What draws a young artist to make sense of their world through art? For the artists in Top Arts 2026, standing at the threshold of adulthood, art became a space to test possibilities, explore shifting realities and express ideas shaped by their experiences growing up in metropolitan and regional Victoria.
Presented as part of the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority’s Season of Excellence, Top Arts 2026 celebrates forty‑three emerging artists who completed VCE visual art studies in 2025. This annual exhibition, now in its 32nd year, sees each new cohort present work as distinctive and varied as the artists themselves.
For many participants, early adolescence unfolded amid COVID‑19 lockdowns – periods of interruption, isolation and rapid change. While the long-term impact of this period is hard to define, traces of the pandemic’s influence seem to emerge throughout the exhibition. Many artworks are resolutely hand‑made: twenty paintings, several carefully crafted sculptures and works using labour‑intensive practices such as crochet and tailoring. Equally striking is the depth of introspection, prompting questions about how isolation may have nurtured skill, patience and self‑reflection and how this may have shaped a generation of young artists.
Selected from more than 1100 applicants, the artists featured in Top Arts 2026 demonstrate sustained inquiry, technical skill and conceptual depth across diverse materials and processes, giving rise to five key exhibition themes.
Self as story
These artworks are deeply introspective and autobiographical. For Coco Sargent, lockdown and isolation created space to learn crochet, a skill that continues to shape her practice. Autoethnography reflects Sargent’s Kenyan and Australian heritage through a crocheted dress made from culturally specific materials, including strands of her mother’s hair. The garment was later deliberately destroyed as part of a recorded performance, with only its remnants presented in the final installation. Through this act, the work underscores the fluid, shifting nature of cultural identity.
Shaun McNearney turned to painting to explore the layered complexities of his heritage. In Me vs Me, he stages a boxing match between two versions of himself, each representing his Irish and American backgrounds respectively, symbolising inner conflict and tension between cultures.
Tension takes a different form in Lehan Ma’s sculptural work Seeing you, seeing me, a playful exploration of familial miscommunications. The miniature figures, based on the artist and her mother, feature heads of similar but distinct marine creatures that symbolise small misunderstandings among family.
Informed by her experience of the rare disease scleroderma, Mabel Fowler’s photographic series Unique celebrates the resilience of young people living with the condition. Similarly, Brooke Wheeler’s self‑portrait Devil horns peeled away exposes the material evidence of craniofacial surgery, positioning her continued healing as an empowered process of self‑reclamation.
Living landscapes
Alongside introspection, other artists responded decisively to the world around them. Rome Jowett-Crociani’s BOODJURA (fire sticks) explores fire as a force of destruction, healing and renewal. Drawing on Indigenous cultural burning practices and family teachings, the artist presents fire as a tool for caring for Country.
Oscar Cooke’s photographic series Mountains to Oceans reflects his engagement with seaside landscapes and surf communities. Meanwhile, in Lunch, Amelia Bull examines the hidden impacts of commercial fishing in an intricate drawing of delicate marine creatures caught inside a sardine tin.
Willow Hines’ Best before yesterday is a satirical comment on climate inaction, transforming a fridge into a stage where tiny figures skate on thinning ice. Examining urban precarity, Ben Burton’s streetscape Stairway to Heaven explores how marginalised individuals can rapidly shift from stability into homelessness.
Ways of seeing
We all experience the world differently, and the artists in Top Arts 2026 bring their unique perspectives to life through art. Some draw on formative journeys while others rethink societal expectations through diverse materials and approaches.
In his large-scale painting Fragments of becoming, Goldman Xu reflects on a turbulent transition into adulthood. Expressive lines and fragmented forms convey chaos while a repeated eye motif suggests both self‑discovery and an uneasy sense of being watched.
The exhibition also reflects the pressures of image and identity. Sandra Abeywardena’s sculpture BRAT appears as a grotesque yet vulnerable, grub-like creature that favours honesty over polished perfection. Conversely, Milo Friedman’s Obduktion fragments and reconstructs the body, reflecting contemporary anxieties around body image.
Inspired by the concept of seeing oneself from the outside, Zindzi Clayford’s enigmatic portrait Fallacies of perception (autoscopy) explores how self‑perception shifts when we reconsider our experiences from a distance.
Everyday moments
The quiet routines and overlooked details of daily life can subtly shape who we are, as we see in this section of Top Arts 2026 where artists transform the mundane into something resonant. Yoona Liu’s Tones of the everyday depicts domestic spaces infused with colours she associates with different members of her family while in Reflection in practice, Shiya Tang elevates humble objects, including stationery and art‑making tools, revealing their beauty through meticulous detail.
For Sayuni Wickramasinghe, a familiar Year 12 scene inspired her intricately rendered painting, Burnout. Scattered objects on an unmade bed signal lapses in self‑care while the emanating glow of a laptop conveys the strain of constant screen use. In contrast, Wilby Fredericks’s Workshop 5, made from upcycled materials including a bed base and a used drop sheet, celebrates the resourcefulness and creativity undertaken in sheds, workshops and studios.
Here, now
For some artists in Top Arts 2026, time is a force that shapes experience, memory and change. Attuned to both the immediacy of the present and the poetry of the past, these works explore time in inventive and thought‑provoking ways.
Marleah Wilkie’s Innocence is a bitch examines the shift from childhood to adolescence through contrasting depictions of her twelve‑year‑old sister and seventeen‑year‑old friend. Vehicles in the painting symbolise both freedom and confinement and reflect the isolation and longing for independence Wilkie experienced as a teenager.
Through three sequential self‑portraits, Week 7, 10, and 12, Emi Wong presents a selection from a broader series in which she charts her artistic development over a twelve-week period. Meanwhile, Alexandra Lawry’s Mondo treasures a fleeting moment shared with her pet cat.
Though a hallmark of Top Arts 2026 is its abundance of handmade work, the exhibition concludes with two digital pieces. Dylan Hopkins invites audience interaction in flow, where real‑time physics and live participation generate shifting patterns inspired by natural systems. And in Carina Tang’s animation Silence and the Khronos Wonderland, viewers follow the character Silence on a philosophical journey through time, reflecting on existence as it unfolds and dissolves.
Collectively, the artworks in Top Arts 2026 chart the many ways young people navigate identity, landscape, everyday life, shifting perceptions and the passage of time. Whether created through painstakingly handmade forms or bold digital expression, the work of these talented VCE graduates reminds us that artmaking is an active process of seeing, questioning and reimagining both inner experience and the wider world with care, curiosity and intent.