Posted on Aug 27, 2023

Side Line — August 2023

Hey Side Friends!

We have news! We are thrilled to unveil a new chapter in the SG journey.

As we continue to curate a lineup of exceptional exhibitions, we are excited to announce our expansion to include an SG style of representation for a small, select group of emerging and mid-career artists.

Our mission's primary goal has always been to celebrate creativity, nurture talent, and foster connections between artists and the creative community. 
With this expansion, we're taking this commitment to the next level, opening our doors to a diverse array of voices and visions that are both fresh and compelling.

Our decision to embrace representation for emerging and mid-career artists stems from a conversation between Leesa and Laura years ago. We wanted to see how we could help shape Brisbane's creative community with our diverse skillset and give opportunities to artists aligned with the commercial and professional career pathway. The hybrid version of Side will always remain, as it is integral to our personal goals, and giving emerging artists a platform to explore professional practice is what we love to do! We see this evolution as an opportunity to provide a platform for those shaping the art world's future, whose perspectives enrich and challenge our understanding of creativity. By nurturing these rising talents, we aim to cultivate an atmosphere of innovation, conversation, and growth within our vibrant artistic community.

In the coming months, you can look forward to captivating exhibitions that showcase these talented individuals' works and our affiliated artists' programming — business as usual! This next step also paves the way for exciting collaborations, workshops, and events that will allow you to engage directly with these creators, and we are so excited to see what happens!

We invite you to follow us on Instagram to keep an eye on our socials and subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated on upcoming events. We're really looking forward to watching this new journey begin, and we're thrilled to have our creative community's support behind us. 

Thank you for being an integral part of our SG family. Your support has been the foundation of our growth, and we can't wait to share this exciting new phase with you.
Stay tuned for more updates, and get ready to be inspired!

Love always, 
Leesa + Laura 

Meet our stable…

Carolyn V Watson

For over 20 years, Carolyn V Watson has used her art practice as a means to navigate her own life, anxiety and patterns of behaviour. Primarily self-taught, Watson was initially committed to an intense drawing and painting practice before experimenting with three-dimensional making to expand her art capabilities and understanding of her painting process. 
In contrast to her drawings' purposeful looseness and immediacy, Watson's sculptural responses make her work's contemplative and multilayered nature explicit. Drawn to the theory of defamiliarization, she employs labour-intensive methods that include the deconstruction of authentic objects, carving, hand-stitching and assemblage to draw out physical embodiments of objects deliberately made 'unfamiliar' or strange. 
Addressing the elements of abstraction and landscape, her structured studio process highlights patterns between the cogent humm of her inner world, her home environment, and the natural world. 


Watson's artifice remakes the natural anew, resulting in an enigmatic coalescence between the Totemic and ritualistic, the posturing and pretend.


Carolyn V Watson is an alum of the Queensland College of Art. Highly Commended in the inaugural 2021 Lethbridge Landscape Prize and Finalist 2022 and 2023,  and a dual finalist in the 2020 Tom Bass Prize for Figurative Sculpture, she has won multiple awards at the Brisbane Sculpture Festival (2019, 2018, 2017, 2016) and Brisbane Rotary Art Spectacular (Won 3D Section 2023 and 2016, Finalist – 2017), and been a finalist in numerous awards including the Moreton Bay Regional Art Awards (2019, 2017, 2016, 2013, 2011); the Marie Ellis OAM Drawing Prize (2015, 2013, 2010); the Prometheus Visual Art Award (2011, 2009) and the Lethbridge 10000 Small Scale Art Award (2015), the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (2012) and the John Fries Memorial Art Prize (2012). Included in the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize in 2008, her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia since 2006.

Jessica Nothdurft

Jessica Nothdurft is a multimedia artist living and working in Meanjin/Brisbane. Following studies in visual arts at TAFE and then at the Queensland University of Technology, Jessica has developed her art practice to explore highly personal, evocative depictions of her life experiences. A winner and finalist of multiple awards, Jessica uses a variety of media, including oil, ink and metal. She has honed a lifetime of experiences into a recurring exploratory theme, often in faux-naive stylised depictions. By drawing on the familiar visual languages of artists from Giacometti to Louise Bourgeois and Jenny Watson, Jessica uses her art practice to explore the existence of struggles below the surface and the many facets of shame.

Kitty Horton

Kitty Horton is an Australian artist living in Meanjin, Brisbane. Kitty’s artworks often explore the materiality of oils, mixed media, ceramics and drawing as primary mediums in her visual art practice. Inspired by the American Minimalists, Kitty investigates her surroundings by creating distorted shapes, forms and motifs. Mark-making and the lucky accident extend the relationship between painting and drawing. Kitty has recently engaged with spatial configurations of interior objects to provide compositional structures. The mediums of drawing, ceramics and painting enable Kitty to investigate further the hard and soft duality of opposing, sometimes complimentary, interior forms. 

Kitty completed a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Queensland College of Art (Griffith University) in 2013 and a Graduate Diploma in Education (Senior years) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in 2014. Kitty actively participates in the arts industry with public art projects, workshops, and residencies. Her artwork has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia and a group exhibition internationally in Miami, Florida. Private clients in Australia, New Zealand and France collect her work.

Group Exhibition

Thursday 9 – 17 November

We're super excited to showcase a group exhibition with our stable of artists. Join us from 5.30 pm to chat with and welcome the artists as part of Side Gallery’s newest initiative, and stay for opening drinks from 6 pm

Kate Barry — Diversion

Thursday 31 August – 8 September

Opening drinks: Thursday, 31 August 6 – 8 pm.

Kate Barry joins us again for a solo exhibition exploring her signature lyrical abstraction practice.

Join us at 5.30 pm for an artist in conversation with curator Laura.  

Photography  Alan Uthmann

Michelle Xen — Portals

14 –  22 September
Opening night Thursday, 14 September, 6 – 8 pm

Join us for opening night on Thursday, 14 September, to experience exciting new work by multidisciplinary artist Michelle Xen, including video, light work and paintings.

Natacha Arena — FROM THE SNOW ON MY TONGUE TO THE FIRE ON YOUR SHOULDER

28 September – 7 October
Opening night Thursday, 28 September, 6 – 8 pm

Natacha Arena's visual art practice is centred on painting and its relationship to observing natural phenomena through an intuitive approach. We look forward to showcasing a new body of work by Natacha exclusively for Side Gallery.

Leesa did a thing!

It's titled, 'The Curator's Wishlist', and it's what she would like to add to her personal collection! You can find it in Issue 42 of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, which will be released soon! Head over to their page to subscribe now xx

Discover the Beautiful Bizarre publication here.

Bolted — A Wilder, Kinder Cup Day

We are so thrilled to sponsor the Bolted Events again for 2023! Tickets are available now 

Last year, Side Gallery worked with our girl Bonnie Hislop to commission a gorgeous vase to donate to the live auction! The auction raises money for the RSPCA and Gynaecological cancer research, and the event was so successful!! We loved working with other artist mates who also put work forward for the auction. It was such an amazing day, and the outcomes will impact so many lives of animals and women. We are 100000% behind this amazing event, so keep your eyes peeled for updates on the next luncheon! Doing good + Art = Happy Leesa and Laura 

To book your tickets now, click here.