11th February - 8th March 2026
A Three of Cups Group Exhibition
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When I hear the word “trove” I immediately think of treasure. Not necessarily the shiny gold kind, but the kind you discover unexpectedly, perhaps rifling through an old suitcase, or searching for something lost at the back of a cupboard, or while remodelling a section of your dwelling. The sort of treasure that may not be considered treasure by the masses. Much of my art practice involves combining media in non-traditional ways and the pieces for this exhibition have allowed me to continue to explore this through sculpture. These artworks also invite engagement with the unexpected, which is a core part of my practice.
Chez Robinson
The Collector
2026
Thread, thrifted and found items, beads, wire, sewing notions
NFS
This piece was inspired by the artist’s regular exploration of local op shops and the subjective worth, both monetary and sentimental, of items found there. The everyday items bound in the web - doilies, buttons, souvenirs, jewellery, trinkets - hint at a comfortable home setting and prompt reflection on the ways in which we fill our living spaces with items that we value. The industrious arachnid caught mid-pilfer gives form to the thrift shopping experience: the careful gathering and curation of treasures lost or discarded by others.
Nesting
2025
Stoneware ceramic, glaze, dollhouse miniatures, wool felt
NFS
Inspired by the discovery of termites in the backyard, Nesting is a response to an unsettling thought about the unknown and unseen visitors with whom we may be sharing our living spaces. The use of dollhouse miniatures lends a sense of absurdity that contrasts with the organic shapes and textures of the “nest”, to create an overall sense of disequilibrium. Are the tiny hands poachers or protectors? And what on earth (or beyond) will hatch from those eggs?
Rat King: sacred/profane
2025
Ceramic, glaze, gold leaf, wire, rope
NFS
The phrase “rat king” refers to a group of rats who have become fused together by their tails. This occurs when many rats live together in a small space. Mummified specimens of rat kings are housed in museums around the world. To discover or gaze upon the phenomenon of the rat king may inspire both fascination and revulsion. Through the patterns and gloss finish on the rats and crown, Rat King: sacred/profane aims to subvert the immediate disgust associated with the rat king mythology, and invites the viewer to contemplate the dignity of once-living creatures bound to an inevitable fate.
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I have explored the theme of Trove, of what is taonga or what is held sacred, through my intimate and personal experience, as ancestral connections via whakapapa, the telling of community stories, and through the deeper understanding of Maori culture.
These artworks explore stories of shared identity, the connection between environment, personal experience, and community. I view these stories as intertwined, layered, and inseparable. I invite reflection on how water is a primary facilitator of this multifaceted connection.
I use a variety of mediums often placing the contemporary alongside the traditional and mirroring my own reality. Within me lives the new and promising; I have my own unique and personal lived experience, my own mana and mauri. I am also the living embodiment of ancestral wisdom and traditions passed from wahine to wahine or woman to woman.
Jennis Ardern
Waipuna-ā-rangi
2025
Acrylic and ink on wood, hand-dyed rope, wool.
110cmW x 220cmH
NFS
Waipuna-ā-rangi gifts her mauri (life-force, spiritual essence) through the ua (rain) flowing from Ranginui, the Sky Father, to Papatūānuku, the Earth Mother. The water nourishes the soil, the plants, and kai (food) from the land, the fresh water, and ocean then returns to the sky as part of a cycle of giving and receiving.
Water is a taonga, a sacred treasure to Maori; it is the essence of life, embodied in the ancestral and cultural identity of the people. Waipuna-ā-rangi is rendered in the likeness of the artist’s great-great-grandmother to signify the importance of this relationship.
Each Precious Drop
2020
Ink, transparent sheet, resin on lightboxes
142cm W x 200cm L x 50cm H
$45 each / per resin piece
Each drop of water is a physical representation of a literal kindness from one stranger to another, a counterpoint to the social fears often associated with strangers. Embedded within each resin drop is a recollection of a personal experience collected by the artist via conversations with people in person or online, most often while going about her daily routines. When seen individually each droplet reflects a singular experience. When seen together, they form a body of water that represents the way that acts of kindness can nourish a community.
