Artsbox Artist in Residence Program

Dayna Hayman

(January/February 2026)

Dayna Hayman's project, Footscray Reflections, explores local Footscray public spaces, events and community through in-situ observational drawing. Kicking off in the final week of January, Dayna will spend her six-week ArtsBox Residency drawing in local area spaces like the train station and Footscray Park where she will be inspired by what she observes in these spaces to deliver her Footscray Reflections artworks. Her development of these artworks into final illustrated posters will be on live-display at Footscray Library. 

A lifelong drawer, Dayna Hayman grew up in Darwin before pursing her creative passion in Melbourne, now calling Footscray home. After training in design, Dayna combined her illustration and sense making skills to deliver graphic recording (live, visual, synthesised notes) and complex visualisation (strategic visuals and scientific illustration) projects finding a speciality in environmental, climate change and disaster preparedness & management sectors. Outside of her professional design practice, Dayna lets her obsession for fantasy and sci-fi fuel her highly detailed illustrated artworks and short story zines. In these personal, creative projects she likes to build epic-worlds while exploring contemporary feminine representation within illustration and entertainment design. 

Spider

(March/April 2026)

Spider is a multi-disciplinary multimedia artist. 

Spider’s intuitive, nature‑held practice draws from lived experiences of homelessness, queerness, and community care. Their work lives in youth centres and refuges across Naarm, and they have enjoyed recent collaborations with Lararia and Parminder Kaur at Liquid Architecture.

During their residency, Spider will be exploring what it means to “become feral”: to create without permission, without perfection, and without the pressure to be a “successful” artist. Their residency will be shaped by collaboration with local artists, the queer collection at Footscray Library, and the communities that have held them through their own journey. 

Oliver Bradley

(May/June 2026)

Larissa MacFarlane

(July/August)

Larissa MacFarlane is a proud Disabled and Mad Artist/Activist of Scottish descent, living and working on the unceded sovereign lands of the Kulin Nation. With a multidisciplinary practice spanning linocut printmaking, street art, circus and community arts, they have exhibited locally and internationally since 2006. They have had over 10 solo exhibitions, in galleries such as Footscray Community Arts, Sunshine Arts Spaces Gallery, Hobsons Bay Art in Public Places and interstate.

Their work is deeply informed by lived experience of a 27-year brain injury and long-term disability activism, often exploring themes of Disabled Culture, community identity and pride. They are widely recognised for their disability-led public art, including Australia’s first Disability Pride mural in Footscray (2017), created in collaboration with 50 disabled artists, and a further major commission for the City of Melbourne (2022). Alongside their artistic practice, MacFarlane is an experienced Disability Arts consultant, trainer, violence prevention educator, mentor, speaker and workshop facilitator.

MacFarlane's Artsbox residency in July (aligning with Disability Pride Month) will see them celebrating and deepening understanding of Disability Pride, culture and history. Their project investigates the often-overlooked histories of disability in Melbourne/Naarm’s west through library resources and knowledge-sharing. This research will inform new linocut works, drawings and collages, potentially culminating in artist books and zines. The residency will also include participatory workshops inviting disabled people and allies to explore Disability Pride through activities including badge-making. Stay connected with Larissa's residency via Maribyrnong Arts & Culture's social media channels. 

Manuel Fuentealba Campos

(August/September)

Manuel Fuentealba Campos is a Melbourne-based jewellery maker originally from Chile. His practice is centred on making by hand, exploring the relationship between materials, memory, and everyday life. He is drawn to slow, thoughtful processes and believes that jewellery can carry stories, preserve moments, and create meaningful connections between people and the objects they wear.

During his Artsbox residency, Manu will be working on Closing the Circle, a project dedicated to completing a collection of unfinished jewellery pieces and small objects that have accumulated over the past few years. Rather than beginning something new, the residency is an opportunity to return to ideas that were left behind and give them the time and care they deserve. Community members are invited to follow the process as it unfolds, contribute to a notebook by sharing something they have left unfinished, and join an open studio toward the end of the residency to see the completed works and the stories behind them.

