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Project8 Gallery

Project8 is a contemporary art space in Melbourne dedicated to speculative poetic and material innovation.

07/09/2026

A first look at ‘Ineffable’, a curated group exhibition at Project8.

In ‘Kuala Jagad (Confluence of Realms)’, 2025, Karina Utomo experiments with the sonic frequencies of a worker bee’s wingbeat, the human voice and the gong, bringing these sounds together to consider the intersection of sound, spirituality and the unseen realm.

‘Ineffable’ opens Friday 18 September, 6–8pm.
On view 19 September–24 October.

Image: Karina Utomo, ‘Kuala Jagad (Confluence of Realms)’, 2025. Commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art. Installation view, ‘Knowing Otherwise’, Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne, 2026. Photography: Christian Capurro.

04/09/2026

Final day to see 'Impractical Companions' at Project8, closing at 5pm ✨

Thank you to everyone who visited 'Impractical Companions' and spent time with the works.

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Images:

1. Installation view with works by John R Neeson and Ravi Avasti.
2. Aldo Bilotta, 'Delage D8 Bonnets', 2026.
3. Installation view with works by Aldo Bilotta, Ravi Avasti and Aleks Danko.

Photography: Lucy Foster.

03/09/2026

'The Hidden Screen, Laplae (ลับแล)' and 'Three Worlds 7' bring together different strands of Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s practice, moving between Thailand and Australia, the visible and the hidden.

Drawing on the 14th-century Thai cosmological text 'Traibhumikatha', 'Three Worlds 7' layers text with motifs of Australian trees, architecture and figures, reflecting on the experience of inhabiting two home countries. 'The Hidden Screen, Laplae (ลับแล)' considers how memory and history can become divided, obscured or hidden from view, opening a space between past and present, the seen and unseen.

Final days to see these works in 'Impractical Companions', on view at Project8 until 5 September.

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Image: Phaptawan Suwannakudt, 'The Hidden Screen, Laplae (ลับแล)', 2026, acrylic on canvas, 210 × 75 cm; 'Three Worlds 7', 2009, acrylic on canvas, 135 × 60 cm.
Photography: Lucy Foster.

02/09/2026

JOHN R NEESON

Across his 'Renditions' paintings, John R Neeson compresses still life into a narrow, shelf-like stage. Domestic objects and geometric forms occupy an extremely shallow pictorial space, while the surrounding field is painted to match the wall, allowing the picture plane to almost dissolve.

Mirroring and duplication remain central. Forms repeat across the paintings’ vertical axes, shifting between colour and monochrome, object and reflection. Rooted in Neeson’s history with minimalist abstraction, the works offer a deliberately reductive take on still life, where painted objects appear to edge out of illusion and into the space of the viewer.

Part of 'Impractical Companions', on view at Project8 until 5 September.

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Left to right: John R Neeson, 'Glass half', 2025–2026; 'Snookered', 2024–2026; 'Inheritance', 2024–2026; 'Piece of sky', 2025–2026; 'Bay', 2025–2026.

All oil on canvas.

Photography: Lucy Foster

01/09/2026

Last week to see 'Impractical Companions' at Project8, including Natalie Thomas’s 'Puppy' 🐚

Wednesday–Saturday, 11am–5pm.
Closing 5 September.

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NATALIE THOMAS
'Puppy', 2013
Shells and adhesive on fibreglass
85 × 45 × 77 cm

Photography: Lucy Foster.

28/08/2026

SUZIE IDIENS

Suzie Idiens turns the support materials of the studio into the work itself. Blue tape, bubble wrap, cardboard and raw canvas — usually used for packing, protection, mock-ups and drafting — are brought from the periphery of her practice into view.

Across four works, a single form is repeated in different materials. Three are wall-mounted; another rests on the floor, clinging partly to the wall as though it has slipped from the final hang. Together they form a motley crew: insecure and slightly awkward, resisting the sense that the form should resolve into something useful.

The forms may be impractical, yet the materials themselves remain essential support structures for Idiens’ practice.

Part of 'Impractical Companions', on view at Project8 until 5 September.