Adrift Upon Deepening Memories
2024
Mixed media collage, watercolour paper on wood
30.5cm H x 20.8cm L
$590
The ocean seems a place of fleeting human encounters.
Like a kiss, or footprints on the sand; a moment caught in time.
But we were connected long before childhood,
It bearing witness to my ancestors’ home-seeking
Since infancy I’ve swum its waters;
But my memory serves as poor reflection.
It’s water has cradled my body,
Filled my nostrils, heard my beating heart;
It does not forget me, or those before.
The ocean is a living source of memory
safe-fast within its tides and eddies,
The sand, and sediment holds evidence of the world’s birth,
A microbial memory of Earth’s childhood.
Incomprehensible Twists of Meaning
2026
Mixed media collage, watercolour paper on wood
30.5cm H x 20.8cm L
$590
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In We are all just eggs, a zine-based work, I explore how we assign meaning to ourselves through the often absurd logic of categorisation. Someone once told me I have "big quiche energy." I hate quiche. This moment prompted a question: if our entire personalities can be reduced to egg forms, what does that say about the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us? How does bias play into how we read our horoscope or complete another personality profile for a job?
My practice over the past year has been food-focused, illustrating cherished family recipes and meals that permeated suburban homes while exploring the connection between taste and collective memory. Eggs felt like the natural next step—familiar, yet polarising. I've illustrated these forms to function similarly: vague enough to feel personal yet specific enough to spark recognition. The work taps into our desire to understand ourselves through external frameworks, even when we know they're reductive.
This collection of zine, posters and flowchart forms a taxonomy of ways to be human—a trove of tiny mirrors reflecting our need to categorize, belong and still remain indefinable. We're all just egg-xisting in the communal carton of life.
Kim Loughland
We are all just eggs
2025
Archival print
42 x 60 cm
$350 (framed)
Someone once told me I have “big quiche energy.” I hate quiche. This moment led to the creation of a zine and this poster, which explore the parallels between egg forms and personality types. The work plays with the absurd logic of categorisation and how easily we accept simplified frameworks as tools for self-understanding. Familiar yet polarising, the egg forms are vague enough to feel personal and specific enough to spark recognition, reflecting our ongoing urge to define ourselves, even when those definitions never quite fit.
Which egg are you?
2025
Archival print
42 x 60 cm
$200 (framed)
Step right up and take this totally scientific flowchart quiz to find out which egg you really are. Spoiler: there are no wrong answers, just increasingly questionable ones. This trove of tiny mirrors reflects our desperate need to sort ourselves into neat little boxes while somehow staying gloriously undefinable. Part game, part puzzle, it reminds us that identity is messy and maybe a little scrambled.
It’s all one big yolk anyway
2025
Archival print
42 x 60 cm
$200 (framed)
Is it just human nature to want to understand ourselves through external frameworks, even when we know they are reductive? This work borrows the familiar logic of an alignment chart as another way into the egg taxonomy. Viewers are invited to place themselves somewhere between competing ideas of right, wrong and personality, then sit with the discomfort of how slippery that placement feels. Like the zine and flowchart, the chart is designed to be re-read, second-guessed and gently argued with, suggesting that no matter where we land, the boundaries between categories were never all that solid to begin with.
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In Suburban Altars I create a memorial to reframe the tension between the weight of grief and the restorative power of small, domestic rituals.
The aesthetic of the series is rooted in a DIY sensibility, utilising accessible materials such as pipe cleaners, plastic gems, and papier-mâché. These bright, sometimes ostentatious structures intentionally subvert the somber visual language usually associated with mourning. For me, the process of papier-mâché is transformative; it allows for a structural freedom where almost any form is possible, mirroring the fluidity of memory itself.
