Laura Jones
Laura Jones is an Australian artist whose painting and printmaking practice explores the interconnected relationship between human experience and the natural environment, with a sustained focus on ecological vulnerability, care, and emotional resilience. Her work is characterised by an openness of form and surface, using deliberate looseness and visual ambiguity to reflect environmental fragility and uncertainty. Through this approach, Jones positions the natural world as an intimate and affective presence rather than a distant subject.
A defining aspect of Jones’ practice is the parallel treatment of landscape and domestic interior. By bringing together depictions of vulnerable ecosystems and private, lived spaces, her work foregrounds the close relationship between environmental and human precarity. This emphasis on emotional proximity resists idealised representations of nature, instead grounding ecological concern in everyday experience and attentiveness.
Jones’ engagement with environmental crisis and renewal is evident across a number of key exhibitions spanning her practice. These include Bleached at Olsen Gallery (2017), The Garden at Manly Art Gallery and Museum (2020) developed in response to the Black Summer bushfires, Arcadia at Glasshouse Regional Gallery (2020), and Music for Trees at Sophie Gannon Gallery (2022). Other significant exhibitions include Light and Life at Tweed Regional Gallery (2023) and Tender at Ngununggula (2025), which extended her practice through more intimate and human-centred themes, while remaining grounded in a sustained attentiveness to vulnerability, care, and lived experience.
Jones currently lives in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney and holds a Bachelor of Arts (Japanese and Art History) from Sydney University and a Master of Art (Printmaking) from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. She has exhibited widely since 2011 and undertaken residencies in ecologically significant locations including Lizard Island and Heron Island Research Stations on the Great Barrier Reef, Antarctica, and most recently Gang Gang Residency on Yuin Country in Cuttagee, NSW.
In 2024, Jones won the Archibald Prize with a portrait of author Tim Winton. She has previously been selected as a finalist in the Sulman Prize (2024), the Archibald Prize (2023, 2022, 2019) and Wynne Prize (2021), and won the People’s Choice Award at the Paddington Art Prize (2021). In 2023 she was awarded the Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence at Tweed Regional Gallery. Her work has been acquired for the Artbank Collection, Tweed Regional Gallery, national and international private collections, and she currently serves on the board of the Bundanon Trust.
Image credit: Maggie Shapter
Nila Rezaei
Nila Rezaei is an Iranian-Australian designer, educator, and leader whose practice explores design as a catalyst for social and environmental transformation. As Co-Founder and Design Director of RK Collective, a female-led studio pioneering circular design, material storytelling and co-design, her work bridges sustainability, cultural identity, and design activism.
Best known for Crafted Liberation, a globally acclaimed project transforming discarded Iranian head scarves into stadium seating as a symbol of empowerment, Nila’s work has been exhibited internationally at the IKEA Museum (Sweden), Dutch Design Week, Berlin Design Week, the Australian Design Centre, and ICAD Jakarta, and recognised with major honours including the Seoul Design Award (Top 10 Best of the Best) and multiple Good Design Australia awards.
Alongside her socially engaged practice, Nila’s career spans a decade of product design and innovation, leading projects across consumer products, mobility, public infrastructure, and environmental design and material innovation for global brands and start-ups alike. Her multidisciplinary approach brings together a collaborative design practice with commercial realities, creating design solutions that are both impactful and enduring.
With a background that bridges commercial design and critical practice, Nila is deeply committed to mentoring emerging designers, creating platforms for dialogue, and advocating for equity in design leadership. She serves as Chair of the Design Institute of Australia’s NSW Council, Good Design Australia Ambassador, is Co-Founder of Industrial Design Xchange Sydney (IDX SYD), and teaches at UNSW Art & Design in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs.
Passionate about sharing knowledge and nurturing future generations, Nila regularly speaks at national and international forums on sustainability, material innovation, and social design, inspiring others to see design as a powerful agent of cultural and systemic change.
Image Credit: Debbie Gallulo, UNO Studio