The Leo Kelly Blacktown Arts Centre
The Leo Kelly Blacktown Arts Centre is closed.
Main Street Studios
Main Street Studios
An 8-minute walk from Blacktown Station, Main Street Studios are available to artists for short, medium- and long-term residencies by application.
Rent-free studios are available for 3 to 12 month residencies. Applications are open to artists at any stage of their career working across a range of disciplines, with preference given to artists living in Blacktown and western Sydney.
Studio residents will also have the opportunity to meet and receive support from Blacktown Arts staff and Curators.
Current artists
Dania Shahkhan
Dania Shahkhan’s artform includes drawing, sketching, painting, and occasionally mixed media. Her practice is rooted in storytelling, often inspired by reference photos from her phone that capture tender, everyday moments with her family. Recently, Dania’s work explored the playful spirit of her toddler and the quiet reflections that arise in motherhood. She also writes about being a creative Muslim mother in the West, using both words and images to express themes of faith, identity, joy, and belonging.
In earlier exhibitions, she has explored her experience as an immigrant in Australia during the pandemic, using painting to express feelings of homesickness, isolation, and transformation. Her artistic voice is intuitive, personal, and focused on memory and colour. Whether she’s painting a window scene, a child’s toy, or a moment of stillness, she aims to find meaning in the seemingly small details of everyday life.
You can find Dania on Instagram here
Desiree Martin
Desiree Marin is an expressionist artist, who creates artworks that embrace bright colours, interesting patterns. She likes to give the feeling of the subject more that copying the subject exactly like it is. In a way creating a new version of surrealism. Her rich history of European and Australian Aboriginal have inspired much of her art style. Desiree began her working life in the fashion industry, which has also had a big influence on her style. She enjoys adding layers of colour and symbolic patterning that is a salute to beautiful fabrics, buttons, braids and lacework that Desiree loved to work with.
You can find Desiree on Instagram here
Dung-Chuan Wen
Wen’s creative practice explores materials related to environmental issues in the Anthropocene, significantly influenced by materiality and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). His work adopts nontraditional materials, blending them with his background in Taiwanese Buddhism, while consciously minimising carbon emissions and waste.
Guided by conceptual art principles, this environmentally conscious process is meticulously planned. His practice spans both physical and digital art forms, including painting, sculpture, digital projection, extended reality, and post-social sculpture, aiming to raise awareness of the environmental crisis.
You can find Dung-Chuan on Instagram here
Nicole Cadelina
Nicole is a writer, critic and text-based artist with a strong interest in developing a career in filmmaking as a director-screenwriter. Her filmmaking projects engage with Filipino Australian stories told through Catholic poetics of reverence and spirituality, with themes centred on family, love, and devotion to faith. As a filmmaker, Nicole’s interests centre on diasporic storytelling through impressionistic, lyrical approaches that invoke early memories of being in community and culture.
She has recently directed and wrote Santa Niña, a short film that explores the reconciliation of two Filipina women during the night before Sinulog. This short film best represents her emerging practice as a filmmaker, and her interests.
You can find Nicole on Instagram here
Past artists
Jaii Villacorta
Jaii Villacorta is a Filipino-born multidisciplinary artist who grew up in the Philippines and the U.S. before immigrating to Australia at age 10. With a background in graphic design and photography, her practice is rooted in illustration, influenced by her father’s work in animation.
Her current work is a quiet search for an inner home, a response to a life shaped by constant moves, where the ground never feels entirely steady. Through her art, she explores the spaces between belonging and displacement, seeking to piece together a sense of place from fragments of memory, identity, and lived experience. In recent years, she has expanded into sculpture, becoming a finalist in the 2023 Blacktown Art Prize. Her work has been featured in magazines and publications, with the goal of connecting with people through striking visual storytelling.
‘My work is inspired by spirituality, culture, nature, patterns, and my unique lived experience. I work intuitively, allowing my style to shift with my mood while maintaining staple visual elements that weave throughout my art.’
You can find Jaii on Instagram here
Jugni Chaudhry
Jugni is a visual artist based on Dharug land. Her compelling work explores the profound connection between the spiritual and material worlds, serving as a dialogue born from the rich intersection of her Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage and her life in Australia.
Educated at the National College of Arts (Pakistan), where she majored in Miniature Painting and minored in Islamic/Arabic Calligraphy, Jugni’s early focus was intricate two-dimensional works in gouache and 24-carat gold. Her practice, inspired by Sufism and the poetry of Rumi, has since evolved to include sculptural forms crafted from humble, sustainable materials.
She creates a unique visual language by harmoniously blending sacred geometry and Arabesque patterns with Australian native flora and fauna. This fusion speaks to both deep spiritual roots and a boundless connection to the earthly and divine. Jugni’s art invites introspection, exploring themes like Tashakkur (Gratitude) within the diaspora and mapping a personal journey of identity, community, and belonging.
A two-time consecutive finalist in the prestigious Blacktown City Art Prize, her work carries a profound intention: to build bridges and cultivate empathy and gratitude by sharing the peaceful and beautiful aspects of her cultural and religious traditions with the broader Australian landscape
You can find Jugni on Instagram here
Tarni Eastwood
Tarni Eastwood is a Ngiyampaa and Guringai multidisciplinary artist, curator and owner of Nula Weaving based on Dharug Land, in Western Sydney. Tarni actively facilitates weaving workshops with community to contribute to the ongoing revitalisation of traditional cultural practices whilst providing a safe space to pass down creative knowledge.
Tarni’s arts practice is an extension of her connection, through making she connects deeper with Country, community, and culture.
You can find Tarni on Instagram here
This project is presented by Blacktown Arts and supported by Blacktown City Council and the NSW Government through Create NSW.