The project is heavily informed by Dana Salvo’s photographs in Home Altars of Mexico. I am drawn to the provincial, tactile nature of these spaces, where wrapping paper and iconography are used to bridge the domestic with the divine. By incorporating these inexpensive craft products and household items, Suburban Altars seeks to ground the experience of loss in the familiar. It is an invitation to acknowledge substantial milestones through a lens of accessibility, injecting the familiar into the profound landscape of grieving.
Kim Wheeler
Suburban Altars
2025/2026
Mixed media - Photography, sculpture, illustration
and then came love - $375
Distant Dream - $275
Under the Stars - $200
The Wait - $350
In Moonlight - $300
Love Story - $375
Love Letters - $250
Suburban Altars reframes the tension between the weight of grief and the restorative power of domestic ritual. Utilising a DIY aesthetic, these vibrant structures subvert traditional, somber mourning archetypes. By grounding loss in accessible, everyday materials, the work invites the viewer to engage with their own grief through a lens of remembrance that seeks to uplift rather than weigh down.
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My art practice is a deep exploration of self and place, weaving together and connecting ancestral stories and present-day rhythms of life as a woman farmer. Utilising foraged botanicals and found objects, I respond to the shifting climate, environmental precarity and emotional impacts. Manual and contemplative rituals such as collecting, sorting and processing embrace both beauty and imperfection, and offer solace and meditative calm amidst the flurry of contemporary life and duties. A playful transformation of reclaimed materials, and moments of reflection and reconnection with nature intertwine to unravel relationships to the land and its use.
Kylie Harries
Sparrow 1 and 2
2025
Fine Art archival reproduction print on 100% cotton rag (framed)
$650
A treasured moment is discovering the possibility that a material considered waste can undergo a journey of transformation, and its lifetime extended through reuse, reclamation and reimagining. This work was a happy accident. At the last minute, stuffing a rusted garden ornament into a wad of paper going through an ecoprint process revealed a little treasure. Perched proudly on a branch in all their alchemist glory, two little birds.
Blue
2022-2026
Acrylic on canvas, quandong seeds, river driftwood, cotton string
NFS
Collecting and processing the beautiful fruit of the blue quandong (Elaeocarpus grandis) offers calm and solace. The trees grow abundantly along the North Pine River, a river that meanders through my farm. Produced by a microscopic structure similar to iridescent bird and butterfly wings, the skin of the quandong is a brilliant blue, and striking against paddock grasses. The hypnotic repetition of seeds invites silent contemplation - these little blinking treasures have been part of a meditative and healing journey.
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Underfoot series
2017 - presentWithin the theme of TROVE, this work found a home. I have been taking this series of photographs for over 8 years, playfully pushing around the question of ‘what is art ?’
As the work grew over time I found myself setting 3 rules,
1. Under my feet. 2. Just as I see it, no manipulation. 3. No editing, apart from cropping into a square.With the challenge of seeing without judgment, seeing out of context and enjoying the act of noticing. Looking for arrangements that I find visually interesting, collecting my own treasure trove of visual poetry.
I have noticed the days when I capture these images there is an added layer richness and satisfaction to my life.
Marian Reginato
Underfoot I and II
2017 - 2025
76cm x 57cm
Archival Photographic Prints, Fabriano Watercolour Paper
NFS
Underfoot is a selection of photographs from an ongoing series Marian began in 2017. Intrigued and excited by the act of noticing, of being present and observing.
Seeing the colours, shapes, textures and patterns under her feet in gutters and pathways, as little squares of visual poetry. Choosing to use her phone camera to capture these images when and as she saw them, Marian is reinforcing and reflecting the immediacy and directness of the act of noticing.
Using these images from the gutter, Marian is asking us to challenge our concept of aesthetics and what art can be. Inviting viewers to find beauty in places least expected and enjoy the experience of the art of noticing.
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No dwelling place but in me is a continuation of my sculptural practice, which has previously focused on found objects and often incorporated soft textural elements. Turning towards hard and newly fabricated materials represents a shift in my artistic process which is in great part due to the muse and influence I’ve found in the Three of Cups Club.
