The Project That Started It All in Melbourne

Newcastle Art Gallery, with Exhibitionist Digital

When I first landed in Melbourne, I didn't have a network, a portfolio anyone local recognized, or a single lead. What I had was a conversation with Mat Spisbah, Creative Director at Exhibitionist Digital, that turned into the first real opportunity of my new chapter here.

That opportunity was the Newcastle Art Gallery website. A three month contract, working closely with James Edmond, building a digital home for one of the region's cultural institutions.

Walking In Green

I remember going into this one a little nervous. New country, new team, first project. Exhibitionist Digital had already scoped out a site that needed to feel less like a static museum brochure and more like a living platform, somewhere people could browse the collection, catch up on events, and get lost in the gallery's media output the same way they'd get lost wandering the actual halls.

The stack was Next.js on the front end and Sanity as the CMS. Clean, fast, and flexible enough that the gallery's own team could manage content without needing a developer on call for every update. That last part mattered a lot to the client, and it shaped a lot of the decisions James and I made along the way.

Building the Gallery

The gallery component was where a lot of the early thinking went. Artwork isn't uniform. Some pieces are wide, some are tall, some come with a paragraph of context and some come with almost none. I built the browsing experience to handle that variety gracefully, so every piece got to breathe on the page instead of being squeezed into a rigid grid.

Alongside that came search. Visitors needed a way to actually find things, an artist, a piece, a theme, without digging through menus. Getting that feature to feel instant and reliable took its own share of iteration.

The Feature I'm Proudest Of

If you ask me what I look back on most fondly from those three months, it's the Watch, Read, Listen page.

NAG puts out a genuine amount of media. Podcasts, articles, video, events. All of it valuable, all of it scattered. My job was to bring it together into something coherent, a dedicated space where each content type had its own identity but still felt like part of the same experience. I built the events and podcasts listings that fed into this page, and watching it all click together by the end was one of those quiet, satisfying moments you don't forget.

What It Taught Me

Looking back now, this project was more than just a line on a resume. It was proof, to myself as much as anyone, that I could land somewhere new and still deliver on something real. It taught me how to build content heavy platforms that stay flexible for the people managing them and polished for the people visiting them.

And it all traced back to one conversation with Mat. Sometimes that's all it takes.

Contributed as Frontend Engineer

In collaboration with Exhibitionist Digital

Made using Nextjs, Radix, Sanity