Queer Group Exhibition

Feeling First

28 Jan - 8 Feb 2026

Opening night

30 January | 6 - 8pm

G2 and G3

Curator Statement | Feeling First

Feeling First is a celebration of the queer community, coinciding with the Midsumma Festival 2026. This beautiful and dynamic exhibition brings together seven artists across Galleries 2 and 3. Through connection and beyonding, it highlights the ways queer lives are shaped by sensing what feels true.

Featuring Bonnie-Jean Whitlock, Simon Welsh, Liam Folie, Bella Insch, JD Mitchell, Raph James, and Richard McCoy. Together, these artists create an exhibition that honours feelings as connection, and shared experience.

Simon Welsh

Artist Statement

Simon Welsh is a mixed media collage artist based in Sydney. Working primarily in the figurative genre, Welsh explores the endless transformative possibilities collage can create with the human body. His works are playful, camp and provocative and he sees the body has a canvas with which you can share and build a new narrative on to tell queer stories and lived experiences.

In Feeling First the works appear faceless or voiceless and are delicately sewn together – to create campy visceral motifs. The bodies are vulnerable but defiant, strong in one's sexuality and congress but delicately held together, capturing that under all the bravado and machismo sit delicate queer bodies wanting love and affection and to be seen.

For Feeling First, Welsh uses vintage queer erotica, ikebana, human anatomy, The Masters and pop culture elements, which he then playfully hand sews patterns, movements and storylines onto the body. Playing with anonymity and the incognito, Welsh creates new narratives through a queer lens. Often allowing the embroidery to guide him, binding and retelling new stories. Welsh often free forms the shapes and lets the embroidery guide the formations through texture and tightness, a give and take balance to create new narratives.

Artist Biography

Simon Welsh is a Sydney based queer collage artist, graphic designer and librarian. He has been practising collage for 7 years exploring the unlimited potential of the figurative genre. In this short time Welsh has continued to develop his practice and incorporates mixed media into his collage. A member of the Sydney collage society, Welsh champions the art of collage has a contemporary artform. He plays with shape, movement, gender and sexuality, influenced by the Masters, queer erotica, sculpture and the Renaissance, he reinterprets traditional mediums through a modern queer lens. 

Welsh’s work has been seen across Australia and Internationally. A previous finalist in the Midsumma Art prize 2022, the Sunshine Coast National Art prize and The Wollongong Art prize in 2025, as well as the Nillumbik, Wyndham Prizes in Victoria, he has made a mark in his practice and continues to push the art of collage. 

JD Mitchell

Artist Statement

JD Mitchell (they/them) re-claims landscape artworks sourced from op shops and breathes new light into them through their signature use of collage to create ironic juxtaposition. In Feeling First, JD explores themes of queer ecology and challenges the notion that queer identities are some passing fad by integrating the larger than life drag personas of local Melbourne performers into a variety of natural landscape settings. Thereby illustrating that queerness is a natural phenomenon in human society and the animal kingdom.

Artist Biography

JD Mitchell (they/them) is a mixed media collage artist, poet and Art Therapist from Naarm. Their surrealist works continue the rich tradition of collage as a distinctly political medium by exploring the personal nature of lived political realities for marginalised communities. 

JD’s art is shaped by their passion for sustainability, felt kinship with discarded items and their ever-present dance between hope and cynicism. JD celebrates juxtaposition, utilising inherited representations of external eco-systems to carve out space for the complexity of their inner world, resulting in mutually playful and tender scenes. 

Liam Folie

Artist Statement

Liam Folie explores the hymenophore, the spore-bearing structure of fungi, as a catalyst for examining queer ecology and non-binary existence. Their practice involves a physical process of mushroom foraging and cultivation combined with macro-photography and digital experimentation, transforming the fungi's unique architecture into luminous, philosophical maps. By highlighting this vital, understudied kingdom, Folie advocates for the citizen scientist and celebrates the beauty found in life that resists simple classification.

Artist Biography

Liam Folie is a visual artist and photographer based in Mackay, QLD, whose practice acts as a catalyst for the unseen, dedicated to illuminating the philosophical and ecological depths of the fungal kingdom through a powerful fusion of technology, science, and queer philosophy. Folie centres their inquiry on the hymenophore, the spore-bearing structure of the mushroom, interpreting its fundamental refusal of the plant/animal binary as a potent metaphor for the fluidity and resilience of queer identity.

