“Trouble in paradise unearths the beautiful and scary sides both in nature and our psychology. The combination of dark and light and that sweet spot in the middle that makes life so exquisite. Like when you are floating in the water and imagining both the magic underneath you and the monsters. Even the monsters are stunning.

This body of work layers and combines images of nature that don’t necessarily make sense together but neither does the world and we don’t have to make sense of everything.

This is my subjective interpretation of my world. I have left a mysteriousness, eeriness and ambiguity with these paintings so that you, the viewer, can make your own subjective interpretation of these paintings. Be open to it and don’t be afraid to just feel and not understand it all.”


Ondine Seabrook lives and works in Sydney. Seabrook graduated from the National Art School in 2017 with a BFA in painting and has been represented by China Heights Gallery since 2018.

Ondine’s paintings are exploration and celebration of the natural world. She paints places she has absorbed herself in and responds to them subjectively and emotively. Her vibrant use of colour is key to her portrayal of these places, along with her distinct use of striking gestural marks paired with soft, hazy marks. This results in a melding of boldness and subtlety that teleports the viewer into a serene atmospheric world.

Seabrook has exhibited in a multitude of group shows across Australia since 2013 and has had 7 Solo exhibitions. Ondine has been a finalist in the Brett Whiteley travelling art scholarship, the Portia Geach memorial award, The Mosman art prize and the Paddington art prize. Ondine has also had a solo exhibit with Louis Vuitton in Brisbane.

I wish I was special
by Jedda-Daisy Culley 

Awe is something not easy to define, but usually involves stopping in your tracks, being amazed by something, and, often, feeling small against the vastness of the universe. As I scroll through Ondine’s Instagram feed—palm trees, hibiscus flowers, bikini, boyfriend against the backdrop of a tropical paradise—. Meanwhile, I’m on the Eurostar: winter coat, grouchy kids, and my partner with a beard dotted in croissant crumbs. Outside, the landscape rushes past. Rain streaking the window in horizontal lines, turning everything into a soft, ghostly haze. It feels like one of Onnie’s landscapes, a window into a different way of seeing. What does it mean to be an avid awe hunter? How far do we need to extend our geography to adopt this mentality? Is awe hunting like any other addiction—do we need to turn up the volume once we've seen a thing or two? Are we, the snorkel dorks, still mind-blown by the sea dragon or even the sway of seagrass at Macca’s Bay? Have we seen those creatures from the deep too many times on Instagram? Are we numb to the sight, or riddled with fear? 

Trouble in Paradise, but what’s the "trouble in paradise" really? It all looks pretty perfect through my phone. Are these postcard-perfect moments from Onnie's life, both online and off, or do they present something deeper to unpack? My old man Steve, 72 years old, is a proper awe hunter in a homebound kind of way. His brain fires up with excitement at the grooves carved into driftwood by the river; he collects sculptural pieces crafted by ants to decorate the walls of his shed of curiosities. His love for the natural world is childlike, not too dissimilar to Onnie collecting shells to decorate her paintings. It’s so unpretentious, so her—she’s walking back and forth at Yarra Bay, bobbing up and down as she spies a good one. Her bag jingles with the sound of clinking shells.

I’m still on the Eurostar, Creep from Pablo Honey in my headphones, cruising my way into London. This is my nostalgia: 90% Freo, Mills Records, standing at the CD booth dressed like Courtney Love—a cliche. But this isn’t Onnie’s experience. Her nostalgia is an island where the forest meets the sea. Her childhood— a decade younger than mine, a 2000s girly—was spent traveling to Steiner school by boat, listening to... something very different, with a little pet rat on her shoulder. We lock into our nostalgia, those childhood experiences that, for better or worse, shape how we think the world should be seen and how we think life should be lived. Nostalgia isn’t just a longing for the past; it’s a lens through which we interpret the present, and for Onnie, her nostalgic connection to the island, the sea, and the forest drives her deep engagement with nature.

