BRISBANE.- Melbourne artist Margaret McIntosh returns to Mitchell Fine Art in Fortitude Valley with her second solo exhibition, Placky Bags, showing from 26 August 2025.

In her latest exhibition, McIntosh illuminates societal waste and overconsumption and highlights the intersection between urban waste and natural scavenging.

Drawing a striking parallel between curbside rubbish and the ritual of crows picking at a carcass, Placky Bags examines our throwaway culture with sharp critique and quiet reverence.

‘Placky Bags aims to challenge our relationship to consumption and waste’ says McIntosh ‘to reimagine what we call dead, broken or done’.

McIntosh is critical of rubbish piles stacked curbside, likening them to ‘modern makeshift alters to excess and obsolescence’. Not unlike the way crows transform death into sustenance, rubbish scavengers recycle our cast-off belongings, transforming and repurposing our rejected objects.

Her work challenges our relationship to consumerism and asks viewers to reconsider the stories embedded in domestic garbage.

Margaret McIntosh paintings use subtle shifts in composition, emptiness, and object relationships to evoke mood, memory, and narrative. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts, where she was the recipient of the Maude Glover Fleay Graduate Award. In 2024, she was a finalist in the Paddington Art Prize in Sydney.

The exhibition is showing at Mitchell Fine Art, 86 Arthur Street in Fortitude Valley from 26th August – 20th September 2025.

An Exhibition Opening Event will be held on Saturday 30th August from 2 – 4pm with the Margaret in attendance. This is a free event.

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Mitchell Fine Art is open 6 days a week from Monday to Friday 10am to 5.30pm and Saturday 10am until 5pm, with onsite parking available.