Kelly Manning (b. 1974, Mulubinba/Newcastle) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Working across installation, sculpture, printmaking, drawing and socially engaged practice, her work investigates how adaptation, mutual aid and material ingenuity might help us navigate an increasingly unstable world.

Raised within a military family and shaped by experiences of trauma, environmental concern and queer identity, Manning's practice examines the systems that govern how we survive, ecologically, politically and collectively. Rather than offering solutions, her work proposes speculative alternatives through wearable shelters, defensive architectures, improvised technologies and collaborative structures that privilege care over conquest and cooperation over domination.

Central to her practice is an understanding that making is a form of thinking. While projects often begin with an idea, their meaning emerges through an intuitive dialogue between material, process and place. Rather than using materials to illustrate concepts, Manning allows them to reveal new relationships. Salvaged plastics, Tetra Pak packaging, cable ties, bronze, bone, paper and found materials become collaborators, carrying with them histories of industry, consumption, conflict and resilience.

Although formally trained as a printmaker, Manning sees printmaking less as a discipline than as a philosophy. Pressure, transfer, repetition, trace and transformation underpin her entire practice. Sculptures become printing matrices, installations become impressions, wearable works become acts of transfer. She is less interested in producing editions than in developing systems through which ideas can reproduce, evolve and adapt.

This methodology has led to the development of experimental processes, including what she describes as "reverse Tetra Pak printing", a technique developed through research into accessible and sustainable printmaking that transforms discarded food packaging into complex print and sculptural forms. Throughout her career she has resisted fixed methodologies, preferring to invent new processes that evolve alongside the ideas they generate.

Manning draws connections between military camouflage, animal defence mechanisms, mythology, feminist histories, posthuman philosophy and environmental science. She is fascinated by adaptive intelligence, the ways fungi survive radiation, octopuses disappear into their surroundings, communities organise through mutual aid, and artists continue to make under conditions of scarcity. These seemingly disparate references converge around a single question: How do we survive together?

Underlying her work is a deep unease with the environmental consequences of petrochemical culture and the accelerating conditions of the Anthropocene. Rather than positioning waste as failure, Manning approaches discarded materials as repositories of knowledge and possibility. She is drawn to what society overlooks, waste plastic, obsolete technologies, forgotten histories and marginal voices, not as symbols of loss, but as sites from which new futures might emerge.

Across exhibitions, residencies and collaborative projects, Manning's works function as speculative prototypes rather than fixed objects. Helmets become vulnerable monuments. Blankets become architecture. Printmaking becomes an ecology of exchange. Installations become spaces to imagine alternative ways of living. Through experimentation, making and collaboration, her practice asks whether adaptation, care and collective intelligence might become the most important survival technologies of our time.

Manning completed a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2024 and has undertaken artist residencies in Venice, Bundanon, Edenhope and Thailand. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Florence Biennale, where she received fourth prize in sculpture.

Ultimately, Kelly Manning's practice is driven by urgency, curiosity and hope. It is an ongoing attempt to understand how we might live more ethically with one another and with the more-than-human world, not by mastering it, but by learning from its extraordinary capacity to adapt.

Manning’s work has been included in a number of important exhibitions within Australia and internationally and is held in collections worldwide. She has undertaken collaborative projects and several artist residencies, including, at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy (2023). She was a finalist in the Wyndham Art Prize (2023) and a prize winner in the Dora McRae Exhibition at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne (2022). Much of her work has focused on the generational impact of the Vietnam War and in 2009 she was commissioned to make new work for the exhibition Nam Bang! at Casula Powerhouse, Sydney. Manning’s sculpture, Intangible Momento Mori, 2023 was curated into I Am You – Individual and Collective Identities in Contemporary Art and Design, XIV Florence Biennale, Venice, Italy in 2023.

Manning has a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours (Drawing), RMIT University, Melbourne (2002) and is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne.

CV

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2026 Title TBC, The Wandering Room, Brunswick, Vic

2026                    Midsumma and Australia Post Art Award 2025, No Vacancy Gallery, Melbourne, Vic

2025                   Salon des Refusés, Wama Foundation, Halls Gap, Vic

2025                    Home Front, Curated by Ron Bradfield Jr, Library @ the Dock, Docklands, Vic

2025                    Soul, Sol Gallery, Fitzroy, Vic

2025                    Midsumma and Australia Post Art Award 2025, No Vacancy Gallery, Melbourne, Vic

2024                    Decoy, Masters of Contemporary Art Group Show Curated by Dr Kim Donaldson, VCA Artspace, Southbank

