Next Gen Creatives at TAFE QLD
One evening, a room filled with bold new work and the Sunshine Coast’s next generation of creative artists standing proudly beside it. Carlie Wacker discovers a showcase of talent that is free and open to everyone.
There’s a moment in a creative life that nobody photographs. It isn’t the finished piece or the opening night but the moment just before when the work leaves the studio and enters a gallery, boutique or a room full of strangers and stops being yours alone. That moment is one filled with nerves, anticipation, expectation and excitement and one that you will feel when you attend the TAFE Queensland Mooloolaba campus’ Creative Showcase this year.
On Thursday 12 November, a whole cohort of Sunshine Coast makers will have that moment all at once and it’s an energy you’ll want to be around. The Creative Showcase will bring together emerging artists, designers and the educators who taught them. It’s free,
it’s open to everyone including family, friends and the curious.
With the work on display as well as food trucks and entertainment, it is a well-deserved celebration of the diverse and unique creative work – and it’s what the students have been training for and working towards across the year. A past graduate is Megan Robinson who graduated with a Diploma of Visual Arts last year and has already found an audience beyond the classroom. Her work was recognised with an award at Sculpture on the Edge, which is not a small thing for an artist at the very start of a career. She’s now heading into further study at the University of Canberra.
That trajectory is worth pausing on. There’s a persistent idea that vocational training and university sit on separate tracks and that you choose one road or the other at eighteen and that’s that. Megan’s path suggests otherwise. She used her TAFE Queensland qualification
as a foundation to build from.
What you will love about the showcase is meeting the people behind the work, including Hamish Barometro who is in the first year of a Diploma of Apparel, Fashion and Textiles specialising in design and product development. Hamish has already shown work publicly at the Nambour Show which is impressive as first-year students don’t usually have that opportunity.
Standing beside your own garments while people look at them, ask questions, and form opinions in front of you is an education in itself and its the kind you cannot get from a brief and a deadline.
As someone who runs a small fashion label, I can tell you the making is the easy part. It’s the showing that takes nerve. Hamish will be part of the fashion show which is always a highlight of the event as the students’ creations are brought to life on the catwalk.
It’s also the people behind the people that the Showcase celebrates putting the teachers in the picture too. Andrew Bryant teaches ceramics and does so as a working ceramic artist with years of teaching behind him and several international study tours informing what he brings to the studio. That combination matters more than it sounds. A teacher who still makes things knows what it feels like when a piece fails in the kiln at the last stage and knows how to talk a student through it without either sugar-coating it or letting them quit.
Fashion teacher Amanda Knights brings a focus that will resonate with anyone paying attention to where the industry is heading. Her teaching leans hard into sustainability, responsible design and a critical look at fast fashion. I love that she teaches her students more than constructing a garment.
They’re learning to ask whether it should exist, what it’s made from and where it goes afterwards. That’s an enormous shift from how fashion was taught a generation ago and it’s happening here at TAFE Queensland Mooloolaba campus.
Our regional creative communities are built on a steady supply of people who are trained locally, encouraged locally and given somewhere to show their work before they’ve earned the right to expect an audience – that’s what the TAFE Queensland Mooloolaba campus Creative Showcase is all about. Some of the names on the walls that night will be familiar to you in a decade. Others will take the skills somewhere else entirely, which is also great. Either way, the whole thing depends on people turning up.
So turn up to TAFE Queensland Mooloolaba campus and immerse yourself in the creative environment. Look properly at the work, enjoy the fashion runway show and see the art in a way a photograph could never manage. Ask a student what they made and why. They’ll be nervous but also they’ll be stoked you asked.
2026 CREATIVE SHOWCASE
Celebrating and showcasing student works.
What: Free, family-friendly exhibition with student art displays, fashion show, live music, food trucks.
Where: TAFE Queensland Mooloolaba campus, 34 Lady Musgrave Drive, Mountain Creek
When: Thurs 12 November, 6pm-8pm.
For more information on events and courses, visit www.tafe.edu.au
