CO-OWNER

Jayne Papalia, co-owner of Sugar House Studios and Gallery, is a Northern Beaches ceramic artist and the creative force behind The Sunshine Collective Australia. Her work is deeply rooted in the rugged beauty of the Australian coastline, drawing from the textures, colours, and rhythms of the sea, sand, and stone. Through hand-built and wheel-thrown forms, Jayne translates the natural environment into tactile, functional art that embodies calm, connection, and place.

Working from her Brookvale-based studio, Jayne creates pieces that feel both raw and refined — sculptural surfaces, organic silhouettes, and soft coastal glazes that echo the shifting shoreline. Her practice is guided by a desire to capture the emotional quality of the landscape: its wildness, its stillness, and its ability to ground and restore.

Jayne has been recognised as a Finalist in the 2023 and 2024 Northern Beaches Environmental Art and Design Prize, reflecting her commitment to environmental storytelling through craft. In 2024, she curated and exhibited Save Our Reef at Sugar House Studios and Gallery, where she is both in-house artist and co-owner. Her work has also been shown with the Artfall Art Collective (2024) and at the Thomas Street Art Fair (2024).

Through her ceramics, she invites viewers to slow down, reconnect with nature, and carry a piece of the Australian coast into their everyday lives.

https://www.thesunshinecollectiveaustralia.com/

CO-OWNER

Pav is an abstract figurative artist based on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, creating bold, expressive works that balance playful energy with emotional depth. Her practice is intuitive and layered, rooted in storytelling and spontaneity.

Drawing from years of experience as a graphic designer, Pav embraces colour, shape, and mixed media to build compositions that feel both immediate and considered. Her work often centres around the human figure… distorted, exaggerated, or simplified… placed in scenes that suggest a narrative without ever making it explicit. She is drawn to moments of contrast: stillness and movement, loud colour and negative space, humour and vulnerability.

Whether painting a reclining woman, a chair with a vase, or a fish-wielding figure, Pav wants the work to spark curiosity and joy, inviting people to bring their own stories to what they see. Ultimately, she creates art to connect… with herself, with others, and with the strange and beautiful in-between spaces that sit just below the surface of everyday life.

https://www.pavspencer.com/

CO-OWNER

Nicole Buckland is a collage and mixed media artist whose practice is rooted in exploration, play, and reimagining the mundane. Drawn to the accessibility and complexity of collage, Nicole delights in the perpetual treasure hunt of collecting materials and finding unexpected relationships between fragments. Collage provides her endless opportunities to see differently and connect more deeply with the world.

Nicole’s work focuses on storytelling. She enjoys creating alternative worlds and fantastical creatures using a style best described as ‘kitschy mysticism’.

Nicole approaches her creative practice as a form of daily self-communion and as a chance to regularly connect with community. She is a long-standing member of The Social Glue of Sydney and regularly hosts collage groups and sessions out of the Museum of Intrepid Exploration, her studio space at Sugar House Studios.

museumofintrepidexploration.com

nicolebucklandot.com.au

STUDIO ARTIST

Christine O’Hagan is an artist whose work explores colour and beauty. Working primarily with oils, Christine’s practice is currently designed by abstract realism with bold use of colour.

Born in Manchester and now based in Sydney, Christine has been a finalist in the Archibald, Salon des Refuse and Portia Geach Exhibitions to name a few.

Christine creates art that celebrates beauty in the every day. She continues to develop new projects that challenge her.

STUDIO ARTIST

Abby is a contemporary Australian artist based in Sydney, working from Sugarhouse Studio’s in Brookvale. With a background in interior design, her sensitivity to form, space and atmosphere informs her painting practice. Her work is ever evolving and guided by impulse and connection, often stirred by landscapes, people and objects that hold personal resonance. She approaches painting as a process of discovery, unearthing images that feel just beneath the surface while exploring self, memory and environment. Loose, vivid brushstrokes and bold colour run through her practice, capturing movement and emotion in works that feel alive and atmospheric.

This year has marked a period of personal growth. Abby moved into a shared art studio in Brookvale with Sugarhouse Studios, was named a finalist in The Toowoomba Gallery’s The Next Big Thing Art Prize, Finalist in Aspire Gallery’s Foot Square competition and selected to participate in Straitjacket Gallery’s Summer Salon group show. Her work is held in several states across Australia and within New Zealand.

https://www.artbyabby.com.au/

STUDIO ARTIST

Sophie is a Sydney based jewellery artist and goldsmith whose work is inspired by the ocean, nature and rhythms of the Australian Coastline. With over a decade of experience at the bench, she combines traditional hand making techniques with modern story telling to create bespoke pieces and small batch collections. Her work reflects a commitment to sustainability, authenticity and the quiet beauty of nature. 

https://www.sophiejadejewellery.com/

STUDIO ARTIST

Danielle Kremer (She/Her) is an Art Director working across fashion, textiles, art, digital print, and curation.

