CIVIC ART BUREAU
M16 x CAB 40th Anniversary Satellite Show
FUNDRAISER in the Civic Art Bureau Window for M16’s 40th anniversary
BUY A RAFFLE TICKET TO WIN!
Opening: Saturday 2 August 3pm – 5pm
Runs: Saturday 2 August – Sunday 17 August 2025
Artworks
1st Prize – Lynne Flemons, Meander, 2025, Acrylic on Canvas, 120×180 cm. (Valued $4,000) Image Brenton McGeachie
2nd Prize – Savanhdary Voongpoothorn, Timbre III, 2005, Intaglio, plate-mark 34.7 h x 29.4 w cm, sheet 61.2 h x 46 w cm. (Valued $2,500) Image Brenton McGeachie
3rd Prize – Nick Offer, Dead Tree, 2024, Oil on aluminium composite board, 41 x 60cm. (Valued $1,600) Image courtesy of the artist
4th Prize – Madeline Cardone, Slick, 2025, Kiln formed glass, 230 x 250 x 30mm. (Valued $1,500) Image Brenton McGeachie
This Satellite exhibition commemorates M16’s legacy of high-calibre studio artists and the thousands of artworks that have been produced and exhibited at M16 over the past 40 years. This show brings together the work of three accomplished M16 Studio artists; Lynne Flemons, Nick Offer, and Madeline Cardone, and esteemed Studio alumni Savanhdary Vongpoothorn.
Artworks in this exhibition have been kindly donated to the 40th Anniversary Fundraiser by the artists and are available to be yours in the online raffle fundraiser. Tickets available in bio!
M16 Artspace is supported by the ACT Government.
The M16 40th Anniversary Fundraiser Project is kindly supported by the exhibiting artists, Civic Art Bureau, The Framing Store, Living Arts Canberra and Brenton McGeachie Photography.
Founded in 1985, M16 Artspace is an inclusive organisation that supports a thriving arts community of emerging and established artists. Located in Griffith, Canberra, M16 runs three gallery spaces, manages 30 artist studios and houses five arts organisations that offer art classes. In celebration of the 40th anniversary of M16 Artspace, the M16 x CAB Satellite Show commemorates M16’s legacy of high-calibre studio artists and the thousands of artworks that have been produced and exhibited at M16 over the past 40 years. This show brings together the work of three accomplished M16 Studio artists; Lynne Flemons, Nick Offer, and Madeline Cardone, and esteemed Studio alumni Savanhdary Vongpoothorn.
Meander, Valley of Creeks (Gudgenby), was painted by Lynne Flemons in response to her time spent in the Gudgenby Valley, in Namadgi National Park. This work is an energetic exploration of Lynne’s observations during her Craft and Design Residency in Namadgi National Park. She reflected;
‘Whilst an AIR I spent time walking and drawing around the Gudgenby Valley. This painting is a compilation of those walks that took me into the landscape from the Gudgenby Read-Cut Cottage, around granite outcrops, over and around creek and wetlands. In the valley, there are many creeks that cross and converge, meandering onward, and there is much work done by National Park Rangers that stay in the homestead, also depicted, to maintain and improve this beautiful and significant landscape.’
Nick Offer’s Portrait of a Dead Tree combines his dual interests in landscape and portraiture and reframes his figurative depiction of a dead tree within a landscape as a humanised subject matter presented in portrait format. This work signals his contemplation and memorialisation of life and death cycles in the everyday.
These themes are also explored through the language of abstraction with Madeline Cardone’s glass wall piece Slick in which an undulating, skin-like texture has been captured in iridescent, kiln-formed glass. The work embraces the posthuman with material playfulness, teetering between the human and non-human – the effect is both dazzling and unsettling to grasp.
Savanhdary Vongpoothorn’s Timbre III is an abstract intaglio print edition the artist produced in 2005. This work is an exploration of undulating colour layers, composed of hundreds of dots in a gridded composition. This work is consistent with the artist’s decades long fascination with the grid as a compositional tool and theoretical approach to abstraction. Consistent with Vongpoothorn’s longstanding body of work, Timbre III utilises the grid as a site of meditation, enabling her to explore Buddhist concepts through abstraction.
Artworks in this exhibition have been kindly donated to the 40th Anniversary Fundraiser by the artists and are available to be yours in the online raffle fundraiser. The raffle will be drawn on Saturday 1 November at 7.30pm at M16 Artspace.
The M16 40th Anniversary Fundraiser Project is kindly supported by the exhibiting artists, Civic Art Bureau, The Framing Store, Living Arts Canberra and Brenton McGeachie Photography.
Artists
Lynne Flemons
Lynne Flemons is an Australian artist based in Canberra, ACT. She has a BA (Visual) from the Australian National University (ANU), a Postgrad Bachelor of Teaching, Western Sydney University, and a Master of Philosophy (Visual Art) ANU. She has exhibited her work widely through her involvement in residencies, solo and group exhibitions at both regional and commercial galleries in Australia and abroad. Her work is held in public and private collections in Australia and internationally including the Australian National Gallery, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Ballinglen Art Foundation, Ireland and many others.
