Federation University Emerging Artist Awards
25 October 2025 – 26 January 2026
Karen Zipkas | Liam Maree Rogers
The Federation University Emerging Artist Award has always been a long-standing tradition before the Art School’s closure (2024), and a testament to the exemplary talent in Gippsland’s contemporary emerging art scene, providing exhibition opportunities at arc Yinnar.
This year Latrobe Regional Gallery is proud to be hosting the last of the Federation University Emerging Artist Award recipients; Karen Zipkas with Reflections on Inversion, and Liam Maree Rogers with Still Breathing. We are proud to offer a paid exhibition- at national standard – in our state-of-the-art gallery spaces, with full curatorial and technical support, giving the emerging artists a memorable start to their flourishing art careers.
The Federation University Emerging Artist Awards has been curated by Visual Artist and arc Yinnar member Liz Tyler with additional curatorial assistance and support from the Latrobe Regional Gallery curatorial staff.
Reflections on Inversion is a folio-based body of work developed in Karen Zipkas’ last year as an Art student. This body of work possesses a profound connection to climatic advocacy, dwelling on Solastalgia, and the climatic effects that sought to threaten and overthrow/devastate the forests of Mirboo North, during the infamous Mirboo North Storm Cell (Feb 2024). This exhibition presents these thematic concerns throughout a constellation of site-responsive artworks that were activated through the employment and conjunctions of analogue, DIY, and contemporary technologies.
A home-made trailer camera obscura conveys many of the artworks produced for this exhibition. The white enclosed box trailer (Van trailer) floats as both an adoration and tribute to the traditional practices, and analogue equipment of the pioneers of mid 1900’s landscape photography, and the very physics that compose the practice of photography itself. This DIY trailer camera obscura stands as testament of a humble, upcycled mentality that seeks to be resourceful in a world that is driven by mass production.
Reflections on Inversion warrants an array of multi-dimensional and multidisciplinary works that span across drawing, analogue photography, sculpture, digital photography, painting, and video work.
Presented as a methodical narrative—part recollection, part liveliness—this exhibition unfolds like a journal of lived experience. It reveals the fleeting beauty that can emerge in the aftermath of climate rupture, fragile and momentary against the sheer weight and presence of absolute loss. Furthermore, inseparable from the collective grief that lingers—a sombre reminder that what has been broken will not simply heal but must be mourned.
Karen Zipkas is a Gippsland-local, visual artist and recipient of the Federation University Emerging Artist Awards (2024).
Still Breathing is both an amalgamation and continuation of Liam Maree Rogers’ folio—based work created in his concluding year (2024) in Art School.
Still Breathing is a tender, gentle, cautious, and caring exhibition that counsels our well-being, by promoting self-care, exercising our right to pause, and indulge in soft mindfulness in what is an otherwise, monotonous, maximalist society driven by overproduction and mass consumption.
Dwelling in the lived experiences of late diagnosis in neurodivergence, queerness, and invisible chronic disability, this exhibition by Rogers centres on the notion of quality—as a state of mind, a state of being, and a state of perception. Here, quality emerges not from speed or perfection, but as the result of meditative care, intentional slowness, and the quiet art of taking one’s time. Through this lens, Rogers invites us to reconsider how we measure excellence—not in outcomes, but in the depth of presence, process, and lived experience.
Still Breathing enacts as both a breathing, meditative and safe installation. Echoing the intimacy of a bedroom (Subtly referencing Tracey Emin’s, My Bed, 1998), Liam platforms experiences of what is deeply personal, while warmly welcoming interaction, and fostering refuge. This multi-layered installation is composed from an array of various disciplines. In both traditional and contemporary methods of artmaking across traditional and contemporary technologies such as, drawing, hand animation (rotoscoping), sculpture, audio-visual and digital media.
Liam Maree Rogers is a Gippsland local, visual artist and recipient of the Federation University Emerging Artist Awards (2024).