Between Bodies

Between Bodies is the first collaboration by Sylvia Wilson and Natalie Scholtz, whose metaphysical portraits navigate identity, belonging and Australianness.

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Sylvia Wilson, a First Nations visual artist, navigates the inherited weight of culture, Country, and continuity shaped through both disconnection and reclamation. Natalie Scholtz, a migrant child of South African and Iranian parents, carries the legacies of diaspora, displacement, and cultural translation, continually negotiating what it means to call this place home.

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These two West Australian contemporary women painters came together for a shared studio residency at cbOne Studios in January 2026. Alongside each other they confronted and unravelled their unsettled ideas of belonging through their art practices.

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Their works meet in the in-between: in bodies that hold layered histories, in cultures that are both learned and lived, and in identities forged across multiple worlds. Through paint, gesture, and figuration, they assemble fragments of self and place, balancing the real and the imagined, the celebratory and the uncertain. Here, Australianness is not a fixed category but a spirited, shifting state—something constructed through portrait, story, and encounter.The exhibition becomes both a questioning and a celebration: of home, ofidentity, of how we become and unbecome Australian in contemporary times.

 

Between Bodies presents recent works by each artist and new collaborative works where their portraits of each othershift into otherworldly visions.