Bespoke Utopia
Gavin Bradstreet, Wilay Designs, Matthew Freeman, Michele Grimston, Shaun Hayes, Matilda Hillam, Evan Humphreys, Karen Lee, Sandy Ma, Paul McInnes, Melissa Nickols, Jessica Spencer, Lisa Stevenson, Grace Walters
23 October – 15 November 2026
Location | M16 Artspace, 21 Blaxland Crescent, Griffith ACT 2603
Opening Hours | Wednesday – Sunday | Noon – 5pm
Entry | Free
Access | Wheelchair accessible, accessible parking, accessible bathroom, assistance animals welcome
Bespoke Utopia brings together leading Canberra artists whose practices embrace the principles of slow design, offering an alternative to the norms of post-capitalist production. Showcasing the depth and diversity of the region’s art and design community, the exhibition highlights creative practices that celebrate care, craftsmanship and long-term thinking.
In today’s post-capitalist economy, contemporary design often functions as a driver of overconsumption. Much of popular design is classified as ephemeral, disposable or temporal, categories that reflect the broader issue of planned obsolescence. These approaches carry significant ethical and environmental implications, particularly in the face of accelerating climate change. Bespoke Utopia invites audiences to critically consider how these design practices shape our world and to reflect on their long-term consequences.
The artists featured in this exhibition prioritise thoughtful, responsible making over rapid, large-scale manufacturing. Drawing on traditions of craftsmanship and handmade processes, their work positions slow design as both a philosophy and a form of creative activism, one that contributes to broader cultural shifts towards environmental and social sustainability. Through sustained engagement with materials, form and process, the exhibition highlights how deliberate, mindful design can foster more enduring and environmentally conscious ways of living.
Canberra’s design identity has long been characterised by the convergence of fine art, craft and applied design. Shaped by the region’s strong history of craft education, community studios and maker networks, the artists in Bespoke Utopia combine traditional technique and contemporary visual languages to create works that are innovative, finely crafted and conceptually grounded. Together, they celebrate the strength of local artistic practice while contributing to wider conversations about sustainability, material culture and the role of design in shaping everyday life.
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Having completed his studies in Fine Art at NAS and worked in fashion for fifteen years, Gavin Bradstreet's work inevitably references his past lives in these different, though all too similar, worlds through the act of making.
The sculptural forms he creates are often informed by the process of sourcing materials, patternmaking, sewing and construction. He is inspired by the curious beauty found in repurposed materials. There is something undeniably intriguing about taking what is often overlooked and disregarded and transforming it into something that gives us pause.
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Jazz and Kristal Matthews are proud Ngunawal sisters and co-founders of Wilay Designs, a multidisciplinary Aboriginal art business grounded in culture, storytelling and connection to Country.
Based on Ngunawal Country, Jazz works across digital design, murals, canvas art and workshops. Her practice is driven by passion and purpose, with a strong focus on sharing culture and building meaningful connections through art.
Kristal, based on Ngarrindjeri Country, is a visual artist, muralist, digital creator, and weaver. Her work reflects a deep respect for Country and community and she has partnered with organisations throughout South Australia and the ACT.
Through Wilay Designs, Jazz and Kristal create vibrant artworks that celebrate culture, empower others and honour the footsteps of those who came before them. -
Matthew Freeman is an Australian artist who completed his MFA in Jewelry and Metalsmithing at Rhode Island School of Design in 2025. His concentration is on the pursuit of the Sublime; a transcendent experience of the unknown, expressed through the transitory natures of stone. Matt’s post-graduate work has been reflecting on the systems, rationale and outliers of erosion through 2 dimensional practice to explore orientationlessness, extending the duration of a moment and the humorous task of depicting a rock.
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Michele Grimston is an artist and community cultural development practitioner based on Ngunnawal Country in Canberra, currently undertaking a practice-led PhD through the University of Canberra.
Her work explores slow, meditative textile processes as ways of practicing care and connection for earth, community and spirit. She is interested in building individual and collective rituals of creation which develop the role of these laborious textile processes in our personal, spiritual and social wellbeing.
She has exhibited across Australia and her work is held in the collection of Geoscience Australia. Michele has presented participative, community engaged works and large scale collaborative projects. -
Based on Ngario Country (Captains Flat, NSW) Shaun Hayes is an Australian ceramic artist whose practice transforms discarded plastic objects into enduring ceramic sculptures, challenging perceptions of value, permanence, and waste. His work encourages reflection on the everyday objects we consume, and discard.
