The annual 15 Artists prize at Redcliffe Art Gallery brings together Queensland’s most promising early‑ to mid‑career creators. Curator Hannah Williamson notes that this year’s cohort wrestles with technology, AI and questions of identity, offering a vivid snapshot of contemporary practice in the state.

Savannah Jarvis’s diptych, Two patients try to explain nociplastic pain to one another, forms part of her Conversations between Patients series. The work invites prolonged contemplation, its layered textures and embedded text turning an invisible, subjective experience of chronic pain into a visual feast.

Sally Molloy’s monumental canvas, Feral Fantasy (Unravelling on the Interstitial Plain), confronts the uneasy ties between Australian landscape painting, colonial history and climate upheaval. Its sheer scale and tangled motifs force the viewer to navigate multiple narratives that hover over the land.

In Garden Room, John A Robinson constructs a seemingly tranquil space made of twenty‑five individual boards that mimic a pixelated screen. The oil painting’s delicate surface masks subtle disruptions, suggesting that peace in a chaotic world is always provisional.

Adrian Charles Smith’s The Banig and Par Four (Sakla), after The Card Players draws on Cézanne’s quiet figure studies while referencing a Filipino card game played at wakes. The abstract surface gradually reveals human silhouettes, a meditation on chance and the forces that shape our lives.

Karen Stephens’s series Looking for the pink opal channels her family’s opal‑mining heritage in western Queensland. Her instinctive “picture mirrors” capture the elusive sparkle of opal in sweeping colour fields, turning remote landscapes into sites of hidden discovery.

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