Gallery 3
KALEIDOSCOPE: A Million Forms of You
Raph James
2 - 13 September 2026
please note last day of exhibition ends on 13 September at 3pm
Opening night
4 September | 6 - 8 pm
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday: 10 am – 5 pm
ARTIST STATEMENT
Raph James creates abstract paintings shaped by line, colour, and small moments of feeling. Based in Naarm (Melbourne), her work holds fragments of personal experience — quiet pauses, bursts of emotion, and things that resist easy language. Deliberate and restrained in form, yet deeply personal in meaning, her paintings invite viewers to slow down, look closely, and engage on an emotional level.
James’ New Zealand Polynesian heritage and her lived experience as a trans woman shape how she moves through the world and naturally inform her practice. These paintings carry layered narratives of belonging, identity, and the ongoing process of becoming. For James, abstraction is not about concealment but about creating space for honesty — a way to express what exists between certainty and change.
Her practice is rooted in evolution. A single element within a work — a line, a colour relationship, a rhythm — often carries forward into another painting, and then another. Ideas are revisited, reshaped, and extended over time, with each piece carrying traces of the one before it while opening new directions. In the studio, she works slowly and with intention, drawing from the intersections where the past meets the present, where memory sits beside movement, and where emotion becomes something visible and traceable on the canvas.
Her hope is that these works not only speak from her experience, but also offer viewers a moment to breathe, to recognise themselves, and to encounter the quiet power of transformation—a reflection of the many shifting facets that make up Kaleidoscope: A million forms of you.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Raph James is a contemporary abstract artist based in Naarm (Melbourne). Working primarily with acrylic and oil on canvas, she is known for a practice defined by precise linework, bold yet balanced colour relationships, and a strong sense of spatial rhythm. Mathematics, grids, and geometric systems form the underlying structure of her work, providing a framework through which intuition and emotion are expressed.
James’ practice is informed by her New Zealand Polynesian heritage and her lived experience as a trans woman, shaping an ongoing exploration of identity, connection, and transformation. Her process is iterative, with visual elements carried from one work into the next, allowing ideas to evolve across series rather than exist in isolation.
Having maintained an artistic practice alongside various careers over the past two decades, James committed to her practice full time in 2021, driven by a newfound clarity of purpose and focus.