Hayes completed a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) with Honours in Ceramics at the Australian National University School of Art in 2013. His achievements include winning the 2024 Muswellbrook Art Prize (Ceramics), and exhibiting with Stanley Street Gallery at the 2023, and 2024 Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, as well as the Melbourne Design Fair in 2023. -
Matilda’s practice is multidisciplinary; confessional, imperfect, messy, undeniably human, hard to define. Placed at the intersection of protest and celebration, the personal is political. For Matilda, everything she does is art. With a silly outfit and her tongue placed firmly against her cheek, Matilda embraces life, kitsch and her inner child.
A bowerbird constantly searching for anything that sparkles, the perfect piece of plastic, a broken children’s toy. From countryside opportunity shops to tip yards and the foot path, through Matilda’s eyes treasures are reclaimed and reframed.
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Evan Humphreys is an artist and furniture maker from Wisconsin, USA. He holds a Bachelor of Visual Art with a concentration in Studio Arts from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, USA. Evan has spent the last 10+ years working in arts organisations, furniture workshops, and various small sheds, starting a workshop upon arriving in Canberra in 2020. He also manages Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA) Inc.
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As a designer, Karen Lee focuses on creating designs with relaxed, modern shapes within an environmentally friendly practice. Rooted in the principles of slow fashion, her practice is guided by integrity, with a commitment to social and environmental responsibility.
Her designs use curves and angles to create sculptural silhouettes with clean lines and refined simplicity. Using leftover fabric cut-offs, Karen creates beautiful new textiles that are often incorporated into garments, giving discarded materials a fresh purpose through thoughtful design.
Karen draws inspiration from her environment - landscapes, architecture, sculpture, art – all shaping her design process. -
Sandy Ma is an emerging multidisciplinary artist and educator of mainland Chinese descent working on unceded Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country. Her creative practice weaves together textiles, sound, and performance to explore embodied knowledge and playful resistance by querying the role of technology in our lives and how to create joyful interactions with emerging technologies. Sandy’s work is deeply invested in collaboration and research, creating participatory installations that engage public audiences. As an educator, Sandy is committed to fostering interdisciplinary learning spaces that centre play and creativity.
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Paul McInnes is a multidisciplinary artist curator. He is also a long-term collector of modernist objects - particularly glass - and his collections inform his art making. The use of found objects has been a feature of his practice for the last 30 years and he uses a diverse range of materials including post-consumer plastics, wood, textiles and ceramics.
McInnes commenced working in glass in 2023, and his most recent work incorporates source material from his collection, extending the life of handmade (often damaged) objects that may otherwise be discarded.
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Melissa Nickols is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice exists in its own ecosystem exploring experimentation, material relationships, and inventive approaches to making. Working across sculpture, installation, digital fabrication, biological processes, and traditional craft, she creates environments where ideas develop through sustained dialogue with materials.
By combining contemporary technologies with historical craft traditions, she develops hybrid processes and custom tools that allow materials to respond, transform, and participate in the making process. Her work embraces iteration, curiosity, and emergence, inviting viewers to consider how form, knowledge, and storytelling can grow through collaboration between human and material systems. -
Jessika Spencer is a Wiradjuri woman from the Sandhills of Narrungdera, New South Wales. For over the past decade she has resided on both Ngunnawal/ Ngambri country and Wiradjuri Country, where she currently creates her art. Being an Indigenous woman, culture and art go hand in hand. They are intertwined and are an ongoing source of inspiration for her.
Through her varied art forms, Jessika explores her cultural identity. She does this via photography, poetry, writing, activism and both contemporary and traditional weaving. Jessika is a qualified photographer with years of experience in creating visual imagery, portfolios, exhibitions, collaborating with the local community, and travelling for her artistic work. Jessika is a First Nations weaver, writer and activist.
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Lisa Stevenson is an emerging multidisciplinary artist living and working on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal people. With a passion for using natural materials, Lisa grows and harvests basketry materials and sustainably forages from her local area. Using a range of basketry techniques, Lisa creates dynamic sculptural works that explore the materiality and potential of fibre to produce biomorphic forms. Completing their degree in visual arts at Australian National University in 2025, she was the recipient of the ANU Drawing Prize 2024, the 2025 QPRC Sculpture Award and awarded the EASS residency at the Canberra Potters.
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Grace Walters is an experimental art-maker from Bowraville currently based in Canberra. Grace's practice explores how we live with contradictions and our apparent complacency with it. The work comes from a deep sensitivity and care for the life that surrounds us. Grace is not limited to a medium and is constantly searching for new things to make ‘art’ with. Grace's practice has a focus on materiality and they're often found combining different forms of media together. From film-making to textiles to assemblage, there is nothing they won't try.
Proudly supported by ACT Government City of Design funding and M16 Artspace
Images
Matthew Freeman | Soma Erratics 1, 2025 | Photo by Rob Chron
Lisa Stevenson | Kangaroo Grass, 2025 | Phot courtesy of the artist
Evan Humphreys | Cloister Chair, 2024 | Photo by Evan Humphreys