Artist Profile

It may be tempting to situate this issue of Artist Profile within a feminist framework, adding to the growing discourse surrounding gender inequality within the arts. Indeed, the trope of the male genius suffuses the canon of Western art like a lurid

In 2019, it’s tempting to think that we’ve passed beyond the boundaries of genre. We live in an arguably postmodern period defined by Craig Owens, for instance, as ‘a crisis of cultural authority’. However, this year’s Kilgour Prize at Newcastle Art

Your photographic works are beautifully staged and finished in colour by hand. Can you speak to the technical and artistic influences in your practice, in particular your ‘Studio Series’? The ‘Studio Series’ was directly influenced by the works of st

Do you paint en plein air or do you work in the studio from sketches or photos? Plein air is a really key aspect to my practice … a way of seeing and feeling the landscape on quite an emotional level. Without that I’d have nothing to work from in the

The photograph is often considered a visual expression of a singular instant, an isolated representation of a moment in time so infinitesimal that mechanical capture is the only means of suspending it. Today, rapid photographic images proliferate exp

When Susan Norrie won an Australia Council Visual Arts Award in 2019 acknowledging her major contribution to Australian contemporary art and broader cultural life, she was unequivocal in declaring the central concerns of her practice. ‘We are at a cr

SHHH … Listen! Do you hear that … silence? Wordlessly, the best art talks to us, luring those beholden to its thrall and fluent in aesthetic dialect, to be offered personal truth given by those in tune with their muse. Linda Marrinon is profoundly sh

At the heart of Yvonne Koolmatrie’s work is her homeland: Ngarrindjeri country. Stretching from the lower Murray River to its mouth at the Coorong lagoon is the land of the artist’s mother and her ancestors. Koolmatrie has lived all of her life in Ng

‘The floor for a sculptor is the same as the floor for a dancer,’ says Jan King. ‘It’s the thing that activates your movement. Dancers can’t fly, they have to hit the floor. They come down, they move across, they lift up again – and this is exactly w

Mulda paints her own experience – it is the medium in which she communicates her story. She has been exhibiting consistently since 2008, yet it was the suite of paintings shown in ‘The National: New Australian Art’ in 2019 which drew the attention of

Cornelia Parker is a British-born, London-based artist set to show at Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) as part of this year’s Sydney International Art Series. Her works are marked by an unusual amount of order, coupled with an unusual ran

What is it that draws you to ruins? I became interested in ruins as visual depictions of estrangement, separation and detachment from the flow of time. I started drawing upon them as visual references through found material, like photographs and book

There are three aspects of my latest paintings (other than the actual physical painting process) that have become important to my work: the dual portraits, the characters and the process before the painting. The idea of creating dual portraits came t

I was born on the day of mastery, according to the secret language of birthdays. My interpretation of this is that I spread across dance, choreography and art in a concentrated manner. I have been called a magpie from an early age. A common saying in

The first painting I can remember is Bruegel’s Harvesters (1565). Although many years have passed since my childhood fascination with it (or rather, with its reproduction hanging in my parents’ bedroom), Harvesters continues to evade my full understa

Of Anubis, jackals, I dream, trample and stamp, looking for the amphibian that moves, through a glass darkly His armour shines, amid croaking sounds An attribution to the burrowing frogs The audience unaware that I in my studio, am aware of the soap

Return to Beginning, the title of a 1965 collage by Helen Marshall (1908–1996), encapsulates both her guiding philosophy and her life story: a life of cyclical returns, fresh starts and perpetual motion, moving ceaselessly for three decades across an

In 1974, I was an undergraduate art history student at Melbourne University. Lynne Cook was a year ahead of me. We were both frustrated by the lack of women artists mentioned in our courses. Two key texts framed our thinking. One was the 1971 essay b

To begin with the jewellery is to begin with the personal, as the personal and the intimate illuminate Lisa Roet’s work. The surface texture of the gilded abstract neck pieces, rings and bangles is the texture of Orang-utan or Gorilla skin, to be wor

The paintings of Chicago-born, Sydneybased artist Evelyna Helmer emphasise the power of nostalgia and the allure of mystery. Often intentionally elliptical, Helmer’s seemingly quiet objects are charged with an emotional and psychological valency. Hel

Any exhibition that includes Tracey Moffatt’s image making comes with a fanfare, and her collaborative show with photographer Hayley Millar-Baker, at Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, called ‘The truth of what occurred remains’, is no exception. Art

There is a growing rebellion over the silence and inactivity of our country’s powerbrokers and general populace regarding climate change. We are living in a time when this rebellion is being portrayed as an inconvenience and calls for protest to only

Egan carefully selects familiar figures from art history who are easily identifiable, such as Vincent van Gogh and Salvador Dali, and juxtaposes them with improbable companions including brush turkeys, kangaroos, domestic dogs and farm animals. Her c

Leading contemporary Australian artist Brenda L. Croft employs a considered approach to the exploration of her Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra and Irish/German/Chinese/Australian heritage. In her first solo exhibition at Niagara Galleries, ‘hand/made/held/

Heralded as a ‘game-changer’, Te Papa Tongarewa’s newly contemporised space – Toi Art – opened in 2018 with a triumphant flourish and a feeling that, finally, the institution will be seen as living up to its promise as New Zealand’s national gallery

The Prue Venables exhibition, recently held at the Australian Design Centre in Sydney, is on its first stop in a national tour. It is being shown with its accompanying documentary, which was filmed in her studio in Castlemaine, Victoria. Over the nex

It’s the twentieth anniversary of Davida Allen’s film Feeling Sexy. The last time I spoke to Allen was back in the 1990s. I came across her phone number while sorting through a mountain of paperwork and decided to call her Ipswich Queensland home to