Dani explores connections across images, materiality and fashion. Through almost 20 years of practice and work in the industry, Dani has garnered a reputation for working with colour, texture, artistic vision and bringing the imaginary to life. Dani’s most recent client work can be seen on the runways for Gary Bigeni and in-store at Sportscraft. 

Dani is currently a PhD candidate at UTS, exploring Digital Print in Fashion and its role in shifting fashion cycles and the rapid consumption of imagery. This is being explored through an evolving body of works on various mediums.

Dani also began a locally made upcycled fashion label MER MER in 2021. The brand designs for kids and grown-ups, drawing on nostalgia to inform fashion for today.

STUDIO ARTIST

trina is a contemporary Australian artist based in Sydney, dividing her painting time between Sugar House Studio in Brookvale and her cabin in the Blue Mountains. Her work centres on atmosphere and light, using subtle tonal shifts and a balance of softness and structure to evoke a felt sense of place and time. Katrina paints with water-mixable oils, for their relative kindness to human health and the environment. Drawn to weather and its moods, Katrina often finds parallels between shifting environmental conditions and the human experience. With a master’s degree in art therapy, it’s natural that her practice explores how the landscape reflects, and sometimes shapes, our emotional and spiritual states. Roads feature in her paintings, serving both as compositional anchors and as an exploration of journeys and transitions. Katrina was a finalist in the Lane Cove Art Prize 2024 and the 9x5 Landscape Prize, and the Fishers Ghost Art Prize in 2024 and 2025. Her work is held in private collections in the UK and Australia.

https://www.katrinabeissel.com/

STUDIO ARTIST

Alison Locke is a painter and 3D animation artist whose work explores the intersection of abstraction and realism. She is particularly drawn to the textures and folds of cloth, and is constantly exploring new ways of creating still life compositions that convey movement, depth, and a sense of mystery. Outside the studio, Alison balances her artistic practice with her role as a librarian, time spent with her children, swimming laps, and enjoying as many live music performances as possible.

STUDIO ARTIST

Suzanne Sommer is widely recognised as a most enduring and accomplished artist whose career spans more than four decades.
Her paintings have become a familiar presence in celebrated galleries and major east-coast exhibitions, admired by collectors and the broader public alike.

Working in acrylic, oil, and pastel, Suzanne is known for her modern contemporary, abstraction, traditional lively street scenes, city scapes, expressive figurative work and her depictions of every day life, she also creates floral work, still life, landscapes, seascapes, and miniatures. Her ability to blend atmosphere, colour, and emotion has shaped a signature style that is instantly recognisable.

Sustaining success in the art world for over forty years requires more than talent. It demands originality, consistency, and the ability to connect with viewers across generations. Suzanne continues to do this with remarkable dedication, producing high-quality work that continues to resonate deeply with her audiences.

Suzanne’s peers recognised this commitment. She
has received more than one hundred awards, including twenty-six first prizes.
Including the
Vincent‘s Fairfax
award and the
Art of Sydney award. Gallery directors and art show convenors have championed her work throughout Australia and internationally, with her paintings now held in private collections and in more than a dozen countries.

A decade and a half ago Suzanne obtained a masters degree in psychotherapy that deeply informs her paintings, she is also a is a fellow member of the Royal Art Society.

Briedie O’Brien is a visual artist and lifelong musician, raised on a working farm in country NSW. After graduating from the Australian Institute of Music in 1998, he pursued a music career across continents before turning to painting full-time in 2020.

Working in oils with a palette knife and bold colour, his practice explores abstract realism and contemporary impressionism, drawing inspiration from travel, bushwalking, and time in the natural world. His work has been recognised as a finalist in major national prizes including the Paddington Art Prize, the Lethbridge Landscape Prize, and the National Capital Art Prize, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally in Madrid, Austria, and Milan.

Now based in Canberra after 27 years in Sydney, he continues to create works that reflect a deep connection between art, light, and the natural world.

https://beobe.com.au/

Born in 1971 in Shepparton, Victoria. Scott’s art career started at a very early age, drawing reproductions of Sydney Nolan’s Ned Kelly on the living room floor.

At primary school, he continued to refine his artistic skills, drawing dinosaurs and daleks on the classroom blackboard during lunch time (much to the delight of fellow students and the displeasure of his teachers).
 In high school, Scott chose fine art, photography and design as his elective subjects, a happy by-product of which was the need to discontinue his study of maths and science.

After Year 12, he moved to Sydney, however unfortunately not in sufficient time to enrol in his preferred tertiary art course.

Not to be deterred, Scott pursued a career in advertising where he spent the next thirty years as a finished artist, illustrator, designer, art director, copywriter, creative director and agency owner.

After achieving all he had set out to achieve in advertising, it was time for a change.

Scott turned his hand to the one thing that had preoccupied his mind for most of his life in one form or another - creating the art he wanted to create.

https://www.scottthomlinson.com