Amanda Alderson, Making, 2024. Photo by Brad Coleman.

Led by curiosity and shaped by lived experience, Creating Space reveals how making art can become an act of survival, defiance, and self-care.

Step into a space where making holds pain, power, and possibility – where healing isn’t a metaphor, it’s a method. Grounded in the belief that creativity is essential to living, artmaking becomes a practical way to navigate pain, assert agency, and reclaim control.

For the artists of the SICK AF Collective, healing is not a separate outcome; it is embodied within the act of creation. Spanning textiles, photography, writing, jewellery, and installation, the exhibition gathers works born of necessity.

Notes, repetitions, and fragments sit alongside finished pieces, extending each work beyond its final form and into the conditions that produced it. Here, constraints are negotiated and adaptations are embraced as vital components of the creative language. Across these works, individual voices emerge through personal systems of meaning and repair.

Creating Space invites viewers to reflect, respond, and expand upon their own creative practices – in studios, at home, in the gallery, or in the quiet moments between.

participating artists

Amanda Alderson, Nadeen Brown, Claire B. Bushby, Brad Coleman, Lucinda Crimson, Catherine Higham, Shayne O’Donnell, Annamaria Weldon.