New Voices at CBD Gallery

Solomiya Sywak

In a moment where the art world is increasingly asking how to hold space for emerging voices, New Voices at CBD Gallery offers a compelling answer. This group exhibition brings together seven recent graduates from the National Art School whose works—spanning painting, drawing, and ceramics—navigate the layered terrain of memory, identity, and materiality.

The glow from the illuminated window spills onto Erskine Street, casting a soft spotlight on Marina Kawabe’s Banzai Girls (1 and 2). These ceramic figures quietly command attention, basking in the light as they gaze blankly outward. Not even a metre tall, they draw on anime stylings to intentionally infantilise the female form, offering a sharp critique of the global fetishisation and commodification of East Asian aesthetics. With warped proportions, exaggerated legs, and lace-trimmed stockings beneath tiny skirts, the Banzai Girls stand coquettishly, hands clasped, their faces stripped of identity - reduced to cultural tropes. Kawabe’s work sets the tone for the exhibition’s broader engagement with perception and materiality, transforming playfulness into pointed commentary.

Overlooking this scene is The Agony and the Ecstasy, one of Brooke Marchel’s painted book pages. Part of a broader series continuing along the gallery wall, these works repurpose vintage books as both surface and subject. Marchel overlays filmic stills, such as from Crimson Peak (2015) onto printed text, allowing image and language to bleed into one another. From the darkened void of the page, she conjures a luminous depth with oil paint, only for it to be drawn back into the spine, as if swallowed by the object’s own history. The intimate scale invites viewers to lean in, to peer closely into these cinematic-collaged relics - an evocative reanimation of the discarded.

The gallery’s white walls reinforce the feel of a classic white cube, interrupted by bursts of colour and textured materiality from artists like Imogen Eve Rowe and Quanzhu Ma, whose works function as visual magnets.

Rowe’s large-scale watercolours on Yupo paper bleed and roll in saturated pigments across the synthetic surface. Depicting suburban front gardens in Sydney’s Inner West, her works evoke a sense of intimacy and familiarity, gently tracing themes of community, belonging, and identity. Painted while seated directly on the paper, Rowe’s physical engagement lends a raw immediacy and quiet devotion to these quasi-archival scenes. Alongside them, her sculptural works Babydolls offer a delicate extension of this practice: cherubic forms rendered in pastel watercolours and mounted on aluminium, their surfaces shimmering like holograms, soft yellows glowing as if touched by sunlight filtering through leaves.

In contrast, Quanzhu Ma’s works embrace elemental chaos. Rooted in the traditional Chinese philosophy of the five elements—wood, fire, earth, metal, and water—Ma’s series is a process-driven exploration of transformation. Described by the artist as “an exploration of process-driven drawing grounded in the philosophy” of these elements, the works feel like controlled detonations: explosions of pigment tracing the movement of the hand through time and matter. Coffee and tea stains spill across the paper, mingling with ash, burn marks, and voids that seem to erode the surface from within. Titled Chaotic Harmony, the series embraces the alchemy of impermanence, allowing each material to react and shift freely - mirroring the balance between spontaneity and structure that underpins the work.

Where Ma courts entropy, Libby Moore turns toward balance. Her meticulously composed paintings of glassware and ceramics, rendered on birch panels, explore domestic stillness with a graphic sensibility. In Tell Me What You Think, glossy candy dishes and ceramic vessels teeter in orchestrated precarity, their soft pastel tones and flattened perspective giving them an almost cartoonish charm. While the objects may seem mundane, Moore reframes them as vessels for human connection - each curve echoing the individuality of a face, each highlight charged with warmth. Through these domestic motifs, she crafts quiet portraits of care and maternal tenderness. 

This visual and emotional dialogue continues in the works of India Swinton and Zi Xin (Sylvia), two artists positioned at opposite ends of a spectrum, yet whose explorations of colour and form converge in a dreamlike harmony.

Swinton’s convex paintings blur the boundary between surface and space, with small droplets of pigment seeming to reach beyond the picture plane. More than formal exercises, her works push the conceptual limits of the canvas, venturing into realms of expanded consciousness. Through vivid, painterly washes, Swinton intuitively maps energy and aura in colour, generating sensory fields that resonate with the viewer. Composed of duplicated squares and rectangles, each painting radiates a distinct mood, grey and blue clouds of ink, pastel mustards, swirling pinks, the internal glow of each palette evoking a different emotional frequency. It’s as if Swinton is stirring these vibrations through colour, offering an emotional cartography guided by feeling.

Xin’s ceramic vessels echo this energy. Their soft, cloud-like forms continue the exploration of shape and sensation, bridging painting and sculpture. Pastel puffs of paint decorate their rounded surfaces, while organic drips of glaze melt down the sides, swirling at the base or pooling gently at the openings. Rich in colour and delicately sculpted, Xin’s series speaks to transformation and transience. “To hold space for the present, for the living, and what remains,” she writes - her vessels acting as meditative anchors, evoking presence, hope, and the quiet power of human connection.

I found myself most drawn to this conversation between the two artists, which continued upstairs, where the gallery became a luminous retreat. Bathed in natural light, this section offered a gentle exhale: a dreamlike exploration of warm pastels, spiritual resonance, and forms in flux. Here, the show’s themes crystallised, not through explanation, but through sensation - holding space for what’s felt as much as what’s seen.

New Voices at CBD Gallery offers more than a showcase of emerging talent - it presents a thoughtful meditation on the ways material, memory, and identity can be reimagined through artistic practice. Across ceramics, painting, and drawing, each artist brings a distinct voice while remaining in dialogue with one another, creating a rich and resonant collective vision. As the works ripple between critique, contemplation, and care, the exhibition reminds us that new voices don’t emerge in isolation - they echo, harmonise, and shape the spaces we share.