Artist Talk | Helen Brancatisano and Miriam Cullen

Helen Brancastisano, View from Aloft #2, 2025. Image courtesy of the Artist.

What: Artist Talk with Shorelines artists Helen Brancatisano and Miriam Cullen
When: Sunday 3 May, 2026, 2 - 3pm
Where: M16 Artspace Foyer, 21 Blaxland Crescent, Griffith
Cost: Free

Walk and Talk with the Artists of Shorelines

Take a walk through M16’s exhibition, Shorelines, with Helen Brancatisano and Miriam Cullen, two of the exhibiting artists. They will talk about how the three artists spend time in the landscape, their individual ways of seeing and working translating into the variety of works in the exhibition.  Works include monotypes, artist books, 3D paper works and ink drawings. They will discuss the works and answer questions about their inspiration, methods and materials.

About the Artists

Helen Brancatisano is a Sydney artist whose work springs from observing the way people navigate their lives through their unique circumstances of place and time. Drawing on historical, literary and personal narratives she explores these themes through drawing, painting and monotype printmaking. The freedom and unpredictability of the monotype is often the springboard for other ideas and guides her processes. 
She is also keenly aware of how birds enter our consciousness and lead us to consider the broader world around us. 
Spending time on the Central Coast of NSW, the rocky shorelines and the sounds of birdlife drew her once more to consider our connection to their world. This reflection forms the basis of her work for the group exhibition Shorelines, consisting of monotypes and ink drawings. 
As well as her five solo exhibitions, Helen has been a finalist in numerous art prizes, including the Lethbridge Small Works Prize, Gallipoli Art Prize, the Blake Prize Director’s Cut, the North Sydney Art Prize, Gosford Art Prize, the KAAF Art Prize and the Waverley Art Prize. She has won several prizes in drawing and printmaking. 

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Miriam Cullen is a linocut printmaker and watercolour painter, interested in the ways we shape our identity over time. Her hand-coloured linocut prints, watercolour paintings, painted relief blocks and three-dimensional paper sculptures examine the ways we are changed by contact with the natural world and our significant relationships. These interactions inform and transform how we see ourselves. 
She teaches literacy, visual arts and gardening to adults and enjoys playing with language and with the plant and animal life around her. Her paintings and prints are held in galleries and private collections in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. 
As a coast dweller, Miriam does much of her art-thinking while swimming. Building a body of work for the "Shorelines" exhibition has enabled her to reflect on what she loves about the sea and sky. In these works, Miriam has moved away from her customary detailed linocuts and used simplified shapes to capture the pared back coastal space and to revisit snippets from childhood beach holidays in vivid colour. 

Exhibition

Printmaking Demonstration | Mokuhanga with Trish Yates

Trish Yates. Image courtesy of the Artist.

What: Introduction to Japanese woodblock printing
When: Saturday 2 May, 2026, 2 - 3pm
Where: M16 Artspace Foyer, 21 Blaxland Crescent, Griffith
Cost: Free

Mokuhanga Demonstration with Trish Yates

Join exhibiting artist, Trish Yates, in discussing the origins of Japanese Woodblock Printmaking and showing examples of Mokuhanga prints. She will bring along wood blocks, tools, special brushes and barens. Trish will explain the registration method, the papers, pigments, and tools used in creating Mokuhanga prints. She will demonstrate the printing technique using water based colours on Japanese paper.

About the Artist

Trish Yates is a Sydney-based printmaker. Her background is Visual Arts teaching but since retiring she has become a full- time artist/printmaker. She has done additional studies at Meadowbank TAFE, The Stables Studio, Galston, Santa Fe, New Mexico USA and at MI-Lab, Kawaguchiko, Japan.
Themes that have always interested her come from the natural environment. Proximity to Sydney bushland, travels in Australia and more recently excursions to the Central Coast, NSW have greatly influenced her work and have enhanced an innate affinity she has with the natural wonders of our unique landscape. 
Trish has been using Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock technique) for 15 years to express her ideas but she also enjoys working and experimenting with Monotypes, Collagraph, Intaglio and other Relief techniques. In 2018 she won a 5-week residency in Japan to further her knowledge of Mokuhanga printmaking techniques. 
The process of researching with drawings, paintings and photographs completed on site on the Central coast has provided a springboard for artworks completed later in her studio. These works on paper will form part of the group exhibition “Shorelines” 

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Exhibition

Painting Demonstration | Patrick Hromas

Patrick Hromas. Image courtesy of the artist.

