Nettie Coleman and Melissa Nickols, Things that do stuff (detail), 2026. Image courtesy of the artists
Things [that do] Stuff
Nettie Coleman and Melissa Nickols
Gallery 2
Opening Saturday 21 November, 2026, 6-8pm
Sunday 22 November - Sunday 13 December 2026
Things [that do] Stuff is a multimedia collection of works by Nettie Coleman and Melissa Nickols that explores things that do stuff, and stuff that does things. Across interactive video, printed forms, and folded sculpture, the exhibition presents objects and images that refuse to stay still, shift, or hold the possibility of more than one form.
Nettie Coleman works across moving image, code, print and installation to create visual systems through light, interaction and time. Melissa Nickols works with tools, digital fabrication and process to create print and sculptural works that move between pattern, print and sculpture.
The works are constantly evolving and shifting, videos rearrange as you walk by, works on paper spring up in 3d forms, as ideas echo around the space. Digital systems spill into physical materials, materials interrupt the logic of the systems, giving room for both to behave in unexpected ways as part of the same messy, collaborative process. The result is playful and tactile, with works that move, respond and extend beyond themselves.
Nettie Coleman and Melissa Nickols are the recipients of the 2026 Emerging Artist Support Scheme Residency at M16 Artspace generously supported by the Tall Foundation.
Learn more about the artists:
Nettie Coleman
Nettie Coleman is a multidisciplinary artist based on Ngunnawal land. Through immersive multimedia installations and printmaking, she explores the intersection between digital and ethereal worlds. Her work renders the invisible infrastructures of the digital age tangible, finding a sense of the sublime within its complexity.
Multi is the best word for her practice, she never stops evolving and growing her many mediums and is constantly on a side-quest of a side-quest. Generally, the ideas come first and the knowledge follows, and she is a firm believer in the fact you can learn literally anything with enough curiosity, determination, and youtube tutorials. Midway through last year (2025) she picked up creative visual coding and has been down that rabbit hole since, but still maintains her deep love for printmaking. Binaries and halftones blend as she weaves between these physical and digital material worlds.
Nettie completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts and Bachelor of Arts (International Relations/Anthropology) at ANU in Canberra. Recently, she was awarded residencies at Megalo Print Studio, M16 Artspace, and ANU Makerspace, and exhibitions at Basil Sellers, M16, and Belco Arts. She has produced work for events such as Gold Dust Festival, HeatStroke, Chroma, Remnants Festival, and Moonlighting.
Melissa Nickols
Melissa Nickols is an interdisciplinary artist whose ecosystem-based practice explores experimentation, material relationships, and inventive approaches to making. Working across sculpture, installation, digital fabrication, biological processes, and traditional craft, she creates environments where ideas develop through sustained dialogue with materials.
By combining contemporary technologies with historical craft traditions, she develops hybrid processes and custom tools that allow materials to respond, transform, and participate in the making process. Her work embraces iteration, curiosity, and emergence, inviting viewers to consider how form, knowledge, and storytelling can grow through collaboration between human and material systems.
Melissa lives and works on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people.