Melbourne Art Fair 2025

Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert is thrilled to return to Melbourne Art Fair (MAF) in 2025.

Our presentation in booth C4 will feature two gallery artists, Prue Venables and Fernando Do Campo, who are master technicians in their respective mediums, making work that is both significant and glorious.

Venables creates refined, sculptural work made from one of the oldest mediums known to artists – clay, specifically for Venables, Limoges porcelain. Do Campo's artworks celebrate story-telling painting, holding within them true narratives that explore complex histories of migration. While each artist has continued to exhibit globally, MAF marks their first solo exhibition in Melbourne in over a decade.

For MAF 2025, Venables explores new ideas and processes, creating fine, sophisticated vessels that challenge our perspective on ceramics. The resulting works are magnificent, contemporary forms enhanced by the glazes Venables chooses for each piece or group.

Venables' work will be presented on specially curated plinths. Some high to experience the way the light catches and interacts with the glazed forms, creating lovely luminosity, and others low to allow you to look into the vessels and discover the complexity of each form – forms that, to most ceramists, defy possibility.

Do Campo presents a new series of paintings titled Lilac Hour, which focuses on his relationship to the presence of introduced flowering trees across temperate and subtropical Australia. Do Campo’s paintings are technically involved; every brushstroke and colour has a reason. His paintings have purposeful layers of unexpected patterns and refined relationships between colours, which brings a contemporary and fresh perspective to the greater Australian story.

"By gradually shifting perceptions as the original form vanishes, the vessel becomes a testament to the power of process to absorb exploration, enquiry and risk, culminating in something unflinchingly new."

– Loewe Foundation

"It is artworks like these that hold within them a true narrative, which celebrates story-telling painting that brings a contemporary and fresh perspective to the greater Australian story."

Fernando do Campo is interested in the species that he encounters wherever he is and the histories they carry. Do Campo’s art practice oscillates between thinking with archives and thinking in the field, searching for ways of narrating non-human histories critically as a human. Lilac Hour is a body of work developed by do Campo across NSW, Queensland and Tasmania, specifically for MAF 2025 and focuses on the histories and presence of introduced flowering trees across temperate and subtropical Australia.

Trees have the capacity to thrive and become at home in locations where they may not naturally occur, arriving by wind, animal carrier, or human hand. As humans, we are aware of many introduced species around us, but the age and wisdom of trees and the fact we often can’t place their origins because we’ve encountered them across multiple locations before means we construct a relationship with them in a slightly different way to introduced animals. At the same time, encountering a specific tree species can teleport us to another time and place.

The series of paintings that make up Lilac Hour were developed while do Campo was being teleported across the global south by trees, as he was setting up a new studio in Brisbane and encountering new species which were often introduced from his first home of Latin America. Do Campo is fascinated by the complexity of such an encounter – the possibility that acknowledging a tree as a critical companion species in the trajectory of one’s day, learning about this companion, has the capacity to reveal colonial and environmental contradictions, personal and poetic pasts, and hopeful multispecies futures. Do Campo enjoys sharing that he makes paintings that document painting itself. There is a material process and a compositional process evident in his works, viewers think through making, while also asking questions about their own species history.

"The work so artfully combines stillness and a sense of risk, of fragility."
– Gwyn Hanssen Pigott (1935 - 2013)

I have observed the evolution of Prue’s work over many years and enjoy the materiality and inventiveness and the construction of her vessel-based forms. They are deceptively simple. The design invention that is so characteristic of Prue’s work lies in the clever manipulation of form such as the oval base and oval rim set at right angles to each other. This shift makes it difficult to grasp the shape of the contained volume of space and adds tension to the form. There is an intriguing play of inside and outside shapes and spaces in the triangular pieces with flared rims that rotate the shape of the base. They are made from wheel thrown porcelain that is cut and re-assembled. The sleeve of clay cut from the base can be altered, moved around and re-attached. The high temperature firing gives the work gentle luminosity and smooth tactile glaze surfaces.

In this new work we can observe a playfulness with the formal elements and the relationship of parts: the shapes, volumes, colours, and the play of light and space. Ensembles of coloured porcelain vessels are created from repeated components and the arrangement creates movement and patterns. The juxtaposition of forms, colours and spaces is rhythmic and evocative, like musical notes they evoke a kind of visual soundscape. They are abstract and intimate sculptures. They suggest possibilities that can help enliven functional work a bit like the high fashion haute couture catwalk in the fashion and textile industry stimulates the clothing designers. There are interesting associations with innovative design in furniture and architecture like Mark Newson’s aluminium lounge or Frank Gehry’s titanium clad buildings or contemporary music like Philip Glass’s evocative sounds. There is no way of explaining what resonates with us, beauty is a mystery, but Prue’s work is stimulating and unique, and adds vitality to the realm of expressive ceramic art.

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Melbourne Art Fair 2025

SOLO PRESENTATIONS BY PRUE VENABLES AND FERNANDO DO CAMPO

Prue Venables: FAIR HIGHLIGHT

Fernando do Campo: Fair Highlight

ABOUT THE ARTISTS AND THEIR MAF25 SOLO PRESENTATIONS

Fernando do Campo

Exhibition Essay

PRUE VENABLES

Exhibition Essay

Watch Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft – Australian Design Centre, 2019

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Melbourne Art Fair 2025

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