Calev

Calev is a Naarm-based multidisciplinary artist whose works explore the lives of queer and trans people of colour, landcare and intergenerational trauma. Calev will be using the Artsbox space to create long-form comics to be published in risograph later this year. Visitors may witness the elusive comics-making process in-studio and connect with Calev about thehistory and legacy of art-making in the queer community.

Sam Elkin

Sam Elkin is a writer, radio maker and community lawyer living in Footscray. In 2022, Sam co-edited Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia and in 2024 published his debut book Detachable Penis: A Queer Legal Saga which was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the North American Foreword Indie Awards. Sam will be in residence at Artsbox in April 2025, using this space to record interviews with local Maribyrnong residents about the 2019 Save Footscray Park campaign. Sam will be using these interviews to create an independent podcast.

Zoe Jones

Zoe Jones (Hands Weave Hello) is a textile artist based on Bunurong Country. Her process-driven practice explores the cyclical nature of energy and materials, weaving inherited histories and memories through repurposed fabrics. During her Artsbox residency (26 May – 5 July 2025), Zoe will be creating a tactile record of past and present Footscray communities through cloth—acknowledging the Artsbox as that common thread where paths cross, spaces are shared, and stories overlap through time.

Rue Liew

Rue is a multidisciplinary artist who practices their cultural crafts as a way of connecting to their homeland. Their current main practice includes ceramics, lino printing, calligraphy and paint on canvas. During their Artsbox residency they will be working in a variety of artforms.

Mito Elias

Mito Elias, whose project, Palimp_ Texto Dialogues, is an interdisciplinary exploration of poetry in all its forms. During his Artsbox residency, Mito will experiment with spoken word and soundscapes, ephemeral “environmental poetics” using light and texture, and avant-garde video poetry. Mito also plans to host readings and screenings that invite deeper reflection and community dialogue. Community voices are at the heart of the project. Residents will be invited to contribute words, sounds and visual fragments, helping to weave a shared poetic record of Footscray.

Adium

Adium is a visual artist and writer interested in exploring interconnected layers of identity and how our self-concepts interlace with others. Through language, distinguished textiles and materials, cultural traditions, and shared experiences, her work highlights how diverse paths are bound by the same core principles. Her work seeks to create moments of resonance, understanding, and unity. During her residency, Adium will explore how Footscray's languages, rituals, aesthetics and lived traditions interlace, creating mixed media works that highlight the threads binding our diverse communities.

Lillian Hull

Candy Ng 

January/February - Victoria McGinness

Victoria is a visual artist based on Wurundjeri Country. Her practice includes embroidery, textiles and painting using predominantly second-hand materials to create her work, emphasising the importance of using the plethora of resources that already exist before buying new.

February/March - Margaret Hui

Margaret was a graphic designer in Hong Kong and has been a children's art teacher for 15 years. As a self-taught artist she does not limit herself to one medium or style to create her art.

April/May - Kate Robinson

Kate is an Iranian/Australian family violence lawyer and crafter. To process the inadequacies of our justice system, Kate loves to create colourful loud craft and murals.

May/June - Isha Menon

Isha is an emerging theatremaker who makes work that is heartfelt, dramatic and irreverent. Their works are part dream and part absurd, with a healthy serving of grit and humour.

July/August - Parul Sen

Parul is a digital artist originally from Jaipur, India, and has lived in the inner west of Melbourne for the past 15 years. Her choice of colours and decluttered style is heavily influenced by her background in graphic design and the colours of Jaipur. Having worked in various mediums, she now creates artwork on an iPad using an app called Procreate. Parul’s work is a celebration of everyday scenes where the common denominators are trees and buildings in an urban setting.

August/September - Sally Walshe

Sally is a passionate local Footscray artist who has been producing art for well over a decade. Her art is hand crafted and she creates mainly limited edition LINOPRINTS. Many of her art pieces are hand painted with acrylic ink. All linocuts are created using a printmakers’ press. Her art is inspired by life, community and the neighbourhood. Lady Mohawk was created in 2022 to encourage people to step into their unique and authentic selves. With Lady Mohawk she runs linoprinting workshops, creates empowering art and is creating a healthy relationship workshop for school aged children.

