The Leo Kelly Blacktown Arts Centre
An innovative multi-arts hub in the heart of Blacktown City.
Inspired by artist Monica Rani Rudhar’s Indian and Romanian heritage, this Makers Space celebrates the rich cultural significance of jewellery and its role in expressing and navigating complex heritage and identity.
Anchoring the installation are oversized jewellery sculptures, drawn from the artist’s personal collection of earrings and transformed here into soft, larger-than-life forms. These sculptures create a sense of joy and curiosity; the artworks hung higher in the space encourage visitors to view, sit and reflect on their beauty and detail.
The sculptures at a lower height invite you to touch, move and rearrange, making each encounter a unique and ever-evolving experience.
Head to the Makers Space to explore these soft sculptures while diving into Monica’s creative process with hands-on making activities for the whole family to enjoy.
Bio
Monica is an artist based on Gadigal land, working across sculpture, video, and performance. Her practice explores the themes of longing and loss related to cultural identity, tracing intergenerational stories within her family to create space for imaginative possibilities. Born to Indian and Romanian migrant parents, her work is influenced by the forces of cultural conformity, essentialization, and commodification within a settler colonial context. Monica’s practice seeks to restore familial histories, traditions, and rituals that have been dispersed by the migration and displacement of her ancestors. Through her auto-ethnographic approach, she translates her family’s fragmented oral histories to reclaim narratives of relationships, resistance, and ritual. These stories intertwine, weaving a personal mythology that manifests their cultural fictions and futures in so-called Australia.
Monica graduated from University of New South Wales Art in 2021, and has exhibited work across Australia and internationally including the Aotearoa Art Fair, New Zealand; Bunjil Place, Victoria; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, NSW; Carriageworks, NSW; Chau Chak Wing Museum, NSW; and Gallery27, India. Artworks are held in Private and Public Collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artbank and Blacktown City Arts with works commissioned by Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and The Powerhouse Museum (MAAS). In 2023 Monica was awarded the Gosford Emerging Art Prize, in 2024 she was curated into Primavera: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and in 2025 she was awarded the acquisitive Blacktown City Art Prize.
Monica is represented by Martin Browne Contemporary and her second solo exhibition with the gallery Just Like the Real Thing opened in June 2025.
You can find Monica on Instagram here
This project is presented by Blacktown Arts and supported by Blacktown City Council and the NSW Government through Create NSW.
