Meet the emerging artists featured in Primavera 2026

By Daniel Herborn

ABC Arts

Topic:Visual Art

Linda Sok's Deities in Temples XXI is one of the artworks on display as a part of Primavera 2026. (Suppled: Jessica Maurer)

Who decides what is remembered? What happens to the objects and stories consigned to history's rubbish bin? Can we ever truly understand or recapture the past?

These are some of the questions the artists showcased in this year's Primavera exhibition, which features Australian artists aged 35 or younger, are wrestling with.

Exhibition curator Antares Wells travelled to dozens of studios and galleries in every state and territory to find the most compelling emerging artists, finding many were interested in working with archives, or records of the past.

"When you visit that many artists, five different exhibitions could come out of that," she tells ABC Arts.

"But I identified a preoccupation with what I've called traces; an interest in the relics of the past, picking them up and making something new with them.

"I think it's an eternal theme, but what [the artists in Primavera] are doing with it is distinctive."

Now in it's 34th year, dozens of Australian artists have been highlighted by Primavera. (Supplied: Jessica Maurer)

The eight artists featured this year in Primavera approach the theme from different angles, but there's a through-line of the idea of value; why we discard or overlook things.

Wells says it's an exhibition for the head and the heart.

"It's not a cold, big, bad archive — there's a human heart beating in all of these works, even the ones that seem very sleek and detached," she says.

"I hope [visitors] take away a sense of the intellectual and aesthetic vitality of work in this country, the sheer range and diversity of that work, but also the richness of human stories around us."

Murder at sea and suppressed queer history

Callum McGrath's work, History Piece, examines a queer love triangle which ended in the stabbing murder of 19-year-old stoker John "Jack" Joseph Riley on naval ship HMAS Australia II in 1942. The incident sparked complex and often opaque legal proceedings.

The Naarm/Melbourne based artist has often explored queer history in his work, though this thread of the story was initially suppressed by the authorities dealing with the murder.

"The homosexual element really comes out of a confession that the victim made to the surgeon while he was being treated for stab wounds before he died," McGrath says.

"That [confession] letter was left out of the court proceedings, so that bit was a bit difficult, but I found a copy of it in the archives eventually," McGrath says.

"The fact that the letter was left out of the court hearings on the boat, I think, speaks volumes."

Callum McGrath's History Piece delves into a love story with a grisly ending. (Supplied: Callum McGrath)

McGrath recasts the story as a complex intersection of queer history, power and politics. His multimedia often uses overlapping layers of images and text to produce a work that resists easy interpretation.

"It's accumulative and exhaustive," McGrath says of History Piece.

"Rather than having something concise, the idea was to present the evidence as this accumulation of stuff."

McGrath's magpie approach includes a series of line drawings he did of the key people involved in the case. He created images from original photos using digital software, etched them onto glass with a computer-driven cutting tool and in-filled the etching marks with ink.

McGrath says he liked the allusive properties of creating portraits on glass.

"In my mind, glass is a visual storage device. The [portraits] are meant to be physical objects of history containing data and information. It's a way of engraving history on these objects that could be reused."

Weaving history and family connection together

In Linda Sok's Deities in Temples XXI, a sacred art form almost extinguished by the Khmer Rouge regime is both revived and reinvented.

When the regime seized power in 1975, they set about destroying religious or pre-revolutionary artefacts, including pidans, a traditional form of Cambodian silk weaving that people usually hung from the ceiling of a temple.

Linda Sok delves into her family history via screen printing. (Supplied: Eloise Cato)

Often, the only record of the lost pidans was archival cards stored in the National Museum of Cambodia.

Sok, now based in the USA, found re-creating these lost treasures helped her reconnect her with her family and Cambodian heritage. She shared the archival card descriptions with her family, who then drew what they thought each lost pidan looked like.

"I'd moved to the US and was feeling far away from them," she says.

"I had to overcome their hesitancy, but when they began doing the drawings and sketches, they became more open to it."

Rather than using the intricate traditional weaving technique, which can take years to learn, let alone master, Sok devised her own method.

She would pull a group of threads tight, screen-print the images her family had created onto the threads, and then add painted elements.

"Screen-printing was my way of paying homage to the practice without actually replicating it, and putting my own spin on it as well," she says.

Re-creating the pidans led Sok to reflect on how our record of the past is always fragmented and imperfect.

One of the images her family created featured a tree front and centre despite the official record of that pidan, created by French archivists, not mentioning any trees.

"When I went back to Cambodia, I noticed how prevalent the imagery [of trees] was throughout Buddhist iconography, so it was interesting that [my family] chose to reintroduce it," she says.

"Maybe the archivists had thought the tree wasn't important to include, so it got left out.

"There's no way of telling what exactly the truth of the matter is, but it's an interesting question that I've been thinking about a lot."

Meteorites and 'meteorwrongs'

Sometimes, a member of the public believes they've found a meteorite, an exotic item that has travelled to Earth from outer space.

Then they send the item to their local science museum, only to be told it's just a regular rock or a lump of industrial debris.

These items are sometimes called "meteorwrongs", and they're the focus of Meteorite Enquiries, a gently funny and melancholy work by Boorloo/Perth-based artist Jack Wansbrough.

"They're essentially waste, but there's still all this life and personality in them," Wansbrough says of the objects.

Jack Wansbrough's collection of ‘meteorwrongs’. (Supplied: Jessica Maurer)

Working from an archive cataloguing a museum's correspondence on "meteorwrongs", Wansbrough sought to re-create (or find) substitute objects for each oddity and give these rejected items their moment in the sun.

He then displayed the objects on a low floor bed alongside the archive's yellowing letters and beneath a pair of stained-glass fixtures he made.

Wansbrough spent about six months making and sourcing the objects, combing crystal shops, industrial estates, roadsides and even the car park of a university geology department to find what he was after.

Monica Rani Rudhar's embellished gold earrings are more than just accessories — they are cultural markers connecting her to family.

"Sometimes, I was looking at photos and a piece I literally found on the ground was almost a perfect match. That was really exciting," Wansbrough says.

"But sometimes, the descriptions are extremely brief, which can make it harder but also easier, in a way. Some letters would just say 'A rock that's been carved', so that gave me an interpretive freedom to carve anything I want."

While the rocks and debris Wansbrough's installation re-creates may not be of scientific interest, each has its own idiosyncratic human story.

"With my work, I'm often pointing away from myself, towards an archive or something external. I find it's an interesting way to work in that you're always looking at this thing in front of you, but also imagining this thing that you can't see."

Primavera 2026: Young Australian Artists runs until September 28 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney.

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