September/October - Tegan Iversen

Tegan is a twenty-something-year-old artist, illustrator & curator who creates visual art inspired by this strange world we live in. Using drawing, painting & sometimes digital techniques, her work is colourful, fun & honest. Inspired by objects such as kewpie dolls & shoes, food such as hot chips & candy & nature such as flowers & the many planted pretties that live in her home, her work reflects the life she lives & the curiosity & wonders in the banal.

November/December - Laura Lethlean

Laura is a playwright and theatre maker based in the City of Maribyrnong. Her plays have been produced in New Zealand, Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. Her first play, Plastic Pacific is about the origins of plastic and the ongoing plastic crisis. Her second, The Space Between the Fuel and the Fire is about the increasing similarity between news reportage and reality television. Other plays have been about the transition from childhood to adulthood, abortion, love, consent, truth, and legacy. 

February - Catalina Garzon

Catalina Garzon is an emerging local artist who draws portraits, paints and makes illustrations mixing traditional and digital techniques. She is also studying visual arts and design.

March – Fiona Barbetti

As a cross-disciplinary local artist Fiona explores concepts of identity, female fertility and everyday experience. A major thread throughout her work has been the exploration of female identity through concepts of home, nostalgia, and the personal journey through infertility into parenthood.

April – Lillian Hull 

Lillian is a participant in the Forte Mentorship Program. She is a Maiawali (that’s a nation in Western Queensland) but spent most of her childhood living in Canberra, on Ngunnawal country. Since 2015 she has worked in the theatre space as a costumier/maker, with companies such as The Australian Ballet and Creature Technology Company. During lockdown last year she rediscovered her love of painting by keeping a disciplined routine with daily practice. She is exploring developing a new business model centred around painting on second hand clothes. 

May - Sasha Cuha

Sasha Cuha is a multidisciplinary artist living in Ascot Vale with extensive experience in film production, visual arts, poetry (both performance and written) and music. Since 2019 he has been involved with Poetryspective held at Pride of Our Footscray where he has performed numerous times as a feature poet with his own live musical accompaniment. During the lockdown of 2020, he was asked to provide approx. 30 minutes of recorded poetry film for their new online presence, and from this the film 5 Fragments was born and is now under consideration for 2 international film festivals. He is a partial recipient of the Mooney Valley Council grant for Podcasting and has been working on a project The Candle which focuses on mental health issues within the arts. 

June - Deb Bain King

Artist Deb Bain-King grew up in forest country. Now living in Naarm (Melbourne). Her work is a consideration of place, drawing on the inter-connectedness of living organisms, environment and community. She has been making and showing works of art in Naarm, interstate, and overseas for almost twenty years as an artist, community activist and curator. Her practice emerges from a lot of walking, observing, and listening. Part of this creates connection to community through conversation with people she finds on her walks and research.

July - Poro Bibi

Poro Bibi is a West Papuan multidisciplinary artist, who uses storytelling through music, visual, spoken word, sound sculpture and community organising to highlight movements of resistance and the continuity of culture, particularly of First Nations people and people from migrant and refugee backgrounds like himself. His current works explore human social behaviour that include migration and reciprocity.

August/September - Talitha Fraser

Talitha Fraser’s creative practice is one of contemplative listening for what space has to say at the nexus of context, time and place. Intuitive place-based arts invite us to inquire of, and deliberately engage with, our immediate landscape and the people in it. What can we make, here? How does place or event shape creative practice, and how does practice change place, or event, or people? Their works seek to explore what responsibilities, privileges, inspirations and possibilities exist within place.

October - Olivia Floate

By way of introduction, Olivia says, “I am (mostly) a ceramicist and (sometimes) a puppeteer who makes works under the name ‘sausage woman’. My works usually have a face with lidded eyes and a mouth on them - sometimes described as ‘disquieting’. I am attracted to anthropomorphism and the spirit that may reside inside an object.”