Anyone who’s spent time with Onnie knows she’s a conduit—her buzzy little fairy body shivering with the energy of whatever place, object, or person she’s tuned into. It’s like her skin can’t help but register the pulse of the world around her. Her hands run over her arms, tracing the invisible current of goosebumps. She’s not just seeing things; she’s feeling them, translating the language of bat, wind, eel, into a physical vibration that leaves her intoxicated with awe. This new collection of paintings make me wonder: Are we really looking? Are we peeking under enough rocks? Have you zoomed in on this moth? It’s like fairy floss. And that baby ray, like a ravioli with a smiling fairy face stuffed inside—actually - it’s more like an angel in a bubble tea to me. And the crazy thing? This isn’t new. It’s always been there, for millennia, waiting to be noticed. But stingray babies are trending online right now—who knew? I certainly didn’t, but I’m all in now. But seriously—look at this flower. It’s right in the middle of this canvas. We’re walking down Bondi Road, and Onnie’s stopping constantly, sniffing a hot fig leaf, staring down the barrel of a frangipani, diving into its sex with a kind of reverence. She floats through the chaos of traffic, so absorbed, so in the moment, it’s like everything else falls away. Unfortunately, the internet doesn’t have a scratch-and-sniff option yet, but these paintings might just be as close as it gets to capturing a sense of tactile wonder.

The trouble in paradise isn’t paradise itself, but how we engage with it in the age of constant digital input. Onnie experiences the world through all her senses—a mix of what she has seen, smelt, and touched—alongside the moments she screenshots offline. For her, paradise isn’t something distant; it’s everywhere, a state of mind. But this raises the question: are we at risk of losing the ability to experience true awe by relying too much on what we see online? It’s not that Onnie doesn’t look online; she does, but she applies her deep, innate understanding of nature to those digital fragments. She doesn’t just collect images for the sake of it—she translates them, grounding them in the real, lived world around her. But for many of us, the constant stream of digital references from the internet can make us numb to the simple wonders we encounter every day. We can’t just pull our understanding of nature from a curated feed of online hoards. Hardly any of us had an  ocean girl, fairy, mermaid, bush turkey childhood—one spent intimately connected to the natural world. But spending a day awe hunting with Onnie is a way of adopting her perspective—one that’s tuned to the small, overlooked wonders around us. Sometimes she brings her cat, Cassius, on a lead—it’s super weird , but it makes everything feel more magical. Onnie’s not offering a grand solution to the chaos of modern life, but she’s giving us a chance to shift our focus. She shows us that awe isn’t something to scroll past or file away—it’s something to step into. Awe is everywhere, but we need to stop, look, and let it in.

In Hot Generation, Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Gabriel Cole crafts a body of work that is at once deeply personal and widely resonant, drawing on the layered intersections of identity, culture, and consumerism. The exhibition takes its title from Paul Witzig’s 1967 surf film, a cultural marker of the Australian longboard era, yet the works transcend nostalgia, channeling the year 1967 as a conceptual anchor. For Cole, “1967” becomes both a framework and a cipher—an emblem of change and upheaval that is manipulated, disrupted, and reimagined across his practice.

Cole's creative lexicon is one of paradox and tension. He juxtaposes painterly abstraction with graphic rigidity, much like his multifaceted career as a painter, designer, and former Paralympian. His works wrestle with structure and distortion, reflecting his own trajectory—a life marked by discipline, artistic exploration, and profound empathy for the rawness of human experience. The aesthetic of Hot Generation mirrors this tension: soft hues of beach flora dissolve into brutalist strokes of anger and frustration, while sleek graphic elements evoke the polished veneer of consumer culture. These are not simply harmonious works; they are fractured, layered, and alive with contradiction.

Central to this series is the phrase “1967,” emblazoned across glass paintings, ceramics, and a collaborative surfboard. The repetition of this element recalls Cole’s fascination with logos and semiotics, reflecting on our societal obsession with identity through consumerism. Yet, Cole does not settle for mere critique. His works speak to the fragility and futility underlying this obsession. Like his surfboard collaboration with Jack Del Rennie, the logo becomes a sculptural entity—a product of the past reframed as an artefact of today’s commodified culture. Cole’s hand in these works—a physical force shaping glass, resin, and oil—is a counterpoint to the machine-like precision of logos, grounding the works in an emotional immediacy that is both tender and unrelenting.

