Artist Statement

Nataliia Hudenko captures stillness and elegance in simple forms through oil painting, watercolour, and gouache. Working primarily in her home studio and outdoors, she explores the interplay of light, colour, and composition in everyday objects and domestic spaces. Her practice celebrates the understated beauty of ordinary moments, inviting viewers to pause and appreciate the quiet poetry found in the mundane.        

Artist Biography

Nataliia Hudenko is a Ukrainian-born oil painter based in Sydney, Australia, specialising in capturing stillness and elegance in simple forms. Working primarily with oil on canvas in her home studio, she explores the interplay of light, colour, and composition through intimate studies of everyday objects and domestic spaces. Her practice extends to plein air painting with gouache and watercolour, and she also works in the traditional Ukrainian folk painting style of Samchykivka, connecting her contemporary practice to her cultural heritage.

Born in Poltava, Ukraine, in 1983, Nataliia studied watercolour painting techniques under Australian artist Chan Dissanayake. She deepened her knowledge of painting techniques and composition with Ukrainian artist Inna Andrazhevskaya and studied the Ukrainian folk painting style Samchykivka under Ukrainian artist Olga Mashevska. Her formal art education includes Reshetylivka Art Lyceum (1999-2000) and Poltava Children's Art School (1997-1999).

Nataliia is a finalist in the 2025 Hornsby Art Prize and has exhibited extensively across New South Wales and Victoria, including "Colours of Freedom" (Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf, 2023) and "Love Letter to the Ocean" (CBD Gallery, Sydney, 2023). Beyond her studio practice, she teaches fine arts at Ukrainian community schools in Sydney and conducts art-based cognitive therapy sessions for senior citizens in aged care facilities.

Raphael Chambers

Artist Statement

Working across a range of mediums, Raphael’s practice centres on elevating small, intimate subjects so they appear monumental in presence. While this exhibition focuses on his watercolour works, his broader practice moves fluidly between materials and techniques. In these paintings, he blends organic forms with free-flowing expressionism, favouring mood, gesture and emotional resonance over strict illustration. Influences range from the expressive intensity of Egon Schiele to the enlarged natural forms of Georgia O'Keeffe, alongside elements of street art, botanical imagery, and East Asian ink and print traditions.

Artist Biography

Raphael Chambers was raised in Aotearoa, New Zealand and has lived in Melbourne for the past decade. A self-trained artist with a wide range of professions and interests, he has developed a distinctive visual language through continuous practice. Alongside producing his own body of work, he is an active participant in life drawing, watercolour painting, and lino printing, with many of his prints appearing in the streets of Melbourne.

Driven by a strong appetite for art and image-making, Chambers’ work explores sensual and organic qualities within his subject matter. Moving comfortably between mediums and approaches, his practice remains deliberately open—shaped by curiosity, experimentation, and a refusal to be confined to a single style or material.

Almay Jordaan

Artist Statement

Old postcards and historic place imagery enabled Almay’s work for this exhibition to reflect the Interior/Exterior theme by providing glimpses of memories, a sense of déja vu and yearning. The artist uses vivid colours which speak to her South African roots and hold a particular sense of personal nostalgia.

Lata Shetty

Artist Statement

In this series of floral paintings, Lata explores the fleeting beauty, vibrant colours and quiet stillness of flowers. Through restrained compositions and dark backgrounds, she creates a space where the subject can exist without distraction. Subtle shifts in light, form and colour are allowed to emerge slowly.

Artist Biography

Lata Shetty is a Fitzroy-based contemporary artist specialising in oil painting. Centred on the quiet beauty of everyday scenes, her work as a still life and landscape painter explores how light, colour, and composition can transform ordinary objects like fruit, vessels, or flowers or daily scenes into opportunities for contemplation. Her practice is rooted in observation and the act of slowing down to honour the materials that shape daily life.