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. 

Follow the artist:
@nickolsnewwave
www.melissanickols-art.com

Olivia Gates

Olivia Gates, 2026. Image courtesy of Cassie Abraham.

Meet the artist

Olivia Gates is an artist working and living between Ngunawal / Ngambri Country (Canberra) and her hometown on Dharawal Country. Working primarily with glass, Gates’ work reflects spiralling internal dialogues around the contrasting impacts of her convict/settler lineage, both in generational connection to - and ongoing destructive colonial claims on place. She makes works that gently hold space for listening, with intention to open respectful dialogues of shared experience and revised histories. 

Gates graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) / Bachelor of Design from the Australian National University in 2021. She has exhibited both locally and internationally and has acquired prizes recognising her work such as the Boronia Prize for excellence in glass, the Corning Museum of Glass / Australian National University School of Art and Design Partner Scholarship, and the Nigel Thomson Travel Grant.

During her residency, Gates intends to build upon recent learnings in printmaking processes, and how they can be integrated into her glass tool making practice. She endeavours to create cast tools from reclaimed CRT TV screens,which vary in colour from dense purples to a light aquamarine, and if not claimed for creative reuse, will be crushed down and integrated into road base. A small number of glass artists in the ACT region utilise this material in their work, diverting waste while gaining access to a free, local, and environmentally conscious alternative to imported raw materials.  Through this residency, Gates hopes to connect more artists and communities to this abundant and underutilised material.

Olivia’s residency is possible in partnership with The Canberra Glassworks and Megalo Print Studio

Nettie Coleman

Nettie Coleman, 2026. Image courtesy of the artist.

Meet the artist

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. 

Nettie completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts and Bachelor of Arts (International Development) at ANU in Canberra. Recently, she was awarded residencies at Megalo Print Studio, M16 Artspace, and ANU Makerspace, and has upcoming exhibitions at Basil Sellers, M16, and Belco Arts.