IMPRINT returns to the Victorian Artists Society for its second iteration and this year’s theme is deceptively simple: what remains?

Building on the success of the 2025 program, The Art of Storytelling, which drew over 116 active participants across exhibitions, talks, and workshops under the leadership of artist Jennifer Fyfe VAS, IMPRINT 2026: What Remains invites eight artists to respond to one of the most enduring questions in human experience: what survives us, in memory, in matter, in landscape, in love?

Each artist in the program offers a distinct perspective.

Liz Gridley anchors the program with a four-week exhibition that combines present interaction and left behind objects. Relics offers tender portraits of loved ones rendered through the objects they once held. Gridley, the 2024 VAS Hansen Little Coterie Featured Artist Award Winner, will be painting live in the gallery and accepting commissions throughout her exhibition, offering an intimate, living dimension to work already steeped in presence.

Spanning the Frater and McCubbin galleries for the first two weeks, Philippa Croll takes an archaeological approach in Spectrum, working in abstraction to reconstruct places and objects the way artefacts are recovered, fragment by fragment, finding narrative in the reassembling of elements. Linda Weil's Dodgy Melbourne finds its material in the city itself, drawing on recycled paper to document the unloved, overlooked corners of Melbourne, suburbs and streetscapes that persist as a kind of urban ruin, unglamorous and quietly resilient. Completing the first half of the program, Olivia Jane's Delirium approaches what remains through the body and the collective, working across installation, sculpture and durational performance to explore the traces left by excess, repetition and rave culture.

From April 30, four new artists join the program. In the Frater Gallery, Nathalie Anne's Held In Line works with graphite, silk thread, and wood to ask what endures when materials meet, transform, and leave their traces. Graphite marks through deliberate erosion, carbon fragments embedding themselves permanently into the grain of the wood, building up even as they break down. Thread moves differently: spun from a single continuous filament, it traces its path through space above the surface rather than within it. Together they describe two ways a line can persist, one buried in the grain, one drawn through the air. It is a practice that mirrors something deeply human, the understanding that we too leave traces through giving ourselves away, and that beneath every finished surface lie the ghosts of earlier selves, never fully erased.

2025 VAS Hansen Little Coterie alum Madaline Harris Schober's Ancient Nostalgia – Mourning Paintings That Could Have Been brings together watercolour and ink travel journals from archaeological expeditions across the Middle East and Mediterranean. This exhibition also includes newly completed oil paintings, a meditation on memory, place and the layers of time we carry within us. In the Cato Gallery, Charli English returns to Imprint with Portholes, framing environmental loss through hybrid form works that examine coastal erosion and the housing crisis, two forces quietly reshaping what Australians can call home. T.J. Murphy VAS, the 2025 Hylton Mackley Artist of the Year, completes the program with Remains To Be Seen, a quiet, still-life celebration of vintage objects and the everyday things we keep. Alongside the exhibitions, IMPRINT: What Remains offers workshops with lead artists, masterclasses, and the experience of watching art being made in the galleries.

Some questions don't resolve. They just get more interesting the longer you sit with them. What remains, it turns out, is never only the object, the mark, or the place. It is also the act of looking, and the decision to pay attention.

Banner image: The Long Cloud, Liz Gridley