Launch: Wednesday 21 May 6–8PM

A Hundred Languages extends on the Reggio Emilia approach of early childhood, which views children’s creativity as having boundless modes of expression. Asking, what methods of making can be challenged by asking artists to play with their languages of self-expression? Adult creatives Lia Dewey Morgan and Juliet Phraser explore this curatorial framework in conversation with artists of intersectional identities and occupations of care, Luyuan Zhang, Mel Deerson, Ruth O’Leary, and Sam Kariotis. Together, a soft and inviting space of sculptures, poetry, drawings and personal narratives invites audiences to reflect on their developed modes of making and communicating.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Lia Dewey Morgan is a poet, writer, and library worker based in Naarm. With a background in spoken word, choral music, and rap, her writing explores the intersection of music, poetry and identity. Her debut collection, Bath Songs, was praised for its "resonant poetics of emergence." Morgan's recent work delves into queer faith and religious scripture. She is currently focused on developing a poetics of place and intercultural exchange through private study and experimentation while refining her second manuscript.

Juliet Phraser is an artist, film-maker and early childhood teacher from Naarm/Melbourne, living with disabilities. Her practice praises ethics of care and collaboration, ranging across mediums of video, painting, sculpture and social practice. She’s seeks to create fulfilling projects that embrace connection and queer family in the face of climate crisis. She is currently working as a kindergarten art teacher and editing her first feature documentary.

Dinithi De Alwis Samarawickrama is a multi-disciplinary Sri Lankan born artist practicing in Naarm, Australia. Their work is an exploration of diasporic longing and loss. It centres on acts of dreaming and prayer through the analysis and honouring of ancestral practices and speculative ecologies. Their artistic practice seeks to develop spiritual solutions to healing and re-remembering; dreaming of a post humanist world through the folk tales of their past.

Luyuan Zhang is a Chinese multidisciplinary artist based in Melbourne. Born in 1995, they moved to Australia in 2014. Luyuan’s work—spanning installation, video, and performance—reflects their queer experiences of displacement, blending deadpan humor and slapstick to provoke critical thought on contemporary social issues.

Mel Deerson is an artist, writer, and teache, working both solo and collaboratively. They make work that's intimate, vivid and sometimes funny, creating a multifaceted imaginative world across mediums with embodied reference to historical or archival material. Their work has been published in Art+Australia and Runway Magazine shown in venues such as TarraWarra Museum of Art. In 2023, Deerson was awarded the University Prato Centre Artist in Residence to research angels, stained glass, medieval art, and local queer histories.

Ruth O’Leary (based Dja Dja Wurrung country) holds a BFA from RMIT University and First Class Honours from Monash University. Her practice interlaces feminist, subjective and maternal ideas played out through the expanded painting and performance. She has exhibited in solo exhibitions and participated widely in group shows across Australia alongside completing residencies in Australia, Germany and Finland. As a mother to three young children her experience of maternity informs all her work. She has taught as a casual lecturer in the drawing department at RMIT since 2018.

Sam Kariotis is a multi-disciplinary artist combining forms of collage with projection, installation, sculpture and sound work. His work reimagines classical Baroque imagery exploring themes of magic, sexuality and the unconscious, and aims to bring intuitive processes into the mediums of collage and installation. Creating intimate encounters with the trans masculine body, he summons viewers to witness a nuanced and highly personal depiction of his relationship between faith and gender.

Image Credit: Dinithi De Alwis Samarawickrama, Work in Progress, 2025, pencil on paper.