When InReview saw the artist and photographer Emmaline Zanelli listed among the state government’s latest round of successful arts grant recipients, there was something refreshingly honest about her project’s simple title: Pocket Money. At the end of the day, doesn’t every artist just want a little pocket money to live and make work?

Unsurprisingly, there was more to the project – a playfully poignant 15-minute video work slated to appear in the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art.

“During my previous work I Take Care of What’s Mine, I was learning about how the careers of parents can shape the life of their children,” Zanelli tells InReview. “Towards the end of making that work I became interested in looking more at young people entering the work force and how their own working shapes their lives.”

Shot between September and December 2025, the film features about 20 young people experiencing their first taste of paid labour, from fast food joints to stacking shelves.

“I was first interested in what people spend their money on, because it’s something that a lot of people remember – what they spent their own money on when they had their first income,” she says. “But during the process of working with the young people who contributed to the project, some other more nuanced questions about value, time and identity arose.”

Zanelli was struck by how conscious young people were of the economic, social and environmental climate they are growing up in.

You might like

Sponsored

The power of learning art later in life

Visual Art

A new home for FELTspace, Adelaide’s artist-run ‘playground’

“Many of the young people in the work spoke about their anxiety about the cost of living, and many of them expressed confusion about how they would ever be able to afford to buy a house in the future.

“Young people are busy and manage so many pressures. And they just get it done.”

You might like

Sponsored

The power of learning art later in life

Visual Art

A new home for FELTspace, Adelaide’s artist-run ‘playground’

The relationship between time, labour, and the physical world is a recurring thread in Yield Strength, the 2026 Adelaide Biennial, and one that emerged gradually as its Adelaide-born curator Ellie Buttrose visited artists around the country.

“I think there is this moment after Covid where artists are investing in ‘time spent’,” Buttrose says. “Artists are spending time with their materials, and pushing their materials and pushing that aesthetic experience of the materiality of art, but also how that has wider implications. The push and pull of the social comes through as a metaphor in the way that you push and pull with materials.”

Buttrose found another example even closer to home, when she paid a visit to the Adelaide studio of sculptor Jennifer Mathews. Mathews had moved back home after completing Honours at the Victorian College of Arts, where her early attempts to explore themes of excess and architecture had hit a ceiling.

“I was deeply interested in the kinds of spaces that lure you in and churn you out in a consumerist sense, and in speculating whether all the waste of it all could be utilised for something hopeful or poetic,” Mathews says.

Realising she needed to upskill to do her ideas justice, Mathews joined Adelaide’s George Street Studios where she spent countless hours learning about metal fabrication from founders David McMurray and Martin Murray.

“I’ve been steadily obsessed with it since,” Mathews says. “Having more knowledge of how things are made has allowed my work to shift from speculative models into something more spatial, structural and grounded, opening up new influences, collaborations and ideas.”

At the time of Buttrose’s visit, Mathews had just opened a solo exhibition in Sydney with a series of sculptures inspired by the agricultural world, and its structures that feed, guide, and sort livestock in active and passive ways.

Mathews will unveil two new large-scale works as part of the Biennial, installed in the lower galleries of the Art Gallery of South Australia. In Mathews’ hands, however, it’s us gallery-goers who are being sorted like cattle.

“Galleries and even curators are often directing people through the spaces, sometimes in overt or covert ways,” Buttrose reflects.

“Jen’s intervening into that flow of the galleries, and not only making us aware of our physical relationship with an artwork, but also the way that we navigate galleries and  spaces, and how that can be controlled or shaped by artist.”

Mathews’s metallic interventions are, in turn, shaped by those hours in the studio drilling, cutting, welding, and grinding. Despite the polished and sterile appearance of her creations, Mathews reiterates the humanity of the process.

“I think the style of metal work that I do can feel very dehumanised despite how labour intensive it can be,” she says. “Lacking a visible ‘hand’, but every aspect has been considered and felt. Hundreds of rivets, hundreds of hours of work.”

From moving pictures to polished metal, Mathews and Zanelli’s projects appear to share little in common. But for Buttrose, they both reflect a level of care and ambition that drew her in.

“The wonderful thing about the biennial is, historically, it has brought in artists who might have been actually mid-career or early-career that aren’t as well known, and it’s given them a platform, an opportunity to do really ambitious projects and become a more familiar name for audiences. I’m definitely expecting that to happen for Emmaline and Jennifer.”

And, we can only hope, the platform will bring both artists enough pocket money to continue their work.

2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength runs from February 27 – June 8

This article was first published in CityMag issue #49