To build a home by Isabella Capezio
Image: Artist Isabella Capezio
Isabella Capezio’s large-scale vinyl artwork ‘To build a home’ will be displayed on the external wall of Mornington Peninsula Shire until Sunday 1 March as part of the Midsumma Festival.
About the Public Art exhibition
When: Monday 24 November – Sunday 1 March
What: To build a home - Public Art - vinyl artwork
Artist: Isabelle Capezio
Where: Mornington Peninsula Shire (external wall) - 2 Queen Street Mornington
Artist Talk: Saturday 24 January - Mornington Library
Isabella Capezio discusses the public art commission, including their inspirations, artistic processes and thematic concerns and engagements.
Workshop: Saturday 31 January - Mornington Library
Join Isabella Capezio for an experimental collage and zine making workshop! Open to all ages and abilities, no prior experience required.
In the words of Isabelle Capezio
Queer families do not have the laid groundwork of heterosexual ones, and such complexities require resourcefulness.
As a queer person growing a family, I’m reflecting on how being in a queer family asks you to weave in what materials you can find to create comfort and stability, a home. Like a nest, they are built by collecting what is at hand, scraps, offcuts, fluff, twigs, spit, and dirt. The coalescence of fragile materials is reinforced through its intersection. The home reflects environmental conditions, familial tensions, and seasonal forces. In this sense, queer is enacted, embodied and performed, queer is the affective connections created through relational ecologies, to a family that is built and not given.
Influenced by Sara Ahmed and Donna Haraway’s writing, ‘to build a home’ is a proposition for a new way of thinking about family, identity, the body and desire. The large-scale collage includes figures overlaid and overlapping on textured surfaces by blending and splicing failed photographic prints, photographs, clippings from old textbooks and test strips. ‘To build a home’ is a document that weaves together found materials with candid moments of hurt, love and connection.
When a path is not clearly laid out, when queer takes you off course, the journey is one of building and becoming.
Artist Bio
Isabella Capezio is an artist and lecturer in photography at RMIT with a PhD in Media and Communication, living and working on
Wurrundjeri Woi Wurrung land. Isabella’s work and research explores ideas of failure, queerness, and nature and how alternative and expanded forms of photography can unsettle existing colonising forms of representation. Isabella is interested in experimental, process driven and site-specific engagements with environments and their histories to address the climate crisis, extraction and colonial logics.
About Midsumma Festival
Midsumma is Australia’s leading queer arts and culture festival, running for 22 days each summer in Melbourne with more than 200 events across visual arts, performance and community.
Other events for Midsumma
Out Loud on the Ninch
Out Loud on the Ninch is a sunset event at the Peninsula Community Theatre, bringing together live queer performers and musicians alongside stalls offering resources and connections for the local queer community. At the heart of the evening is the photographic exhibition You & I, a bold project celebrating queer pride across generations.
Where: Peninsula Community Theatre, 91 Wilsons Rd, Mornington
When: Saturday 7 February 2026, 4pm
Price: $30 adults, $10 concession
Presented by Victoria’s Pride | Victorian Government and Midsumma Festival, produced by Flinders Fringe and supported by Mornington Peninsula Shire.