Lynne has been awarded numerous art residencies in Australia and Europe, including the Cradle Mountain Wilderness Gallery in Tasmania, Ballinglen Art Foundation, Ireland and Serlachius Museum, Finland.
Artist Statement
Lynne Flemons painted Meander, Valley of Creeks (Gudgenby), in response to the Gudgenby Valley, in Namadgi National Park, where she was Artist in Residence in April 2024 as a recipient of the prestigious Craft + Design Canberra AIR Program.
The Gudgenby Valley has natural and cultural heritage significance. Evidence of settler farming history coexists with deep time geological stories, and traces of First Nations land-use practices. The form of the painting echoes the artist’s experience of being there in the valley walking and drawing.
‘Whilst an AIR I spent time walking and drawing around the Gudgenby Valley. This painting is a compilation of those walks that took me into the landscape from the Gudgenby Read-Cut Cottage, around granite outcrops, over and around creek and wetlands. In the valley, there are many creeks that cross and converge, meandering onward, and there is much work done by National Park Rangers that stay in the homestead, also depicted, to maintain and improve this beautiful and significant landscape’
Nick Offer
Nick Offer lives and work in Canberra where he has a studio at M16 Artspace. His work combines figuration and abstraction – whether focusing on landscapes, portraits or mixed media compositions – and has been exhibited widely both here and abroad. His main aim in all formats is to create, often using collage as a starting point, a unique and persuasive world in each picture.
Recent exhibitions and awards have included: The Doyles Landscape Award (2024, First Prize); ‘Figurativas 25’ at the European Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona (2025); The National Contemporary Art Prize (2024, ‘Highly Commended’, 2023 ‘Highly Commended’), The Lethbridge Landscape Award (2024, 2023 ‘Highly Commended’), the John Leslie Art Prize (2024), The Shirley Hannon Portrait Award (2024), ‘Foundation Traces’ , a solo show at M16 Artspace (2024).
Savanhdary Vongpoothorn
Born in Laos in 1971, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn came to Australia in 1979. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the University of Western Sydney and a Masters of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales (COFA). She now lives and works in Canberra, Australia.
Savanhdary has undertaken numerous residencies, both in Australia and overseas including in India, Japan, Laos, Scotland, Singapore, and Vietnam. In 2006 she was commissioned to create a major new work for Zones of Contact, the 15th Biennale of Sydney.
She was a finalist in the 2016 Sir John Sulman Prize and the 1998 Moet & Chandon Art Prize. Her work is included in important public collections including those of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Queensland Art Gallery/GOMA, Brisbane; Art Gallery of New South Wales,Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Australian National University Collection, Canberra and Artbank, as well as notable private and corporate collections including Macquarie Bank, Sydney; World Bank, New York; the Holmes à Court Collection, Perth; and the Allens Collection, Sydney.
Savanhdary’s work has always interwoven Lao cultural references with Australian and other cultural influences: from Australian Aboriginal art to Scottish Tartans, to Indian miniatures, and now to Japanese Buddhism. Besides using motifs and symbols from Lao textiles, for example, she has applied a technique of perforation to some artworks in a direct reference to the act of weaving.
Spiritual references have also been important, especially the use of Lao words, texts and concepts from Theravada Buddhism, including Khathaa (Lao-Pali) protective incantations or spells. In her most recent works, she has woven and broken the Lao-Pali Sutra in such a way that the resulting imagery recalls arabesques.
For Savanhdary Vongpoothorn, such cultural references do not constitute a fixed tradition or an objectified sense of “culture”. Rather, they stem from her experience of growing up living and breathing in Lao cultural, familial, and religious worlds, both in Laos and Australia.
Madeline Cardone
Madeline Cardone lives and works on Ngunnawal country, and is a graduate from the ANU School of Art and Design (2018). Her practice is primarily sculptural, underpinned by an interest in architectural theory and how the body encounters space and materiality. Her work engages predominantly with glass, but also extends to material explorations in ceramics, drawing, photography and performance. She often works to develop experimental and unconventional ways of making with her materials, with an inherent sensitivity towards subtle surface and refined form.
Her current work plays with sensory and material tensions within black glass. She explores the notion of ‘glass as skin’, as a way of conveying an experience of space and bodily memory. Her works frame the interplay of light, shadow in sculptural, tangible form to contemplate how the physical and intangible aspects of human experience are shaped by the spaces, moments, and memories we inhabit.
Madeline has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2017. She is the recipient of the Bassett Downs Honours Scholarship in Glass (ANU, 2021), the Vicki Torr Emerging Artist Prize (Ausglass, 2022), and the Aldo Bellini Acquisition Award for Milano Vetro Under-35 (Milan, 2024).