Creative Generation: In Residence 2025 Digital Exhibition

Group photo of Creative Generation Visual Art In Residence students with lead artist Ross Manning / Photography: Chloë Callistemon, QAGOMA 2025 / View full image

‘Creative Generation: In Residence’ is an annual three-day program delivered in collaboration with the Department of Education that provides Year 10 students from across Queensland the opportunity to work closely with an artist as they learn and experiment with new processes and techniques.

This year, students worked closely with lead artist Ross Manning, a Brisbane-based artist whose work transforms everyday materials into explorations of light, sound, and physics. Across the three-day program, Manning facilitated a series of hands-on workshops that exposed the students to his creative practice and equipped them a range of new skills.

Highlights from the workshops included transforming solar garden lights into devices capable of converting light into sound, creating kinetic sculptures with spinning motors, and experimenting with optical discs salvaged from the 1970s vintage electronic organ, the Optigan. The program culminated with students creating and presenting original artworks that integrated the skills developed through the workshops.

One of my favourite elements was being able to meet people from all over Queensland who share the same love for art that I have, it helped me feel like I’m going down the right path in my life.

– Tom Waller

Aldyn Murphy

Timed Vision 2025

Timed Vision is a piece on technology and the impact it has had on our perception. The goggles represent the sight we have and how some rely on other means. They take a more dated form to show how technology has progressed. I used recyclable materials to show the waste of goods, ranging from metals to recyclable plastic. The shoulder pad shows a shoulder to rest on, with the sharp teeth showing how one wrong move can cause harm, no matter how small.

Amelia Kluger

Sol Lucet Omnibus 2025

Sol Lucet Omnibus is an artwork that explores the intersection and impact of the artificial on nature. In the piece, the lily pads spin in slow harmony, playing with the movement of light and mimicking the appearance of water. The dragonfly is symbolic of conventional beauty that conforms to an idyllic view, juxtaposed with a fly on the opposite side of the lily pad, contrasting in meaning as something that does not fit within aesthetic idealisation. The electrical components are in equal parts ignored, representing an unawareness of environmental impact in preference for an idealised view of the world. The title, which translates to 'the sun shines for all', references how pollution has a deep impact on the environment and serves as a warning of the inevitable result of ignorance in this.

Aoife Fitzgerald

Drift 2025

Drift is a representation of me and my North Queensland lifestyle. I’m often found down by the beach, either on patrol or with my friends. The colours represent how the water can drown out negative thoughts and emotions, and how I find peace in a busy world. The uniqueness of the new skills I’ve gained has contributed to the positivity I feel when out in the sunshine.

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Charlotte Bartimote

Water Lily Wonders 2025

Made from cardboard boxes, hot glue, an old jar lid, repurposed wires, and a motor, I created a lily pad and a water lily that spins. A water lily was chosen as it resembles my connection to my family and how the most beautiful things can come from any beginning. The flower spins using a small motor that is connected to wires and a plug; I attached the mini motor to the base of my flower to make it spin, creating movement in my artwork.

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Heather Kelly

Sound of the Sea 2025

Sound of the Sea is an experimental work that explores the contrast between the playfulness and the uncanniness of the deep sea. Initially, I intended to portray the sea as something colourful and joyful through the use of repurposed mass-produced materials such as cardboard, alfoil, and cellophane. However, through the addition of torchlight, movement, and the jarring sound from the light-to-sound converter, it began to feel disturbing and alien. To me, this feels like a metaphor for the complex and contradictory relationship we have with the sea and our own depiction of it.

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Henry Power

Blinding speed 2025

To create Blinding speed, I used cardboard to create a dirt bike–shaped sculpture. To make the headlight for the bike, I used the light from a garden light and connected it to the battery from an LED candle with some scrap cable wire. I then used a motor system to rotate the base of the bike, which spins it slowly. By creating a dirt bike out of the fragile material of cardboard and rotating it with a machine, I question the value we attach to technology. It’s the juxtaposition of being able to crush the weak cardboard with my shoe and the spinning from the motor, displaying it as an item of value and prestige, that makes the viewer question the integration of technology in the world.

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Holly Stalton

Feather wires 2025

My artwork Feather wires is an interpretation of how technology is interacting with humanity, especially through the use and development of AI and how it tries to replicate human behaviour and thought. The artwork is made up of cardboard, wires, and paddle pop sticks. Feather Wires is meant to look figure-like while also having that uncanny AI feeling of not quite capturing the features of a human, and the wires jutting out of the body symbolise how it is still technology, even if it tries to dress itself up as something else.

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Isabella Schefe

Bottled confessional 2025

Bottled confessional is an abstract project that I have developed over the last day. It includes a jar, a spinning motor, a torch, and the secrets of everyone on the left side of the room. Simple objects, like coloured cellophane and a torch, are used to refract the coloured light and secrets onto their surroundings.

