Jarra Karalinar Steel
Jarra is a multidisciplinary artist known for her Melbourne Art Tram, the curation of Rising Melbourne art trams 2022-2024, her powerful poster art, large-scale public installations, LED Wurrung works, augmented reality, digital art, game design, emu egg engravings, and commemorative signage.

Jarra’s work explores her identity, memories, future folklore, Blak Futurism and her lived experiences growing up in Melbourne and living on country surrounded by culture with knowledge passed down through her family and Elders.

Her focus in public/community art looks at ways to insert contemporary cultural visual language into the urban and/or digital landscape by reclaiming space and belonging through visual storytelling.

Jarra translates all this through her own contemporary lens, evolving it respectfully with Elder permission in whatever form that it leads her to. Using personal iconography to create objects using mix mediums including natural materials (emu eggs), found objects, resin, led lighting and computer aided design.

Over the last few years she has embraced bright vibrant colours which she draws from not only growing up in an urban environment with a love of street art but she is also inspired by the colours of nature around her. The main colours she uses are inspired by the blue sky, native wattle, kangaroo apple flowers and pigface flowers.

She uses these for many personal reasons, one of which is to draw the eye in to make the unseen, seen. Showing the unseen parts of herself and community, culture and the stories she creates.

Over the last few years Jarra has been exploring this story telling through video game design.

Gonzalo Ceballos
Gonzalo Ceballos arrived in Melbourne at the age of four. His family fled the Pinochet regime in Chile and he grew up in the commission housing community of inner-city Melbourne. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Victorian College of the Arts, and has previously exhibited at The Food Court, Blak Dot Gallery, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Seventh Gallery, a laundromat and a public toilet.

Susan Maco Forrester
Susan Maco Forrester is a Somali-Scottish Public artist, who lives and works with respect and gratitude on the lands of the people of the Kulin Nations, in Naarm Melbourne Australia. As an accomplished public artist and arts worker, themes of identity and otherness across social and site-specific contexts inform her practice. Forrester's work encompasses creative enquiries into personal experience that may be imbued with conflicting notions of Identity; imposed, refused, embraced and reclaimed. Since completing a Masters of Art in Public space at RMIT University, Susan continues to refine, reflective and reflexive methods to explore and create cultural embodiment, as temporal sonic counterpoint in public space.

Growing up in the 1990s, I loved playing video games like Quest for Glory series, Fallout 1 & 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, and Harvest Moon, all featuring romance mechanics that allowed players to form in-game relationships. This passion continued with the Dragon Age series and most recently with Baldur’s Gate 3. The well-crafted, mature characters and relationships, as well as the fandom surrounding the companions inspired me to explore the emotions behind fictional romances and the communities they foster.

My project, love.exe is a conceptual installation that seeks to explore romantic love for fictional characters. It examines how these digital romances for some offer social surrogacy that can often provide a safe space for people to explore their desires and emotions. Growing up, romantic love was rarely represented in my community in the media. Discussions about love often excluded romantic love. I want to create a space to express feelings of romance and intimacy for digital fictional characters in the BG3 universe.

love.exe invites audiences to navigate an immersive installation space, relax, have conversations, and contribute to a digital repository of love letters to their own fictional loves, celebrating the intersection of fandom, fantasy, and romantic exploration.

Artist: Jarra Karalinar Steel
Creative Collaborator: Gonzalo Ceballos
Collaborator/Sound: Susan Maco Forrester
Digital Developer: Daniel Reid