2026 Vessels of Love

Faye is a Sydney-based writer and poet influenced by classic literature and romanticism. She embraces free form and narrative structures, crafting worlds to curiously unpick the paradoxes of the human condition. Her work explores our contrasting capacity for both love and destruction in the stories of our lives.

Willo Drummond is a Blue Mountains based poet and lecturer in creative writing. Her critically acclaimed debut poetry collection Moon Wrasse (Puncher & Wattmann), was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, commended in the 2023 Five Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book and selected as one of six Australian poetry titles to feature in the 2024 Aesop Queer Library. Her work is anthologised in Best of Australian Poems and elsewhere.

Martin Edmond was born in Ohakune and grew up in small North Island towns. He has an MA from Victoria University of Wellington (1977) and a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Western Sydney (2013). He travelled with avant-punk theatre Red Mole in the 1970s, worked as a screenwriter in the 1980s and has, since the 1990s, concentrated upon the writing of prose. In 2013 he received the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in non-fiction. After forty years in Australia, in 2023 he moved to Japan, where he lives in Shinanomachi in the mountains of Honshu.

Minnie Agnes Filson was born on 3 May 1898 at Wyalong, then a gold-mining settlement. She grew up in Newtown, Marrickville and Mosman and was educated there. She learned business studies and became manager of the Church Standard. On 6 December 1924, she married Arthur Johnston Filson. She developed rheumatoid arthritis during her early twenties which was exacerbated in 1926, six months after the birth of her son. Bed-bound, she adopted the pseudonym Rickety Kate. She was surrounded by many friends and family members who acted as scribes. 
 

Filson contributed poems to various newspapers and magazines including The Sydney Morning Herald in the 1930s. She was a member of the Jindyworobak poetry movement: her 1944 book, Bralgah, was a Jindyworobak publication. Her poetry has been included in a number of anthologies including The Penguin Book of Australian Woman Poets, Sydney's Poems: A Selection on the Occasion of the City's One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary 1842–1992, Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, Australian Poetry Since 1788 and The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse. 

Filson wrote Feet on the Ground in the 1940s, using the pseudonym Judith Grey. This autobiographical work was posthumously published in 2008 by her grand-daughter, artist Lenore Bassan. Filson's papers are held in the State Library of New South Wales. 

Pooja Mittal Biswas is an Indian-Australian based in Bidjigal Country. She has been widely published in literary journals like Meanjin and Overland. In 2024, she was shortlisted for both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the South Australian Literary Awards. She has been awarded grants from the Australia Council for the Arts and Create NSW and has been interviewed or reviewed by The Age, The Australian and ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. She has been invited to numerous literary festivals. Currently, she teaches at the University of Sydney's National Centre for Cultural Competence.

Michele Seminara is a Sydney-based poet and editor whose work has featured in publications such as Cordite, Mascara Literary Review, and Australian Poetry Journal. She is the author of two poetry collections — Suburban Fantasy and Engraft — and two chapbooks, Scar to Scar (written with Robbie Coburn) and HUSH. Michele has performed her poetry and been a panellist and moderator at numerous literary events nationwide and serves as Managing Editor of Verity La La journal. She is currently working on her verse novella, Dis.

Ethan is an experimental multi-instrumentalist, poet, vocalist and composer living on Gadigal lands. He has studied and works in film and art video, within which this debut collaboration with Deby Cann and The Salons is a natural extension. Released in January 2026, his second album, Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy, is named after the painting of the same name by Francois Lemoyne.

Deby uses vintage books, patterns, text and images to create inclusive, feminist collage artworks that challenge and reject the patriarchal narrative. Deconstructing stereotypes, gender assumptions, misogyny and patriarchal attitudes through reframing these destructive narratives. 

Guardian of Minnie Agnes Filson’s estate, and guest artist and narrator for the poetry film Challenge

@lenorebassanprintmaker

I am a printmaker/artist and have been engaged with printmaking in some smaller or larger way since graduating from College of Art in 1975. I love to be absorbed by the endless ways of creating images and markmaking that printmaking offers. Making artist books is an extension of my printmaking practice. My ideas come from illustrating the poetry of my grandmother 'Rickety Kate' and honouring my ancestors from Romania and Australia in visual form. 

The Salons is an independent curatorial micro organisation creating unusual arts experiences through sustainable practice. Founded by co-curators Angie Contini, Penny Daw and Joan Gillison, our projects are the expression of our enduring friendship and the dynamics formed through the people we engage with. Together, between Sydney and London, across time zones and oceans, we create experiences which invite conversation, encourage simplicity, sustainability, diversity and inclusivity, and recognise the progressive potential of the unusual.

The Salons works with independent artists and organisations across diverse styles, media and backgrounds, fostering the cross-pollination of interdisciplinary practice, shared knowledge, experimentation and collaboration.