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Left to right: Suzie Idiens, 'Structure (Blue Tape)', 'Structure (Blue Tape & Bubble Wrap)', 'Structure (Canvas)' and 'Structure (Cardboard)', all 2026.

Photography: Lucy Foster.

26/08/2026

RAVI AVASTI
'Bolgolam's Articles', 2026
Cedar
215 × 145 × 210 cm

At once absurd and vulnerable, 'Bolgolam's Articles' sits awkwardly beneath the gallery’s lowered ceiling, its monumental scale heightened by the surrounding architecture as a reminder of the burdens of duty and the acts of care through which they are borne.

The work extends Ravi Avasti’s ongoing 'Human Acts' series, which explores the friction between what is real and what is accurate. Beginning with isometric drawings of chairs, Avasti translates these precise but spatially unreal representations into three dimensions, cutting and reforming the resulting structures.

For 'Bolgolam's Articles', Avasti departs from the intuitively altered forms of earlier works, presenting a single monumental chair derived from the elaborate swearing ritual imposed upon Gulliver before his release in 'Gulliver's Travels'. Through this translation, the work considers the complexity of obligation, duty and ritual, and the pleasure of serving.

Part of 'Impractical Companions', on view at Project8 until 5 September.

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Installation views of Ravi Avasti, 'Bolgolam's Articles', 2026.
Photography: Lucy Foster.

24/08/2026

PAUL DONALD
'Vanishing Angle' 2026
Mixed media installation including 4K video with sound, wood, rope
and sunscreen

In 'Vanishing Angle', Paul Donald turns to the mythologies through which masculinity and identity are constructed and performed. Drawing on colonial signifiers including the memorial obelisk and HMS 'Endeavour', Donald brings sculpture, performance and video together to examine what happens when the symbols used to negotiate identity prove incomplete, misrepresented or counterfeit.

His own body enters this unstable field through the language of “manly work”, while allowing for failure and abjection. In doing so, Donald unsettles inherited models of masculinity at a moment when their more dangerous forms appear newly aspirational.

Part of 'Impractical Companions', continuing this week at Project8.
Wednesday–Saturday, 11am–5pm.

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Installation views of Paul Donald, 'Vanishing Angle', 2026.
Photography: Lucy Foster.

21/08/2026

Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s works in 'Impractical Companions' trace a process of transferring, layering and reworking images across paper and pigment.

At left, 'The Process of making' (2013) is an archival work demonstrating Suwannakudt’s mural-making process, using drafting paper, ink and pigment to transfer images through a perforated linear design. Alongside it, 'The Hidden Screen, Laplae (ลับแล)' (2026), one of a series of 36 panels, continues this process through perforated paper and pigment.

Drawing on Suwannakudt’s early training in temple mural painting in Thailand, her practice uses masking, peeling, adding and erasing to create what she describes as “screens of memory, history, and imagination.”

'Impractical Companions'
On view until 5 September 2026
Wednesday–Saturday, 11am–5pm

Image: Phaptawan Suwannakudt, 'The Process of making' (2013) and 'The Hidden Screen, Laplae (ลับแล)' (2026), installation view, 'Impractical Companions', Project8, 2026. Photography: Lucy Foster.

19/08/2026

NATALIE THOMAS

Drawing on dystopian fiction and art-historical references, Natalie Thomas’s paintings revisit familiar narratives of authority, power and control. From 'Brave New World' to 'Fahrenheit 451', historical stories become a way of looking again at questions of autonomy and subjugation playing out today.

Thomas calls the recent works 'Science Non-Fiction', collapsing the distance between imagined worlds and contemporary life.

Part of 'Impractical Companions', continuing this week at Project8.
Wednesday–Saturday, 11am–5pm.

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Installation view, left to right: Natalie Thomas, 'Day of the Triffids (after John Wyndham)', 2026; 'Animal Farm (after Joan Miro)', 2026; 'Clockwork Orange (Science Non-Fiction Series)', 2024; 'Brave New World (Science Non-Fiction Series)', 2024; 'Fahrenheit 451 (Science Non-Fiction Series)', 2024.

All acrylic on linen. Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery.
Photography: Lucy Foster

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Level 2, 417 Collins Street
Melbourne, VIC
3000

Website

https://project8.gallery/

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