This year the show includes dozens of ACU’s current visual art and design students; award winning performance/photomedia/installation artist, ACU alumnus and current staff member Danica I. J. Knežević; and two recent ACU Strathfield graduates: Damien Nicholls (2022) and Rafaela Mori (2023).

As McGlade Gallery Director and exhibition curator Tracey Clement explains, “The Local celebrates homegrown talent and the 2025 edition goes all out with not one, not two, but three alumni—at different stages of their careers—presenting work side by side with current ACU Strathfield students! It is such a treat to see students who are just finding their creative voices showing alongside emerging artists and a confident professional. It’s a rare snapshot of the artistic trajectory.”

Please join us for the opening celebration:
Thursday 7 August 5:30-7:30PM

The Local 2025
28 July –17 August 2025

McGlade Gallery, Building 603, Gate 3
ACU, 25A Barker Road, Strathfield
Monday-Saturday, 11am-4pm

Meet the Locals:

ACU staff member: Dr Danica I. J. Knežević

Drawing on her lived-experience and the psychology of being a carer, Danica I. J. Knežević will present an immersive installation titled Life’s a Waiting Room which seeks to impart the altered temporal experience of giving care.

“The passing of time travels differently for caregivers, it moves to and with another's time,” Knežević explains. “It is constant and consistent waiting. It is constant and consistent time that is yours and not yours. It is a liminal space that is driven by the very action of waiting for the other; a limbo with definitive action, a definitive need without a definitive time.”

After graduating with a BVAD from ACU Strathfield in 2011, Knežević dedicated herself to a practice in which she uses her body—in performance, photography, video and installation works—to evoke the mutual exchange between care giver and receiver. In 2020 she earned a PhD from the University of Sydney. In 2023, Knežević’s experimental film, Body Says, No, was nominated for best-short film animation at the St Kilda Short Film Festival, and she won a prestigious Fauvette Loureiro Memorial travel scholarship. Knežević has been teaching at ACU Strathfield since 2014. She exhibits regularly, both nationally and internationally.

Recent ACU Strathfield graduates:

Damien Nicholls didn’t start studying art until he was in his fifties, but he began exhibiting his sculptures while he was still a student and after completing his internship with the Hidden Sculpture Prize, as part of his degree at ACU, he also began working as exhibition installer.

“My aesthetic reinvents found or discarded objects, transforming, repurposing, and recontextualizing them with calculated surrealist touches,” he says. “Through my art, I hope to inspire others to see beauty and potential in the unwanted and overlooked.”

Since graduating with a BVAD in 2022, Nicholls has had his work selected for numerous sculpture exhibitions including Sculpture in the Vineyards and Sculptures in the Gardens.

Rafaela Mori graduated with a BVAD in late 2023, and by early 2025 she had already been selected by well-respected arts writer Amber Creswell Bell as a young painter to watch! After her first solo show earlier this year, Mori is swiftly gaining a reputation for her bold paintings of fantastical exotic fruit, works which draw on her Brazilian heritage and experience as a migrant to Australia.

“Migration is not just a physical journey, but a psychic rupture. My work reflects the ambiguity and friction of living between languages, customs, and inherited histories,” she explains. “I paint compositions that occupy a cultural in-between territory where identity is not fixed but constantly remade. These compositions embody a state of hybridity where fruits and plants created by me represent the feelings and experiences of living between cultures.”

Current ACU students

More than 25 current art and design students at ACU Strathfield present drawing, printmaking, photography, video, painting, ceramic, illustration and performance pieces.

There are many potential stories here. Two highlights include:

Sean Maquiran’s expressive charcoal portraits and deeply moving soundscape which capture a moody sense of loss as his grandfather slipped further into dementia.

Christine Sanosa’s use of tattoo ink on silicon (a stand in for human skin) as a way of acknowledging the permanent effects of the choices we make in the face of cultural and familial expectations. 

For more information, or to arrange interviews please contact:

Dr Tracey Clement, McGlade Gallery Director

Email: Tracey.Clement@acu.edu.au