Creative Industries Event

Guest speakers

Nicole Lawrence
Nicole Lawrence is a Melbourne based designer and maker whose research-led practice centres on furniture and lighting as formal inquiry. Underpinned by a belief in material agency, she meticulously calibrates metal, timber, textile, and glass, directing weight, grain and formal convention to resolve intent. Lawrence came to furniture and lighting through goldsmithing, and the inheritance is legible in all forms of making. In using fabrication as a process of research and testing, her work draws a considered timeline, allowing her work to be informed by craft histories but not bound by them.

Caelyn Norris
Caeylen Norris’ multidisciplinary practice engages with the ontologies of objects and the performative potential of materials. His work investigates how discrete forms—each embedded with its own histories and functions—can intersect in moments of aesthetic and conceptual harmony. Through the practices of painting and sculpture, he constructs narratives that examine the increasingly porous boundaries between the digital, the physical, and the imagined.

Melissa Grisancich
Melissa Grisancich is a Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist, self-taught curator, educator, and creative practitioner. Working across painting, sculpture, public art, textiles, and publishing, her practice is shaped by a strong DIY ethos and a hands-on approach to making. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, created public artworks, and produced independent artist publications.

Badra Aji
Badra Aji is a Melbourne/Naarm-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans drawing, painting, video, and writing to explore the intersection of personal history and collective memory. By recontextualising archives and speculative imagery, he constructs poetic semi-narratives that navigate the blurred boundaries between autobiography and fiction. Aji’s work has been exhibited widely across Australia and Europe, receiving recognition in major national accolades including the Ramsay Art Prize and the Dobell Drawing Prize.