CBD Gallery proudly presents the 3rd year of New Voices, an exhibition showcasing six emerging 2025 graduate artists from the National Art School, who push the boundaries of contemporary art-making through painting and printmaking.
As part of CBD Gallery’s ongoing commitment to emerging artists, New Voices offers a platform for fresh perspectives, fostering dialogue between contemporary practice and broader cultural narratives.
Fergus Berney-Gibson
Fergus Berney-Gibson is an artist and writer. He is interested in how the narrative of the hero’s journey can be used to cross-examine the relationships between gender and power. This enquiry is pursued through printing, casting, and photography, repeatedly returning to the processes of transference, degradation, and reconstruction. He has completed his Master of Fine Art, specialising in Printmaking. Previous education includes a BFA in Printmaking (NAS, 2020) and a Graduate Certificate in Art Curation (USYD, 2022).
Mary Benvenuto
Mary Benvenuto is a multidisciplinary artist based on Gadigal land in Sydney. She works intuitively with her materials, primarily paint, drawing media, and fabric, to express emotion, spirituality, and the human condition. After graduating with a Diploma of Visual Arts at Meadowbank TAFE (2022), Mary completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in painting, at the National Art School, Sydney (2025). Through painting and drawing, she has developed a body of work focused on her investigation into the sensory and psychological dimensions of the sleep experience, drawing on themes of recurring dreams, complex emotions and memories. Mary's work has been featured in several group shows in Sydney and is held in private collections in Australia and Norway. She has been a finalist in the Hornsby Art Prize, the Hunters Hill Art Prize, and the 9x5 Waverley Landscape Prize.
Lei Feng
Lei Feng is a Chinese-Australian artist living and working on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia. Working across painting, drawing, and installation, her practice explores the poetics of chance, materiality, and embodied experience through a contemporary dialogue between Abstract Expressionism and Chinese calligraphic influences. Drawing on her two-decade career in actuarial science, Lei’s work examines the tension between systems of control and unpredictability through process-driven experimentation with gesture, material, and chance. Lei holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) from the National Art School (2025) and was a finalist in the 2026 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize and Kedumba Drawing Award
Daniel He Wang
Daniel He Wang is a Sydney-based painter, mural artist, and tattoo artist whose practice explores cultural identity, mythology, and the dialogue between tradition and contemporary life. Combining academic realism with popular culture, internet imagery, and symbolism, his works examine themes of memory, power, vulnerability, and the increasingly blurred relationship between the natural and digital worlds.Trained in the Soviet-influenced Chinese academic tradition from an early age, Wang later continued his studies in China under established realist painters, developing a strong foundation in anatomy, tonal structure, and observational drawing. This rigorous classical training continues to underpin his multidisciplinary practice.
Working across painting, murals, and tattooing, Wang brings the same technical precision and commitment to storytelling to every medium. In 2025, he was featured on ABC’s Portrait Artist of the Year, where his self-portrait was broadcast nationally. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from the National Art School, Sydney.
India Jablonski
India Jablonski graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from NAS. Her practice explores the underlying geometry of the landscape, conveyed through a hybridised representational-abstract composition.
“This series focuses on coastal landscapes that convey a binary of architectonic forms and organic shapes. I integrate elements of water sports such as swimming and surfing into the compositions, following my way of navigating the landscape. Through this, I’m constantly responding to dynamic weather systems or geographical changes mirrored in the blurring of linear pictorial space. Representational inserts situated within an abstract composition allows me to ground intuitive mark-making in its physicality. Derived by nature's own visual dynamism, I use this unification to push my own understanding of the world around me through a strong awareness of critical spatial, material and colour relationships.”
Fiona Verity
Fiona Verity is a British-born, Australian artist based on Sydney's Northern Beaches, of the Garigal people. She explores diverse materials in her evolving art, mainly drawing, print, and painting, often blending these to create autobiographical narratives. Her work aims to politicise women's stories and express her feelings about people, places, and objects through observation, investigation, and emotion. Her images, drawn from memory and tactile interactions, shift between abstraction and improvisation, showcasing soulful, expressive mark-making. Personal yet expansive, bold yet thoughtful, her art invites reflection. Experimenting with various tools and materials, including charcoal, ink, paint, and now sewing and thread, she uses slow, tactile processes to think, feel, and connect, stitching fragments of time into layered works that evoke place, sensation, and memory.
Verity also co-founded the acclaimed arts podcast Art W**k, which has featured conversations with hundreds of artists and creative practitioners since 2021.