November/December - Mimmalisa Trifilo

Mimmalisa's artwork encompasses the central themes of identity, place and context, with emphasis on alternate histories, intercultural dialogue/pedagogy, ethnobotany, and ecology. Her foundation in analogue photography has expanded across other artforms, shifting her focus from the medium and concept to relationships. For this residency, Mimmalisa experimented with the repetition of botanical elements such as leaves, flowers, and other organic matter to create tile designs through a cyanotype process.

February - Opal Onyx

Artist OpalOnyx's practice revolves around engaging the overlooked and "childish". They have an obsession with puppetry and relish in using forms of expression typically reserved for children. Using the naive and simple, they express more profound concepts in a palatable and understandable way. Sometimes starting the conversation is difficult, and they hope that their work will give people a jumping-off point to start asking questions. During their residency, Opal will research and create a series of hand-stitched banners out of the world's oldest textile; FELT. Each flag will attempt to explore and highlight issues at the forefront of social justice. Inspired by protestors' signs, they will revolve around the themes of climate justice, indigenous land rights, queer liberation and the imprisonment of refugees.

March - Fiona Waters

Local artist, Fiona Waters, works in watercolour, ink, pencil and ceramics to reflect her own intuitive, playful, cathartic and emotional desires. Her drawings and objects are unique, fluid with organic shapes, often focused on bodies, or lumpy amorphous shapes, colours and textures. For her ArtsBox residency Fiona will make a series of ceramics and drawings that respond to the ceramics books from the Maribyrnong Library Catalogue. 

April - Maxime Banks

Maxime Banks is an award-winning, interdisciplinary artist, a time-traveller of the Black-American Diaspora with Chicago and Mississippi roots. Her work intersects science, visual art and creative technology with a sense of otherness across Afrofuture anamnesis, collage, multimedia, poetry, textiles and painting. Her self-portraits, both literal and psychological, are constellations of her journey as a Black woman emigrant.

Maxime is creating an Afro-galactic archive of Black portraiture, writing and identity. Maxime’s art practice explores Black portraiture, quantum poetics and more.

May - Andy Robertson

In drawings, paintings, videos and installations Andy Robertson collects, examines and reorganises the mundane minutia of everyday life to suggest unexpected or overlooked narratives, while at the same time toying with the viewer’s expectations by introducing elements that are farcical or surreal.

He recently completed a public art commission as part of Maribyrnong City Council’s StopMOTION program, which can be seen on the traffic signal box on the corner of Droop and Donald Streets, Footscray.

June/July - Frances Loriente

Frances Loriente seeks to combine her visual arts practice with her writing and work in the music industry. For her residency at Artsbox Frances wishes to experiment further with this medium to create a animated tale beginning with an Indigenous story of how the whale walked on the land and became the dingo, and a contemporary tale of a wandering dog that ends up in Footscray.

August - Gurmeet Kaur

Gurmeet Kaur (she/her) is a writer and educator from London, currently living on the Kulin Nation (Melbourne). Her work has appeared in Rewrite Reads, Dynamis Journal and Sweet and Sour Zine. Gurmeet is an alumni of Left to Write: Poetry development program with Express Media.

During her ArtsBox residency, she will be exploring family, language and displacement in her poetry project, as well as researching local migration history at the Footscray Library. 

September - Fiona Barbetti

As a cross-disciplinary artist Fiona explores concepts of identity, female fertility and everyday experience. A major thread throughout her work has been the exploration of female identity through concepts of home, nostalgia, and the personal journey through infertility into parenthood.

During her residency Fiona will continue to navigate her identity as female and mother through drawing, photography and collage. These works will form part of a greater body of work, The Female of the Species, where she is creating hybrid feminine creatures. The outcome of the residency will be a new body of work that will be used for an exhibition.

October/November - Matto Lucas

Matto Lucas is a local WeFo-based artist, photographer, designer, lecturer, curator, arts facilitator, producer and podcaster. During this residency, Lucas will attempt to combine his arts practice, photography and love of Footscray to create a series of portraits that celebrate the various faces of the municipality. By turning the Artsbox into an impromptu photo studio, residents are invited to drop in to sit for a portrait and contribute to this multi-media portrait series.