2023                    Experimental Print Prize, Castlemaine Art Museum and Gallery, Castlemaine, Vic

2023                    L’organs Brooch, Tatiara Art Prize, Walkway Gallery, South Australia

2023                    Intangible Memento Mori, Florence Biennale, Florence, Italy

2023 March to Arms: Create, Australian National Veterans Art Museum, Vic

2022                    Easey Street Studio Show, Futures Gallery, Collingwood, Vic

2022                    99% Gallery, Melbourne, Vic

2022                    Portals and Parallels, Dirty Dozen, Melbourne, Vic

2022                    The Dora McRae Exhibition, The VCA Gallery, Melbourne, Vic

2021                    Change, FAC Art Prize, Frankston Art Centre, Vic

2021                    Mon-u-men-tal, BUNKER, Melbourne, Vic

2020                    Clifford Chance, Pride Art 2020, Martin Browne Contemporary Gallery, Sydney

2021 New Normal, VCA Artspace, Southbank, Vic

2021                    Mon-u-men-tal, BUNKER, Melbourne, Vic

2020                    Clifford Chance, Pride Art 2020, Martin Browne Contemporary Gallery, Sydney

2019 Artbox Project Zurich 1.0, Swiss Art Expo, Switzerland

2018-19             small works from a BIG PLACE, Mount Alexander, Hepburn, Macedon and Bendigo, Vic

2018                     Future Icons, A collaborative installation with artist Linda Studena, Trocadero Artspace, Footscray, Vic

2017                    A March to Art: Identity, Australian National Veteran’s Arts Museum, SpACE@Collins, Melbourne

2016                    Little Rebels, A Gallery in Preston, Vic

2014                    Who’s Looking at You, Cambridge Studio Gallery, Collingwood, Vic

2013                    Oi, Oi, Oi and The Golden Mean, Easey Street Studios, Collingwood, Vic 

2012                    Traditional Artists are Priests/Contemporary Artists are Whores, Seventh Gallery, Fitzroy, Vic 

2011                    Identity, Forty-Five Downstairs Gallery, Melbourne, Vic

2010                    Chemical Agents, Artists of the 17th Parallel Collective (A17P), The Library Artspace, Fitzroy, Vic

2009                    Nam Bang, Casula Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, N.S.W

2006                    Space In-Between, City Lights, Melbourne, Vic 

2005                    The Quiet, Maroondah Regional Gallery, Ringwood, Vic

APPOINTMENTS/AWARDS/CONSULTANCY

2026                    Finalist, Midsumma and Australia Post Art Award 2025, No Vacancy Gallery, Melbourne, Vic

2025                    Finalist, Midsumma and Australia Post Art Award 2025, No Vacancy Gallery, Melbourne, Vic

2023-24 Finalist, 2023 Experimental Print Prize, Castlemaine Art Gallery, Vic

2023                    Finalist, Tatiara Art Prize, Walkway Gallery, South Australia

2023                    Sculpture Award, Fourth Prize, Florence Biennale, Florence, Italy

2022                    Finalist, Wyndham Art Prize, Werribee, Vic

2022                    Prize Winner, The Dora McRae Exhibition, The VCA Gallery, Melbourne, Vic

2019                    Second round selection, Darling Portrait Prize, The National Portrait Gallery, ACT

COMMISSIONS/RESIDENCIES

2026 Artist in Residence, Bundanon, Vic

2025 Artist in Residence, Edenhope Artist Residency, Edenhope, Vic

2023 Artist in Residence, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice, Italy

2020 -01           Artist in Residence, The Legendary Estate, Riddells Creek, Vic

2020                    Artist in Residence, Eastern Beach Art House, Geelong, Vic

2018                    Running Boy, Flying Pig, Maribyrnong Winter Festival, Moonie Ponds, Vic

2016                    Mural in collaboration with ANVAM (Australian National Veteran’s Arts Museum), Ringwood RSL

commission, Ringwood, Vic

2016                    Little Rebels, StreetWORKS 2016, Kingsville, Maribyrnong City Council. Vic

2010                    Artist in Residence, Rufus River, Lake Victoria N.S.W

2003-4                Artist in Residence, Hanoi, Vietnam

2002-3                Artist in Residence, St Vincent’s Hospital, Vic  

EDUCATION

2021-2024       Masters of Contemporary Art, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne

2002                    Honors in Fine Arts, Drawing, RMIT, Melbourne

2001                    Bachelor of Fine Arts, Drawing, RMIT, Melbourne

1999                    Visual Arts Diploma, Printmaking, RMIT TAFE, Melbourne

1993                    Associate Diploma in Fine Arts, Painting, Hunter Institute of Technology, Newcastle, N.S.W

BIBLIOGRAPHY/MEDIA

2023                    RICE Magazine, Vol 6, The Contemporary Art Magazine Celebrating Equality and Inclusion, Spain

2021                    Artist Profile, Issue 55, June/July/Aug 2021

2012                    Featured artist in International Contemporary Art Book, 2012.

2011                    Art Monthly, June 2011. 

2009                    Nam Bang, A 2009 Casula Powerhouse Project, Curated by Boitran Huynh-Beattie. Cover and

pages 10-12. Including an essay by Lucy Lippard. 

2009                    ‘The Viet Nam War Explored,’ Journal for Vietnam Veterans Peacekeepers & Peacemakers of the

Vietnam Veterans Federation. March 2009, P24.

2008                    ‘Nam Bang! An Exhibition about the aftermath of the Viet Nam War.’Journal for Viet-Nam

Veterans Peacekeepers & Peacemakers.