Street style: Meet the artists of Melbourne Art Fair

At Melbourne Art Fair, the art wasn’t the only thing turning heads.

Every February, the art crowd descends on Melbourne Art Fair for a few days of booth-hopping, big conversations and even bigger ideas. With 60 leading galleries, Indigenous-owned art centres and design studios exhibiting under one roof, it’s a snapshot of the artists and makers shaping the moment.

For more street style, head to our Fashion section.

But as always, the inspiration doesn’t stop at the walls. In the lead-up to the Fair, Australian photographer Liz Sunshine was on the ground capturing a series of street-style portraits of this year’s participating artists, gallerists, designers and ambassadors. From considered LOEWE tailoring and statement accessories to lived-in band T-shirts and bright knitwear, their looks were just as compelling as the works on display. Meet the artists below and take notes while you’re at it.

Dalton Stewart

Originally from South Africa, Melbourne-based Dalton Stewart’s interdisciplinary practice considers the interconnected roles of architecture, design, and visual art, examining how each informs and shapes the other. Designing furniture and objects, often using repurposed elements – his work seeks to layer and reveal stories, histories, archaeologies and material processes that are frequently overlooked, treating design as a critical form of enquiry.

@_daltonstewart

Elynor Smithwick

Elynor Smithwick’s painting process is contemplative and cyclical, involving both accumulation and erasure. Focusing on the stillness of daily life, her inspiration often comes from fleeting moments – sunsets, shifting skies – that offer a quiet sense of presence and connection. These ephemeral glimpses uncover beauty within the ordinary.

@ely_nor at @sophiegannongallery

Rosanna Ceravolo

Studio Ceravolo is a multi-disciplinary practice, working across the fields of architecture, interior design, and product design, committed to creating diverse outcomes that aim to elevate the human experience. Founded and led by architect Rosanna Ceravolo, Studio Ceravolo’s work is typified by a collaborative, contextually sensitive, and highly considered approach; the practice’s dedication to detailing evidenced within all design responses, from built forms to furniture items.

@studioceravolo at @collingwood_yards

Anna Varendorff

Melbourne-based artist, designer and educator, Anna Varendorff’s cross-disciplinary practice engages with contemporary jewellery, sculpture, and object design; compositionally and materially considering the act of making as integral to the human condition and employing it as a means of critical examination and reimagining. She has exhibited in Australia and internationally since 2004, and in 2016,  Anna founded the design business ACV studio.

@varendorff at @acvstudio

Tali Roth

Established in 2015 by interior designer Tali Roth, her namesake studio’s international body of work fuses exquisite craftsmanship and innate functionality to produce deeply layered and highly detailed residential and commercial environments. Studio Tali Roth has forged a design language of luxe generosity and modern refinement, anchored by whimsical forms, sophisticated materials, and objects that embody a sense of sentimentality.

@studiotaliroth at @stationgalleryaustralia

Jordan Fleming

With a background in cabinet making and interior design, Jordan Felming founded her eponymous practice in Australia in 2018, crafting pieces that transcend function to become expressive, almost animate presences within a space. Fleming’s process is deeply responsive, she allows materials to guide each work, treating them as active collaborators rather than passive mediums.

@_jordanfleming at @collingwood_yards

Maggie Brink

Brisbane-born, Naarm-based Maggie Brink works across painting, textiles and installation. Her practice explores the emotional and psychic registers of images, objects and materials. Drawing from cinema, photography, theatre, popular culture, mythology and domestic life, Brink creates works that hover between surface and screen, intimacy and estrangement. Brink’s paintings – layered and ghost-like representations of inanimate objects, landscapes and figures – are exhibited alongside sculptural works and textiles that are dyed, printed and sewn in different ways, sometimes with graphic imagery or text.

 @maggie_brink at @dainesinger

Daine Singer

Her namesake art gallery, Daine Singer is a contemporary art gallery that exclusively represents a group of fifteen artists from Australia and Aotearoa and also presents occasional curated exhibitions and solo exhibitions by unrepresented artists.

@dainesinger

Annie Paxton

Annie Paxton is a multidisciplinary designer based between Naarm and Berlin. She works as an architect alongside her creative practice which navigates the juncture between architecture and furniture/object, with a keen interest in how design drives and is driven by the poetics of everyday life. With the tendency to imbue works with patina and the trace of the hand, the interrogation of time and process as a material is often a salient driver in her practice.

@anniepaxtonstudio

Ella Saddington

In her own practice as a designer and curator, Ella Saddington champions creative partnerships and the value of experimentation and curiosity. Her work (Cordon Salon) spans lighting and hand-poured mirrors born from a specialised artisanal practice dating back centuries. Seeing traditional craft practices extend into the contemporary design context, Ella’s objects infuse spaces with a solid sense of elegance and playfulness.

@cordonsalon

Andy Dinan

Andy Dinan founded and established Melbourne Art Rooms, known as MARS Gallery, in 2004 with a steadfast resolve for promoting Australian artists. After a successful decade in Port Melbourne, MARS moved into the purpose-built, state-of-the-art gallery in Windsor in 2014. The new MARS represents the gallery’s commitment to the next generation of art and artists, enabling the showing of challenging new media including sound sculpture, video and light art alongside contemporary painting, sculpture and works on paper. MARS is at the forefront of innovation in Australian contemporary art galleries in both design and programs.

@marsgallery

Oigåll Projects

Oigåll Projects is a proudly independent gallery and experimental design space based in Fitzroy. Founded in 2021 by partners Andy Kelly and Mitchell Zurek, the gallery operates as both a commercial showroom and a conceptual playground, a site for serious ideas dressed up in fun outfits. Part gallery, part fever dream, Oigåll Projects is where experimentation meets execution, a place for the aesthetically unwell and the materially obsessed.

@oigall_projects

Ruth O’Leary

Ruth O’Leary is an Australian artist whose practice spans photography, performance, painting and expanded media. Her work often engages feminist, subjective and maternal themes, exploring personal and cultural narratives through experimental approaches such as the photobooth as an artistic space.

@ruth_o.leary at @marycherrycontemporary

Marta Figueiredo

Marta Figueiredo is an Australian-Portuguese multidisciplinary artist and designer. Her practice spans experimental design, sculpture, installation, public art, and performance, exploring how materials, objects, and spatial experiences can express stories of care, resilience, and the body. These investigations are grounded in chronic illness, feminist thought, and engagement with ecology and place. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Melbourne Now at the NGV, Sydney Contemporary, Milan Design Week, Collectible Brussels, and Métaphores – Hermès Paris.

@martafigueiredo_studio at @collingwood_yards

For more on the Melbourne Art Fair, head here.