While keeping to my customary palette of bright colours, the form and style of this work draws instead from the cantilevered architecture of the mid-1900s modern style and the strange nostalgia of a childhood dollhouse I wanted but never had. The imperfect modularity references an attempt to monitor and understand my everchanging moods, (and by extension my life!) through a daily coloured mood tracker. The title is a line taken from Steppenwolf, a novel by Herman Hesse in which a man believes himself to be half-man, half-wolf. I wonder perhaps if I am half-woman, is my other half made of emotion, of shifting hues and reflection?
The site-specific and unrepeatable nature of the assemblage echoes the sense of physical and emotional impermanence, and the viewer is invited to dwell in the liminal spaces of colour, light and reflection.
Mel Brady
No dwelling place but in me
2026
Acrylic sheet
NFS
Layers and angles of acrylic sheeting reflect and obscure as they insist colour and a reproduced self on the viewer. Conceived as a dollhouse-like confection, the structure offers a narrative of liminal spaces within an unreliable framework. Inspired by the artists’ failed attempt to better understand herself during tumultuous times by using a colour-coded mood tracking system, this site-specific assemblage comments on the intangible quality of memory, self-examination, and the grief, nuance and turbulence of middle-life.
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These works are an acknowledgement, a witnessing, a recognition of women’s vitality. They capture fleeting moments, intimate presences, and quiet power — the ordinary made luminous, the unseen made visible.
I am drawn to gestures, stillness, and subtleties that often go unnoticed yet carry the weight of being.
Trove guides this exploration — a landscape of stories, fragments, and histories that ripple through women’s lives. Through it, I trace the strength, tenderness, and resilience that have passed silently through generations, honoring what persists beyond words.
The words are a treasure trove of the depth of life itself, reflecting intuition, layered existence, and enduring strength. They invite reflection and connection, and the threads that link us to those who came before, and those who have come from us and to the life that flows within us all.
Melinda Edwards
Remember: Words for the Beautiful Mess that is Motherhood
2021
5 Page prints from book, digital print
$35 each (framed)
These 5 page prints are drawn from a book shaped by nineteen years of lived experience and reflection. Distilled from personal journals, the words transform memory into shared language, honouring motherhood as layered, imperfect, and deeply human.
Red (Slip Knot Weave)
2026
Jute warp, alpaca wool, loom frame
$150
This woven work reflects motherhood as endurance and release. Jute forms a grounding structure, while dark red alpaca wool represents gentle strength and resilience. Slip knots speak to impermanence, adaptability, and surrender through an embodied, meditative process.
Gauze Weave
2025
Cotton warp, medical gauze, loom frame
$150
Created as an act of care, this work uses cotton to symbolise resilience and medical gauze to represent healing and protection. Through a simple weave, making becomes a grounding response to emotional overwhelm and unseen wounds.
Colour Rove Weave
2026
Cotton warp, coloured wool roving, loom frame
$150
This piece reflects the layered identity of motherhood. Cotton forms a steady foundation, while purple, brown, and blue wool roving symbolise richness, grounding, and emotional depth—honouring mothers as complex, multifaceted, and continually becoming.
White (Rove Weave)
2026
Cotton warp, white wool roving, loom frame
$150
This work explores comfort and protection through softness and touch. Cotton provides structure, while white wool roving evokes warmth, reassurance, and divine care. Weaving becomes a language of trust, guidance, and restoration.
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My work explores the intersection of nature, the human body, and emotional experience. Using hair as a symbol for investigating how memory, identity, and loss are held within the intimate traces of our heritage. Drawing on my female lineage, I use hair as a vessel of containment. A fragment in time that contains absence, connection, and stories that persist beyond presence. Through fine detail, layered colour, and contrast, each piece becomes a trove of memory, a meditation on what has been lost yet continues to shape us. Painting allows me to capture the spirit of what is no longer tangible, transforming ephemeral fragments into visible, tactile reflections on remembrance, intimacy, and emotional resonance.
