PULSE
Pulse
24 June to 11 July 2026
Exhibiting artists: Joanna Cole, Jan Handel, Julia Kennedy Bell and Yvonne Langshaw
Pulse celebrates the vibrant creativity of four artists whose practices echo the rhythms of life and perception. Across the two distinct genres of landscape and abstraction, Joanna Cole, Jan Handel, Julia Kennedy Bell and Yvonne Langshaw explore how colour, form, and gesture can embody movement and emotion.
For Cole and Langshaw the natural world is transformed into expressive terrains, where memory and observation merge in luminous colour. Handel and Kennedy Bell investigate abstraction as a language of tension and harmony, using grids, shapes, and layered hues to evoke systems of thought and sensation inherent in the human experience.
The works of the four artists reveal the dynamic possibilities of painting—where structure meets spontaneity and material becomes a vessel for experience.
A painter born on Kaurna/Peramangk Country in South Australia, Joanna Cole has developed an active practice across Gadigal and Deerubbin, exhibiting her work in group and solo settings since 2017. She mentors artists through her studio and residency space at Little Wobby and continues to explore observational and reflective approaches to painting grounded in place and experience.
Jan Handel is a painter and installation artist. She seeks an unlikely cohesion between painted gesture and hard-edge abstraction to give form to circumstances inherent in human experience. The formal aspects of painting, particularly colour, pictorial space, the geometry of the horizontal and vertical grid and surface texture, respond to the sensory and emotional concepts which form the genesis of the work. Handel holds a B. Fine Art and a Dip. Fine Art and has exhibited in solo and group shows since 2008.
Julia Kennedy Bell explores the aspects of how abstraction can convey the relationship between the universal and personal experience, engaging her -own personal language of differential marks, values and colours. Her process also fluctuates between painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. Graduate of UNSW Art & Design she has been involved in many group and solo exhibitions, studio residencies in both is Sydney and internationally.
Working mostly in acrylics Yvonne Langshaw’s practice explores colour, pattern, and nature‑inspired abstraction. She explores landscape and the environment with paintings from her travel and the local bushland around her home. A National Art School graduate, Langshaw has exhibited widely since 1980 in solo and group shows She has taught across community art schools, delivered numerous workshops, and is represented in public and private collections nationally and internationally.
above detail of work – left to right: Joanna Cole, Jan Handel, Julia Kennedy Bell and Yvonne Langshaw
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