Creation of Love Follows a Line, by Artist Matthew Aberline, with The Beautiful and Useful Studio, as part of Brisbane Quarter’s site-specific installation Wonderstuck in conjunction with QAGOMA’s 2025 exhibition.
Friday 13 November 2026 – Sunday 31 January 2027
For his summer exhibition at Benalla Art Gallery, Matthew Aberline transforms the Pop-Up Benalla Art Gallery into A Secret Garden: an immersive world of inflatable sculpture, lanterns, textile works, appliqué, wearable forms and participatory making.
Drawing on Aberline’s celebrated floral and botanical visual language, A Secret Garden unashamedly explores beauty as a force for healing. This is a garden full of delights and surprises: a place where colour blooms, stories are shared, forms overflow their boundaries, and visitors are invited to play, contribute, remember and imagine.
At the heart of the exhibition are three major works. Originally commissioned for QAGOMA and Brisbane Quarter, Love Follows a Line has been reimagined for Benalla as a wall-based work of giant flowers and glowing patterns. Visitors are invited to add their own stories to the wall, honouring the women and female role models who have helped them grow into the fullest versions of themselves.
I Am Growing in the Garden of Your Love brings together three large-scale appliqué textile works presented with wearable sculptural forms, where pattern and fabric appear to grow across the human body.
Song of Light is a lantern installation celebrating place, home and belonging, with visitors invited to add their own lantern to the growing field of light.
The exhibition also includes I Am Not a Chair, a defiant textile work in which upholstery, appliqué and botanical forms overwhelm the logic of the object. This chair resists what the world says it should be and invents its own future. No longer simply a chair, it becomes a garden: unsittable, transformed and liberated from its original function. The work speaks to the boundaries we inherit, imagine, or place upon ourselves, and the possibility of growing beyond them.
Presented across the summer season from November to January, A Secret Garden is a deliberately family-friendly exhibition that reimagines the white cube gallery as a place of play, participation and emotional renewal. Generous, empowering and deeply accessible, the work invites audiences of all ages to step inside, contribute, connect, and discover beauty as something active: a shared force for healing, imagination and growth.
About the Artist:
Matthew Aberline is an Australian artist and founder of The Beautiful and Useful Studio, with a practice spanning public art, sculptural textiles, inflatables, installation and participatory projects. His work has been presented nationally and internationally, including projects with the United Nations General Assembly and World Pride at the World Trade Center Oculus in New York; Australia House in London; Sydney Opera House, Powerhouse Museum and Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney; and the National Library of Australia and Questacon Science in Museum Canberra.
Aberline is the Creative Director of The Beautiful and Useful Studio. He says: “With over a decade of experience and audience interactions in the millions, we make beautiful, story-rich public artworks – meaningful, deliberately accessible and unapologetically fun. We put the public into public art.”