Their layered process begins with hands-on engagement, involving active foraging in the tropical Australian regions and meticulous mushroom cultivation, establishing an intimate relationship with the ephemeral subject. This organic geometry is then translated using intense macro-photography and sophisticated digital darkroom experimentation, resulting in luminous, visceral forms that function as philosophical maps reflecting psychological depths. By focusing on Australia's critically understudied fungi (where an estimated 90% remains undescribed), Folie seeks to bring essential visibility to this vital kingdom, advocating for the role of the citizen scientist and celebrating the non-conforming architecture of life.

Bella Insch

Artist statement

Bella’s ceramic installations and sculptures draw on themes of longing, nostalgia, queer joy and a deeply personal fantasy-scape that embodies botanical whimsy and a maximalist aesthetic. She is concerned with themes of interpersonal attachment within reimagined depictions of iconography and symbolism that include a camp feminine perspective. 

Artist Biography

Bella Insch is an emerging visual artist, working primarily in ceramic sculpture. Bella grew up on Yuin Country and currently lives and works in Naarm {Melbourne}. Bella was recently a finalist in both the Muswellbrook and National Emerging Art Prizes. She holds a Graduate Diploma and Master of Art Therapy as well as a bachelor’s degree in visual arts (Majoring in sculpture and drawing). Bella is proudly a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. Her sculptural work mostly explores the complexity of interpersonal intimacies, religious iconography, queerness and personal narratives of loss and belonging. Bella's work is exhibited and held in private collections nationally and internationally.

Raph James

Artist Statement

Raph James is a Naarm (Melbourne)–based artist working with line and colour to create linear abstract paintings that hold small, intimate moments of lived experience, inviting viewers to slow down and engage emotionally. Shaped by her New Zealand Polynesian heritage and her lived experience as a trans woman, her work explores themes of belonging, identity, grief, and becoming, using abstraction as a space for honesty rather than concealment. Her practice is evolutionary and intentional, allowing elements to move from one work to the next so each painting carries traces of what came before while opening new possibilities for transformation.

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 her linear abstraction practice, characterised 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.

James maintained an artistic practice sporadically over the past two decades while working full time across various industries. In 2021, she committed to her practice full time, finding both the courage and clarity of purpose to focus entirely on her work as an artist.

Bonnie-Jean Whitlock

Artist Statement

Centring analogue process and material relationships, Bonnie-Jean Whitlock’s surreal, often large-scale paintings incorporate beading, staining, and wax resist techniques. Through autobiography, her work explores ideas around morality, subjectivity and the queer perspective.

Artist Biography

Born in rural South Australia (1992) and raised in far East Gippsland, Bonnie currently lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, in 2023 she completed a Master of Fine Art at RMIT and was awarded the Lowenstein’s Arts Management Prize. She received an honourable mention at Brunswick Street Gallery’s 2026 small works prize and is currently shortlisted in the 2026 Midsumma Art Prize. She has held solo exhibitions in commercial and artist run galleries throughout Melbourne and rural Victoria, participated in numerous group exhibitions, and has work held in Federation University’s permanent collection and private collections locally and internationally.

Her work bears trace of life off grid in isolated parts of Australia, referencing the bushland, the landscape and inherited habits of collecting, repurposing, and DIY. Working in a sustained state of experimentation, she treats the surface more like a textile than a painting: Folding, beading, dying, and utilising wax and salt to create unique patterns in the pigment that guide her compositions.  Glass beads, wax, salt, flax, oil and pigment all speak to a type of alchemy. 

For Bonnie, painting is deeply rooted in analogue process. In the age of flawlessness and oversaturation, she heralds the tactile and a bodily relationship to constructing artworks; treating them as vessels that carry ideas through from autobiography into conversations around morality and belief systems, subjectivity, and queer perspectives.

Richard McCoy

Artist Statement

This new series continues my interest in how historical artistic subjects and materials can be interpreted with digital technology. Here queer desire circulates as data and fantasy, bodies coded for consumption, disciplined and rewarded for excess while erasing tenderness. Virtual flesh collapsing intimacy into spectacle, queer sex as a game of visibility and dominance, a fever dream of rejection.

Artist Biography

Melbourne based artist Richard McCoy thinks of his work as snapshots or inventories of fragmented lives. Often kitsch, with a consistent use of computer technology, his work explores the interrelationships between change, time, reality and identity. He works across fashion, print design, photography and digital art with the aim of suggesting alternatives to how we see the past, reality, and the transformative power of art. After exhibiting his 3D printed master’s artworks at London’s Tate Britain in 2013, his work continues to use new technology.

Contact
Phone : (03) 9482 3550
mail@redgallery.com.au

Address
157 St Georges Rd
Fitzroy North, Victoria, 3068
Map

How to get here
Tram: Route 11
Stop 21 just north of Edinburgh Gardens

Melway Ref: 30B12
Parking in nearby streets

Bus: 504 (Reid Street)