Helen Brancastisano, View from Aloft #2, 2025. Image courtesy of the Artist.
Helen Brancatisano, Miriam Cullen, Trish Yates
Gallery 1B
Opening Thursday 16 April, 2026, 6-8pm
Friday 17 April - Sunday 10 May
This exhibition of works on paper will showcase three very different artistic responses to time spent alongside the changing moods of the coastal landscape on the NSW Central Coast over the course of two years.
Keenly aware of what they were seeing, hearing, touching and smelling on site, the three began with preparatory ink, charcoal and watercolour drawings, returning to their own studios to develop their ideas into completed works including linocuts, Mokuhanga, monotypes and ink drawings, as well as artist books and paper sculptures.
Helen Brancatisano
Working on the Central Coast Helen was drawn to the vastness of the rocky coastline and the sounds of the ocean birds. Helen views birds as transcending our own limitations. While we stand at the centre of things earth bound, birds traverse vast coastlines and waterways. She was reminded that they are the messengers who signal the changes in our waterways and coastlines foretelling the consequences of our actions.
Miriam Cullen
So many changes experienced over half a century of living on this part of the Australian coast. Miriam retraced her memory map of significant places and events, reducing these to their simplest forms, where detail has gone but the feelings remain.
We strive to leave our footprints on the landscape and build our sandcastle dreams. The erosion of time and tide steadily sweeps aside our traces and only the ocean remains.
Trish Yates
Trish’s body of work for this exhibition has revolved around the beauty and moods of the ocean and its edges, water patterns, the sand, rockpools, rock formations and tessellated rock platform. Not replicating nature but rather seeking its essence.
Being connected to this precious eco system reminds us that a healthy ocean sustains all life, animal, plant and human. Protecting this life support is vital for the future.
About the Artists
Helen Brancatisano
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.
Miriam Cullen
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.
Trish Yates
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”