Threads of Belonging
An ongoing program with permanent lightboxes and outdoor art exhibitions along AMP Lane Albury every four to six months.
Threads of Belonging
This exhibition brings together artists whose practices explore how identity, memory, resilience, and community are woven into lived experience. From personal narrative to collective voice, each artist reimagines belonging through different media—painting, ceramics, digital collage, photography, gatherings and installation—showing how art can both ground us in place and connect us across difference.
Lisa Clarke
Champions
Champions is a portrait series by Albury-based photojournalist Lisa Clarke, celebrating five local Special Olympians who each excel in their chosen sport. Through large-scale portraits integrated with graphic elements, the project amplifies the athletes’ voices by weaving their own words on belonging, strength, and positive self-perception into the visual narrative. The result is both a celebration of athletic achievement and a powerful statement on the importance of inclusive representation.
Despite progress in disability rights, people with disabilities often face stigma and underrepresentation. Sport, however, has long been a force for transformation —building resilience, confidence, and community connection. Yet athletes with disabilities remain largely invisible in mainstream media and public art. Champions seeks to challenge this gap, spotlighting these athletes with dignity, pride, and agency. Each portrait is developed in close collaboration with the athletes, choosing poses that reflect their identity and sharing words that speak to their lived experience. These statements incorporated graphically, serve as both visual design and narrative voice —inviting viewers to reflect on strength, visibility, and inclusion.
Lisa’s creative practice spans nearly two decades and is grounded in authentic storytelling and collaboration. She holds a Bachelor of Photography (Majoring in Photojournalism and Visual Culture) from the Queensland College of Art and Design at Griffith University, and a qualification in Digital Graphic Design from RMIT. As a result, she has exhibited extensively, including at the nationally recognised Head On Photo Festival in Sydney, and last year when she presented a major exhibition at the Toowoomba Region Art Galleries in Queensland, showcasing five years of illustration work.
Her photos have been published nationally and internationally, with features in outlets including ABC News, The Guardian Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The New York Times Lens Blog. She has also collaborated with organisations such as Down Syndrome Australia, Queensland Health, New South Wales Health, and Mental Health Australia to deliver impactful national awareness campaigns and exhibitions that centre lived experience.
Recognition of her work includes winning the Rural Press Award for Best People Photograph (2012), and consecutive Clarion Awards for Best Photographic Essay (2013, 2014).
Melissa Baird
Artwork
Melissa Baird is a mixed-media artist based in the Albury–Wodonga region, creating works that celebrate joy, connection, and community.
For more than 37 years she has explored drawing, painting, and mixed media, working with acrylic and watercolour paints, polymer clay, resin, alcohol inks, gold leaf, and decorative home pieces such as resin bowls. Her practice also extends to original art prints and cards.
Melissa creates art as a way to bring happiness, colour, and harmony into the lives of others. Her work is deeply personal, drawing on fragments of thoughts, feelings, and memories, yet always intended to spark connection within the wider community. Inspired by artists such as Simon Bull, she embraces bold colour, uplifting words, and layers of texture to invite viewers to feel alive, at peace, and connected.
To Melissa art is about more than aesthetics—it is an act of storytelling and community building. Through her work she seeks to encourage belonging, kindness, and compassion, reflecting her belief that love is unconditional and that life is a journey to be treasured.
As a parent of two adult sons with special needs, Melissa’s art is also shaped by resilience, empathy, and a commitment to celebrating the beauty in everyday encounters. She often returns to recurring motifs, such as the eagle, symbolising strength, protection, and the ability to rise above challenges, and the tree of life, representing growth, harmony, and shared humanity.
Melissa’s art is ultimately an invitation to smile, to feel inspired, and to live with love and kindness.
Si Yi Shen
Mother's Bloom
Si Yi Shen is an emerging artist based in Magandjin (Brisbane), working across digital collage, moving image, projection, and installation. Her practice explores themes of placemaking, identity, and belonging through digital assemblage, where fragments of images, texts, emojis, and archival materials converge into interconnected visual worlds.
A core aspect of Si Yi Shen’s work examines intercultural connections and diasporic experiences. Through visual dialogue and non-verbal language, her ongoing series Mother’s Bloom reflects how families and communities nurture bonds across distance through imagination and imagery.
Recent projects include Shifting Perspectives (Bathurst Regional Gallery, 2025), Free Water (Worlding, Platform Arts Geelong, 2024), Imagining Terrains (Broken Hill City Gallery, 2023), and commissions with the Australian National Maritime Museum (New Beginnings Festival 2024; Sydney Festival 2024). Other works include Auspicious Beasts AR Experience (EDGE Sydenham, 2023), Digital Twin (Culture Vault at Piermarq, 2023), In the Moment (Boronia Grove Community Centre, 2021), Sending You Love (Casula Powerhouse, 2021), and Living (Storybox Darling Harbour / Parramatta, 2021). Earlier works include The Eclipse (Willoughby Visual Arts Biennial, 2019) and West Projections Festival (2019).
Si Yi Shen has been recognised as a winner of the Queensland XR Festival (Digital Art category), and as a finalist in the Sunshine Coast Art Awards (2025), the Lumen Prize (2024), the Australian XR Festival (2023), and the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (2023, 2025).
Jayanto Tan
Tea Ceremony in the Laneway’s
Jayanto Tan is a Gadigal/Sydney-based visual artist originally from North Sumatra, Indonesia. He blends mythologies, personal narratives, and cultural tradition to create works that speak to themes of identity, queer perspective, hierarchy, colonialism, and belonging. His practise includes ceramics, installation, and performance, often exploring his experience as a ‘minority in minority’ immigrant artist. Through sharing his unique creativity, he is hoping to represent those minority communities that struggle to have a voice in mainstream society.
Jayanto Tan’s practice is grounded in a deep engagement with memory, ritual, connection and belonging. Drawing inspiration from family archives, the artist reconnects with fragments of the past, seeking to preserve and honour embodied traditions that have shaped his identity and inform his art making. Food serves as a recurring motif throughout Jayanto's practice, featuring as both subject matter of his ceramic works and a performance element in tea ceremonies, while also serving as non-traditional art materials through his use of pandan extract. What results is imaginary forms that conjure a colourful, dream-like world. This project was created during a 2025 artist recent residency at The Pumphouse Albury.
Growing up in a large farming family in North Sumatra, the artist has many memories of gatherings in the kitchen, cooking, sharing stories, singing, dancing, laughing, and drinking tea. In these works, you see the artist reflects on these memorial home gatherings to create a live performance at The Pumphouse that engages with the supportive community. The artist found a way to celebrate their unique cultural identity and connection by sharing stories and recipes with the generous community, which are offered here with humour and love.
The garden that the artist has created, to honour family and friends who have deceased, explores Jayanto's personal narrative of identity, longing, queerness, lost family, memorial, and self-destruction, here portrayed through alienation, fantasy, and desire in a peaceful dreamland. Tea Ceremony in the Laneway’s Garden is a shared space where friends and family from the past, and visitors in the present, can mingle to envision the future.
Jayanto Tan is a Gadigal/Sydney-based visual artist originally from North Sumatra, Indonesia. He blends mythologies, personal narratives, and cultural tradition to create works that speak to themes of identity, queer perspective, hierarchy, colonialism, and belonging.
His practise includes ceramics, installation, and performance, often exploring his experience as a ‘minority in minority’ immigrant artist. Through sharing his unique creativity, he is hoping to represent those minority communities that struggle to have a voice in mainstream society.
