"There is no art that's not constrained and works within boundaries. And within those boundaries, you've still got an absolute infinity of possibilities." — Gavin Ryan
Harley Breen sits down with Gavin Ryan, Woodfordia's Artist in Residence and the designer behind the Woodford Folk Festival poster (and other wonderful works) since 2008. Gavin's path to Woodford began almost by accident — a satirical exhibition called Sex and Death and Shopping, an unsolicited email to Bill Hauritz on his way through to Sydney, and a "yep, you, come here" that changed the course of his career. Before Woodford, Gavin was Australia's youngest-ever stamp designer, illustrated for encyclopedias as a teenager, and apprenticed under his uncle, an official Australian war artist whose work now hangs in the Australian War Memorial.
This year's poster, themed "Tending the Light," is Gavin's most technically ambitious yet — a 3D digital work built from a file containing over 154 million polygons, seven months in the making, and rendered frame by frame on a fully-specced MacBook Pro. The conversation moves from the practical (three days engineering the mechanism behind the poster's live reveal) to the philosophical — how creative boundaries produce, rather than limit, genuine originality.
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Key topics: Gavin Ryan, artist in residence, Woodford Folk Festival poster, 3D digital art, Sex and Death and Shopping, Woodfordia, community art, stamp design, creative process
To come to the Woodford Folk Festival this year visit: https://woodfordfolkfestival.com/
FOR MORE:
Harley Breen: https://www.harleybreen.com.au
Gavin Ryan: https://linktr.ee/Gavinryan
Woodfordia: https://woodfordia.org/
CREDITS: Host: Harley Breen | Guest: Gavin Ryan | Executive Producer: Bree Hickson-Jamieson | Production: Josh Weier | Runner: Monica Clayton | Video Editor: Nick Haddow | Sound Engineer: Stevie-Leigh Batiste | Music by: The East Pointers | Recorded on Jinibara Country | Recorded September 2026
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