Join our current artists in residence, Sol Fernandez and Jenn Arllen, at Schoolhouse Studios on Thursday 3 September from 6 - 8pm for the opening of Still, We Make: a culmination of works created during a three month residency at Schoolhouse Studios.
Still, We Make is a two-person exhibition bringing together new painting, photography and film made during the residency period. The title holds two meanings: we make things even now, in the midst of everything — and in stillness, we find the conditions to create.
The exhibition centres on identity, ancestry and the creative life of mothers — not motherhood as subject matter, but motherhood as context: the circumstances under which art gets made, postponed, recovered, and reimagined. Both Sol and Jenn bring practices shaped by cultural heritage and personal lineage. Sol’s work draws on intergenerational storytelling rooted in her South Asian background and community; Jenn’s paintings and drawings return repeatedly to ancestral offerings, tropical landscape and the body as site of memory. Together, the works ask: what do we carry, what do we pass on, and what do we finally allow ourselves to keep?
About the artists
Sol Fernandez and Jenn Arllen are BIPOC artists, mothers and collaborators based in Naarm. Their practices are rooted in painting, photography and film, and share a preoccupation with ancestry, belonging, tenderness, and the quiet labour of holding a family’s stories across time.
Sol is a multidisciplinary artist and curator whose work centres intergenerational memory and community authorship. She is Artistic Director of Way Over There Collective, an organisation dedicated to uplifting Black, Brown and Indigenous artists in South-East Naarm, and Curator at Seventh Gallery, Collingwood. Her 2023 New Ground Commission at Bunjil Place (Sidney Myer Fund) resulted in I Am All Of Us — a short film, docu-series and publication developed across seven years with family and community. Sol has exhibited and screened work across Melbourne since 2017, with ongoing institutional collaborations including the NGV and SBS.
Jenn Arllen is a multidisciplinary artist and mother, painter and drawer whose visual art practice moves between vivid colour-saturated canvases and quiet, gestural charcoal work. Her imagery — palm trees, ancestral flowers, tender figures — draws from cultural memory, the body, and a deep attentiveness to lineage. A work of hers was recently acquired into the Pagbasa Archive Collection.
Together, they are re-entering and deepening their practices as artists who are also mothers, bringing that experience to the centre of their work.
Carers & bubs event held on Friday 4 September 11am — 1pm, for everyone who mother — in all the forms that takes. Book via the link below!
This project is supported by Merri-bek City Council.