The ocean, a recurring theme in Cole’s life as a surfer, serves as a metaphorical through-line. Traditionally a place of solace and freedom, the ocean here is troubled, overlaid by societal expectations and cultural commodification. The works oscillate between celebration and critique of beach culture, their textile-inspired patterns and resin decals capturing both the organic beauty of the natural world and its exploitation through consumerism. Stripes—a recurring abstract motif—echo both the rhythm of waves and the stark lines of mass production. Through this interplay, Cole explores the duality of human existence: our longing for connection and reprieve, and the systems that fragment and distort these desires.

Cole’s artistic process is equally dualistic. He begins with meticulous, trade-driven techniques such as screen printing, exposing screens, and applying silver leaf, echoing both the precision of his past experience as a sign-writer and his upbringing with a father who runs a crash-repair shop. This calculated foundation is disrupted by his painterly approach—gestural, impromptu, and cathartic. This disruption is deliberate, embodying the dissonance between order and chaos, public and private, industrial and organic. His exploration of glass as a medium—a material both fragile and rigid—underscores this tension and reinforces the relevance of trade materials used within his practice.

The exhibition’s sculptural elements further extend this dialogue. Aluminium frames fabricated by Adelaide artist James Dodd encase the glass works, emphasising the interplay between the fragility of glass as a medium and the structural weight of steel. This deliberate juxtaposition evokes a Donald Judd-inspired minimalist aesthetic, grounded in references to prefabrication and industrial design. Judd’s influence is particularly evident in Cole’s approach to installation, where the spatial arrangement of works plays a critical role. By adopting Judd’s language of repetition and industrial materials, Cole situates his works within a broader minimalist tradition while reshaping it to address themes of identity and consumerism.

This influence is also evident in the dual-sided presentation of his glass works and upside down presentation of the surfboard, allowing the audience to view both the front and back of each piece. This strategy mirrors Judd’s emphasis on spatial engagement and the idea of works existing autonomously within their environment. Yet, while Judd pursued pure form and object-hood, Cole’s works embed personal and cultural narratives, layering Judd’s structural clarity with emotional resonance and historical context.  

Cole’s work identifies with subcultures and marginalised groups, driven by his personal experiences. His sensitivity to pain—physical, emotional, societal—is palpable in the tormented energy of Hot Generation. The sharp edges of his ceramics and the rawness of his brushstrokes mimic the tactile experience of ceramic-making, where the act of shaping becomes a visceral expression of emotion. Yet beneath this torment lies a deep well of love and empathy. Cole’s works invite us to sit with discomfort, to see beauty in imperfection, and to question the systems that shape our identities.

At its core, Hot Generation is a meditation on coexistence: between the personal and the public, the organic and the industrial, the nostalgic and the contemporary. Through abstraction, graphic identity, and sculptural innovation, Cole creates a body of work that is both deeply rooted in its references and unmoored from their constraints. It is an exhibition that resists easy interpretation, instead offering a space for reflection, disruption, and connection. In this way, Gabriel Cole’s Hot Generation becomes not just an artistic statement, but an emotional journey—a testament to the complexities of living, creating, and navigating a world in flux.

Gabriel Cole is an artist and designer based in Naarm/Melbourne, originally from Adelaide. His multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, painting, film, sound, and textiles, adapting fluidly to the conceptual demands of each body of work.

Cole’s work is rooted in the exploration of semiotics and motifs, often incorporating signage and branding as visual and emotional entities. His approach combines a meticulous painterly technique with an embrace of organic imperfection, creating layered compositions where refined craftsmanship meets spontaneous abstraction. Materials are torn, folded, and disrupted, allowing for natural deconstruction while maintaining a deliberate sense of balance and form.

Through these processes, Cole challenges the boundaries of identity and cultural symbols, interrogating their original intent and reframing them in ambiguous contexts. His work reflects a dissolution of pop culture, blurring distinctions between personal and societal narratives, between polished graphic precision and raw, emotive gestures.

Cole’s practice invites viewers to navigate these blurred lines, creating space for reflection on the intersection of the external world and internal experience.