Bush Art Gallery
This year the Strawberry Fields art gallery returns with a broad selection of exciting new artists from across Australia; drawing on the worlds of fine art, street art, pop culture, mysticism and surrealism.
DHUNGALA - The mirror has a ripple”
‘Dhungala’ in the Yorta Yorta language means ‘Big Water’, and refers to the Murray River.
In the bush, nothing is quite as it seems. The river mirrors our world back to us - but the image shimmers, bends and disappears.
This exhibition is an invitation to lean into distortion, embrace the uncanny and play with perception. It’s a sideways glance at the Australian landscape through water, mirror, memory and myth.
Aimee Vandersteen is a visual artist working with earthy textures and colour palettes to create organic harmony within spaces.
AIMEE ANDERSTEEN
Glen is an artist, muralist, illustrator and graphic designer working out of The Arts Hole studio in Melbourne’s south east. He has shown artwork in exhibitions around Australia and the world and has produced seven solo exhibitions of his own work that have exhibited in Melbourne, Brisbane and online. Glen's practice combines a reverence for the natural world with a fairly nihilistic view of the human one. He uses a free-form improvisational approach to composition, often paying homage to popular and historical culture, to synthesise a fantastical view of an apparently absurd world.
GLEN DOWNEY
Hera Wing is a Naarm-based multimedia artist whose work dissolves the boundaries between the organic and the unearthly. Utilizing a variety of sensorial stimuli, found objects and household refuse, she distils surreal imagery into immersive worlds that bend notions of utopia and dystopia.
Raised off-grid in the forests of northern New Zealand, Hera developed a deep affinity for biological structures and the rhythms of the natural world. This solitude nurtured an enduring curiosity for human psychology and the interplay between internal perception, external realities, and technological interference.
Her work frequently explores chimeric hybrids—human, animal, and plant forms tangled in dreamlike refractions of life and sentience. What first appears alien reveals its earthly origins upon closer inspection, reflecting the fluidity of nature and an ever-blurring line between the natural and the engineered.
HERA WING
Stephanie Cartledge is a Melbourne based multidisciplinary artist known for her large scale murals and canvas works. Her practice blends an instinct for scale, colour and storytelling with a deep connection to nature and place. Whether painting murals in regional towns or developing works on canvas in the studio, Stephanie’s work reflects a strong resonance with environment and community. Drawing on native flora and fauna, she explores our evolving relationship with the natural world through a distinctive visual language.
STEPHANIE CARTLEDGE
Ben is a visual explorer and restless creator. Inspired by dreams, nature, the ancient world, and the cosmic realms; his art is a blend of personal experience fused with subconscious flow.
BEN LOPEZ
HAART (b. 1995) Is a predominantly digital based artist from Melbourne, Australia. After studying Fine Arts at RMIT University, she left half way through her course as she realised that the wisdom she sought to discover was not something that could be found in books, but something she had to go out and experience for herself. Five years of travel later, countless experiences, as well as her own struggles with mental health is where she learned the lessons that she now uses to drive her art and life today.
Her creativity seeks to serve as a reminder of the part inside of ourselves that often gets lost in the reality we see and experience. That beneath the chaos of the world around us, as well as our own minds; there is an unspoken knowing that lives within us, and a love impenetrable by time.
For this collection in particular, she aims to address the tough topics of love as well as loss, and the power that two such transformational experiences can hold. The process of gaining our heart's desires, as well as losing them has the ability to push a person past themself - and in doing so, reveals a stillness inside, an understanding, and a hope that if we can find peace in a reality that is both terrible as well as beautiful. That's where we will find our own meaning, creativity, love - and the courage to move forward.
HAART
Jamsimosa, aka Simon James, is a visual artist from South West Australia inspired by the inner and outer mystery of nature. Weaving together ethereal patterns with the Australian landscape, his paintings and illustrations ground the visionary in the present surroundings and express the subtle spirit of the living land.
JAMSIMOSA
Tayla Broekman is a Melbourne based artist and muralist. She paints pop surreal female characters and animals, who often reflect her experiences through an emotional narrative.
Though her concepts are expressed fairly subconsciously, her work looks at connection to herself and others, spirituality, love and fear. Every character she paints, human or animal is an unconscious form of self portrait. Colour palette is also a key feature of each piece, either using bold contrast or soft tones and colours. Design elements like colour represent her mental state and values too, depicting a sense of harmony or strength.
As a studio artist, she primarily uses gouache and acrylic paint, while her murals are created with spray paint and house paint. Four years of working in sign writing has also informed her mural practice. She currently has a studio at Everfresh in Melbourne.
TAYLA BROEKMAN
Felix von Dallwitz is a painter whose work oscillates between analogue and digital mediums and modes of production. Appropriating the conventions of the medium, his work seeks to interrogate painting’s role and function in a contemporary digital age. Often working in collaboration with Artificial Intelligence, von Dallwitz explores the automation of aesthetics and the visual languages of neural networks. Images materializing, the distance between screen and canvas shortening.
FELIX VON DALLWITZ
Hayden Dewar is a Naarm based artist creating murals, illustrations and paintings. Hayden draws on formative influences of graffiti, surrealism, street art and comic books to form a narrative style that combines real world elements with imagined ones.
The result is a world of his own; a place inhabited by his signature “Solarquin” characters, where myth, machines, flora, fauna, history and the cycle of life collide, hinting at the wonder and weirdness of life’s journey.
HAYDEN DEWAR
Charlie was born in 1988 and grew up in the small rural community of Walcha located in the New England area in Northwestern NSW. Charlie received his Bachelor in graphic Design in 2011 from University of Canberra - Receiving the ‘Orphan’ award for Illustration.
Charlie’s inspiration comes from his love of pop culture and the evolution of technology he has witnessed throughout his childhood. He combines graphic imagery, typography and various symbols with bright yet restricted colour palettes.
He has been actively involved in the Australian street art scene having many public works on display both commercial and non commercial works. His public works include Skate parks, council funded murals, Supermarkets, Cafes, Hospitality venues and many more.
SILLY PEAR
Vero Coya (b.1994) is a french Canadian, multidisciplinary artist. Drawing inspiration from emotionality, plant relationships, animism, the human experience and psychedelia - her familiar imagery, earnest expression and storytelling invites the viewer to step into her comforting world.
VERO COYA
Strawberry Post
We're going postal—festival style! If you're feeling the urge to send a note to your mum, your best mate, or even that long-lost second cousin, swing by the Bush Art Gallery and grab a postcard.
This year’s collection features stunning photos taken over the years at Strawberry Fields, capturing the magic and memories of this special place. Each postcard comes with a postage stamp, making it easy to send a piece of the festival home. It's the perfect way to share the love and keep the festival spirit alive long after the weekend ends!