What: Demonstration | Introduction to Grisaille: A Contemporary Approach
When: Saturday 28 March 2026, 1:00 - 2:00pm
Where: Gallery 3, M16 Artspace, 21 Blaxland Crescent, Griffith
Cost: Free

Introduction to Grisaille: A Contemporary Approach

Join artist Patrick Hromas for a short oil painting demonstration. In this session, the artist will demonstrate a timeless oil painting technique that allows for almost limitless adjustments as the painting develops. The demonstration explores a a technique used by Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael: grisaille, but with a twist! 

About the Artist:

Patrick Hromas has recently exhibited in three group exhibitions in England and participated in Arte Laguna World, Italy. His multidisciplinary practice spans oil painting and works on paper, drawing on theatre, cinema, and the landscapes of the Blue Mountains, NSW as key conceptual foundations.

At the age of sixteen, Hromas performed in an ad hoc production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a park in Turramurra in 1989. This formative experience shaped his enduring engagement with theatricality and performance. In 2003, he produced a drawing of Neil from Dead Poets Society, the first work in what became the Film Still Series.

Influenced by Henri Matisse and Édouard Manet in motif and composition, and by Toulouse Lautrec and Edgar Degas stylistically, Hromas combines historical reference with contemporary imagery. His recurring interest in archetypal characters and his commitment to resolving complex compositions underpin a practice that bridges landscape, history, and staged narrative.

Exhibition

Poetry Workshop | Brenda Goggs

Brenda Goggs, Medieval is not old, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.

What: Poetry Workshop with Brenda Goggs
When: Saturday 7 March 2026, 2:00 - 3:00pm
Where: Gallery 2, M16 Artspace, 21 Blaxland Crescent, Griffith
Cost: Free

Writing the landscape: Seeing is believing

In a short writing workshop participants will have the opportunity to write poetry or short prose inspired by pieces in the exhibition, Holding up the Sky. The artist will be on hand to lead, challenge and encourage would-be writers.

About the Artist:

Brenda Goggs has a foot in two worlds as a practising Visual Artist and former teacher of English. Exhibiting woven tapestry over the past 25 years, she has focused on Australian identity and the landscape as an ‘object’ in an imperial ‘cabinet of curiosities’ and during this time has witnessed a national shift towards a search for understanding of our colonial past and our culpability in a quest for ownership.

She is excited by connections between things, where art and literature, words and pictures collide and where everyday moments reveal the sublime, just for a moment. She insists that the world continues to be a place of wonder, even in the suburbs, and even when things go wrong. These ambiguities provided the inspiration for her first published poetry collection Cracks in the Path, (Ginninderra Press, 2025), about living in the national capital surrounded by the public monuments which frame suburban life.

As a visual artist, Brenda has interrogated literature and interpreted work by Gerald Murnane, Patrick White and David Malouf, and collaborated with poets Geoff Page and Alan Gould.

Exhibition

Floor Talk | Kerry Shepherdson

Kerry Shepherdson, Things and Thoughts, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.

What: Floor Talk with Kerry Shepherdson
When: Saturday 7 February 2026, 1:00 - 2:00pm
Where: Gallery 2, M16 Artspace, 21 Blaxland Crescent, Griffith
Cost: Free

Join artist Kerry Shepherdson for a floor talk that looks at the everyday objects we collect and live with, and the memories and experiences they carry. Through her still life paintings, Shepherdson slows things down, focusing on familiar spaces and the quiet details often overlooked in daily life. Her work plays with colour, pattern, and texture, using fluid paint and expressive brushwork rather than light and shadow. Influenced by her formative training in Chinese Brush painting and her years living overseas, Shepherdson’s practice invites audiences to pause, reflect, and see the beauty and meaning in ordinary things.