Jade Menzies

Sound Waves 2025

Sound Waves highlights the contrast between modern technologies, such as solar cells, motors, and LED lights, and nature, including sea creatures like jellyfish and clownfish. Nature is steady, consistent, and able to blend seamlessly into its ecosystem, while technology affects its surroundings, destroying, moving, and changing. The sea creatures are made from recycled materials, while the motors and other technologies were purchased new for this artwork.

Jasmin Roberts

Cat and Cat 2025

My artwork is my two babies, Petey and Ralphy. I used a motor to make them spin as if they were chasing each other, just like they do in the house. Innocence is shown in my artwork through the simplicity of my cats.

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Linh Nguyen

Flame of Nostalgia 2025

The flame of childhood never truly dies. Positioned on top of a rotating motor is a traditional carousel made from wooden sticks and paper, with an LED candle at its centre. The way in which the flame flickers mirrors the complex and fragile connection between past and present, but never truly dies. By incorporating themes reminiscent of childhood, the artwork invites the viewer to reflect on their own youth and connect with the artwork on an emotional level.

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Maddie Hernandez

The music box that grew a girl 2025

This piece portrays the blossoming of the young lady I have become today. It reflects my childhood and my growing love for dance. The inspiration for this sculpture is the first jewellery box I ever owned, which I still use to this day. My artwork means so much to me, as I have a deep and beautiful connection with dance and the life it has given me. Dance has taught me the most important life lessons that I carry with me in my day-to-day life. The flowers blooming around the ballerina symbolize each year passing by, with every petal holding every skill, memory, tear, smile, and giggle. Each petal represents a year of dance I have done, not just 13 petals, but 13 times I have chosen to continue doing the thing I love most.

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Matilda Dempsey

Boombox 2025

I really wanted to combine both turning light into sound and turning vibrations into sound, and personally, I love music. Boombox is a collection of various textures and materials that create different sounds when hit with the vibration detector. The centrepiece is a record player with holes cut into it and a light detector underneath, powered by a motor. When the motor spins, so does the record, and the light shines through, creating a repetitive beat. The other sounds can be played on top of this beat to make music.

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Morgan Pilotto

Our bare components 2025

My artwork is a metaphoric reflection of the past few days. With Ross Manning, I often found myself stripping wires and disassembling various electronic parts to isolate them into their base components. This inspired me to create an artwork resembling a motherboard, consisting of makeshift wires, engraved cardboard, and a pair of eyes. The difference, yet immense similarity, between man-made and natural objects ties back to the artwork’s roots—the “bare components” that affect how light, sound, and visual media are perceived.

Oli (Bethany Oliver)

Toothy McGee 2025

Looking at mechanical contraptions is something I haven’t explored much before, and the technicalities of them intrigued me, especially the contact speakers and how they pick up vibrations. I love exploring textures, and this was a fun way to continue that. I also noticed how most of the turning things were symmetrical, so in sculpting a tooth with other heavier objects inside, I explored how different shapes would spin.

Oliver Gisler

Refraction 2025

Refraction encourages viewers to reflect on the positive and negative parts of themselves. It blends horror and beauty while also conveying the fragile nature of life, emphasising that the decisions you make are in your own hands. A glass rose is held by a makeshift hand that bleeds, further symbolising the hurt and pain one can experience if this supporting hand is injured or mistreated.

Ruby-Clare Richardson

Little Fishy in the Sea 2025

Little Fishy in the Sea was inspired by Ponyo, especially the scene where Ponyo is running across the ocean of fish chasing the car. The waves are flowing, and the fish are jumping, reaching for freedom while staying in place.

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Simone Puddle

The Beauty Within 2025

This piece reveals how something simple can become extraordinary when seen from a different perspective or in a new light. As the shadows shift and unfurl, the familiar transforms into something unexpectedly beautiful. In this piece, I invite viewers to pause, look again, and notice the beauty woven into the fabric of everyday things.

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Tom Waller

Free 2025

My piece, Free, is a representation of my cat, Bob. Recently, we received complaints from our neighbour about Bob going into his garden and were threatened with a council complaint. We were left with only two options: keep him or return him to the RSPCA. In the end, we decided to keep him, which unfortunately meant he became a strictly indoor cat. Through this zoetrope animation of a cat leaping, I wanted to reflect the freedom he once had but has now been taken from him.

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Violet Wood

Shattered 2025

Fragmented layers of discs rotate while tilting unsettlingly. A cool light illuminates the iridescent shards, radiating jagged rays. A solar sensor emits a disconcerting noise, similar to that of a broken record.

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Vlada Nikitina

Dottie vision 2025

Dottie Vision is an aesthetically pleasing sculpture that exudes beauty with a sense of futurism. Ross Manning's influence made this new experimental work an interesting and innovative representation of tropical North Queensland flora, flourishing and blooming with its seasons. Dottie Vision carries a spirited cluelessness about nature.

Zaria Henry

Sonication 2025

Sonication is when plants respond to vibrations. It is a behavioural response to specific frequencies and can affect a plant’s growth and improve pollen production. In this piece, a solar light is used to create sound from the lights beneath the flower to demonstrate this. The flower is a half-open rose, with the lights creating sound as if the plant is growing from the vibrations and frequencies.