What’s On: Margaret McIntosh exhibition, Placky Bags (Mitchell Fine Art)

Placky Bags

26 August – 20 September 2025

Mitchell Fine Art Gallery, Fortitude Valley

Melbourne artist Margaret McIntosh returns to Mitchell Fine Art with her second solo exhibition, Placky Bags, illuminating 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,” said McIntosh, “to reimagine what we call dead, broken or done.”

McIntosh is critical of rubbish piles stacked curbside, likening them to “modern makeshift altars 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.

For further information, and to view the exhibition catalogue, visit the Mitchell Fine Art website