Rachel South
Honouring the Vessel
2025
Acrylic on Canvas with gold frame
$180 each (framed)
Honouring the Vessel draws on religious iconography and the tradition of relic veneration to reframe devotion as personal, intimate, and feminine. The work acts as a contemporary altar, where hair—both material and symbol—holds reverence for a life. The use of gold, echoing the gilded altars and sacred embellishments of Catholic tradition, elevates the ordinary into the sacred, imbuing the work with a sense of holiness and ritual. Through its color, composition, and framing, the painting transforms the vessel of the human body, memory, and lived experience into an object of adoration. In this space, the simple, tangible presence of hair carries the weight of love, memory, and veneration, a personal offering made visible.
Relic: 5 Generations
2025
Hair, Perspex
NFS
Is a deeply personal work composed of locks of hair spanning five generations of the matrilineal line. Preserved within clear housings, each fragment functions as a bodily trace—an intimate material carrying memory, inheritance, and presence.
Referencing traditions of relic veneration, the work honours female lineage as sacred. The piece meditates on ancestry, memory, and the intimate threads that connect us through time. Each strand acts as a tangible remnant of lived experience, a fragment of identity preserved and honoured. By presenting these locks as relics, the work elevates the personal to the universal, acknowledging the silent histories carried through women’s lives. The piece invites reflection on lineage, the passage of time, and how familial bonds transcend the visible and the ephemeral.
The paradox of hair: something physically small, ordinary, and everyday can carry enormous emotional and symbolic weight. All because it’s a part of the human body that is both personal and universal. It’s tangible, yet deeply symbolic.
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Keeper of the Unkeepable emerges from my internal landscape, shaped by experience, and emotion. The work considers the body as a site of containment where memory, secrets, and shame are held and nurtured until they inevitably escape.
Completed primarily in acrylics, the painting is built through layers of colour and form that create dreamlike spaces where realism and imagination intersect. The symbolism functions as emotional reference, allowing space to explore themes of femininity, magic, transformation and otherness where gentleness and perceived monstrosity can coexist.
While the ideas behind this work are deeply personal, I aim to leave room for viewers to bring their own interpretations, creating moments of shared reflection on what we carry, keep and quietly release over time.
Samantha Gilkes
Keeper of the Unkeepable
2025
Acrylic on wood
NFS
Exploring the body as a site of containment, Keeper of the Unkeepable shares where memory, secrets, and shame are held, until they’re not. Built through layered acrylics, the work creates a dreamlike space where realism and imagination intersect. Symbols function as emotional references, reflecting themes of femininity, magic, and transformation. While deeply personal in origin, the work invites viewers into spaces of shared reflection on what we carry, keep and quietly release over time.
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For Trove, I present In Softness We Reclaim. This body of work brings together objects of comfort and protection to explore the emotional architectures we build around ourselves. I am drawn to domestic materials—pillows, bedding, fabric, and stitched language—because they quietly hold memory, reassurance, and vulnerability.
The works in this exhibition grew from my experiences of growing up within 1980s culture, alongside a queer lineage shaped by coded symbols, survival, and resilience. In You Are Not in Trouble, a hanging pillow murmurs reassurance to the inner child. Names Can Never Hurt Me extends this tenderness into the realm of identity, reimagining a suit of armour through queer symbology—lemons, lavender, and the pink triangle—as a way of reclaiming language once used to wound.
Together, these works form a personal and collective trove of memories, gestures, and codes that move between shame and pride, softness and strength. I am interested in what we choose to hold onto, what we might rework, and how protection can be found not in hardness, but in the courage to remain tender.
This body of work was supported with a Continue Creating grant as part of City of Moreton Bay’s Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF), a partnership between the Queensland Government and City of Moreton Bay.
