For Independent 2025, Aleana Egan presents a group of new paintings and sculpture. In Egan’s work, traces of interactions and experience are harvested and expressed through material objects, colour, and form, blending fragmented interior visions with sources from the world at large. 

small scene is a new sculpture comprised of an eclectic assortment of objects: ribbons of fabric threaded through a mesh structure, a linear wall relief, a folded garment atop a small red stool. The work is evocative and yet mysterious. Steel mesh hints towards industrial histories, while the stool brings us into the sphere of the domestic. Fabric and textiles evoke absence, but also the essence of a person – an external layer that can express our interiority, creating an atmosphere of emotional resonance and intimacy.

A meandering, sensuous line and sense of fluidity is carried from Egan’s sculptures into her painting practice. The artist manipulates colour, surface and texture, layering thin washes with thicker daubs. Inchoate forms evoke the malleable and elusive images that form behind closed eyes; fragmentary shapes that grasp at images as if retrieving memories from deep in the psychic landscape. 

“Feeling uncertain is a part of my work and life,” writes the artist in a statement on her work. She cites Keats’s concept of ‘negative capability’ – an acceptance of uncertainty, and the deeper understanding that comes through acknowledging two apparently contradictory truths. “There is such emphasis on knowing and understanding,” she continues, “but maybe there is much more to be learnt in not knowing.”

Twofold

In the recent series Twofold, Liliane Tomasko’s distinctive, bold lyricism and assertive sense of colour unfold across new diptychs on aluminium and linen. Opening up spatial possibility, this format allows tone, form and texture to dialogue back and forth across surfaces, sparking new resonances and shaping our understanding of each panel in relation to its neighbour. These paintings must negotiate two distinct voices – sometimes finding harmony, elsewhere tension; forging complex relationships that actively engage the viewer. “To confront these monumental diptychs of Tomasko is to enter a garden of forking paths, a forest of signs,” writes critic Raphy Sarkissian in a newly commissioned text. “Diaphanous and opaque forms coexist within these enigmatic diptychs.”

Like much of Tomasko’s oeuvre, the works in Twofold appear abstract but bear deep and tangled connections to the pictorial and narrative worlds. Larger shapes, suggestive of figures, come in and out of focus, fragmenting and coming back together in the mind’s eye. The work is also shaped by the artist’s longstanding interest in mythologies, particularly narratives of equilibrium and justice, such as the ancient concept of the weighing of the soul.