Shan Michaels
Names Can Never Hurt Me
2026
Silk fabric, stitching, mixed textile elements
NFS
Names Can Never Hurt Me reimagines the suit of armour as both protection and reclamation. Constructed from silky yellow fabric and embroidered with textured lemons, the work transforms softness into strength. When the artist was at school, lemon was used as a coded insult—slang for a girl suspected of being a lesbian. Here, the word is reclaimed and celebrated as a symbol of queer pride and resilience. A pink triangle stitched over the heart recalls queer histories of persecution and resistance, while the helmet’s lavender mohawk nods to coded languages of identity. By remaking armour from silken cloth, the work blurs protection and vulnerability, suggesting tenderness itself as a form of defence.
You Are Not in Trouble
2026
Pillow, vintage bedding, beads
NFS
You Are Not in Trouble takes the form of a pillow suspended from the ceiling, its pillowcase made from 1980s bedding. On the front, in small beaded lettering, the phrase “you are not in trouble” appears almost as a whisper. Drawing on the textures and emotional registers of that era, the work considers the pillow as both refuge and companion—something held close, cried into, and quietly relied upon. Suspended in space, it invites reflection on self-soothing, memory, and the ways comfort is learned, remembered, and reclaimed.
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This body of work began after a visit to Fremantle, where I stayed in a 1960s suburban home. Walking through the house felt like stepping into someone’s Nonna’s place. That sense of familiarity became the starting point for a series of hand-built ceramic works drawn from suburban domestic life.
I’m interested in how familiar things change meaning over time. Items that once felt playful, awkward or easy to overlook often come back later carrying a whole new kind of weight and humour. The work draws on shared suburban references, the language we grew up with, everyday routines, and the kinds of objects that quietly sit in the background but stay with us.
Within TROVE, these works sit alongside other acts of collecting and keeping. By remaking ordinary domestic forms in ceramic, I’m treating them as things worth holding onto. The pieces reflect how memory and belonging can be carried through the most familiar parts of everyday life.
Tiff Howe
Goon of Fortune
2026
Hand-built ceramic
$600
A playful nod to Australia’s backyard drinking game, where a bag of cheap boxed wine is pegged on a hills hoist and spun like a wheel of fortune. Once a teen rite of passage, it’s a funny reminder of how our rituals and the objects that go with them change meaning as we grow up.
Perimenopause Blues
2026
Hand built ceramic
$400
A nod to Puberty Blues and its iconic "Rack Off Mole." Turns out the emotional chaos of adolescence has a sequel.
On Line
2026
Hand built ceramic
$300
Before we were online, we were on the line. The Hills Hoist spins between utility, nostalgia, and humour. It’s a practical backyard fixture that has shaped time, memory, and the everyday rhythm of our Australian homes.
The Pink Vanity
2025
Hand built ceramic
$250
Our associations with bathrooms while growing up are layered, emotional, and often quietly formative. They’re more than functional spaces; they become sites of privacy, ritual, humour, shame, rebellion and solidarity.
Like stumbling upon a cache of forgotten letters or inherited keepsakes, TROVE reveals what twelve contemporary women artists have unearthed, preserved, and transformed from personal and collective histories.
A group exhibition by the Three of Cups Club, a collective of women artists from the greater Moreton Bay region, TROVE presents rich and varied approaches through painting, ceramics, assemblage, weaving, drawing, digital illustration and photography. This diversity reflects the collective's founding values of collaboration, care, and creative exchange.
Work presented in TROVE functions as both personal artefact and intentional archive—evidence of the quiet labour and material investigations involved in navigating identity, heritage and belonging through creative practice.
The exhibition questions what we choose to keep and what stories these treasures tell. In an age of disposability, planned obsolescence and subscription-based collecting, TROVE positions contemporary artmaking as an act of preservation and rebellion, celebrating practices and memories worth treasuring.
A Three of Cups Club Group Exhibition
11th February - 8th March 2026
Old Fire Station Gallery,
395 Oxley Road, Redcliffe
Visit @threeofcups_club for artist bios & updates