From the onset of puberty I have suffered from chronic migraines. The word migraine comes from the Greek ‘hemi-krania’, or half skull, referring to pain on one side of the head. This conception of the half, the halving of the body that migraine infli

No one who saw Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s Life Span installation in The Ludoteca Castello, Venice, for La Biennale di Venezia, in 2009 has ever forgotten it: a huge black rectangular solid block made from 175,218 VHS video cassettes (weighing n

Not long ago I encountered the sculpture No.247 Metal construction (1965–68) in the exhibition ‘Assembled: The Art of Robert Klippel’ at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria. It was set centrally in the space, backlit by a large window on the far wall.

Writing after the death of Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol declared that ‘people will be discussing new beauty in Beuys as long as there are people.’ That was forty-four years ago, and Warhol’s faith in his friend remains as affecting as the beauty in Beuy

Drew Pettifer is the quintessential artist/academic who weaves together his knowledge and insight as an historian with a rigorous practice of image-making to explore gender, sexuality and the politics of desire. His first encounter with the story of

Synaesthesia is a catch-all term for an intriguing group of broad sensory phenomena where subjects perceive external elements through multiple senses. Colours are heard, sounds are felt in different parts of the body and numbers are processed as shap

Having visited Iceland on an art residency in 2011, the impressions of rapture and bewilderment were hard to shake off. The nagging feeling led to an application to Hafnarborg, the contemporary art centre in the former fishing town of Hafnarfjördur.

What attracted you to glass? Its refraction of light, the fact that it's a sculptural material that is malleable; it is a liquid and you can melt it. I was very, very drawn to glass – it seemed quite exotic. I had already been studying photography, s

The 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art celebrates a thirty-year milestone with ‘Monster Theatres’, curated by Leigh Robb, who is also Art Gallery of South Australia’s (AGSA) first Curator of Contemporary Art. The title draws from the Latin mone

What lead to building your new studio? Claire: Having the luxury of being able to ponder, rather than have a concept in mind or making the work for a particular site. To have an object within a space to crash your big toe into or fall over; just go t

Anna Louise Richardson’s charcoal and graphite drawings are luscious and dramatic. Her subject matter can be confronting: a hanging carcass, an oversized fly, amplified by the depth and tone of her drawings. Muscle is glossy; hairs are defined. Ideas

Robin White (Ngãti Awa) first came to prominence in the 1970s with her distinctive figurative representations of the landscapes and people of New Zealand. The clarity and figurative concentration of her paintings from this period, such as 1974’s Fish

David Noonan is on an endless quest to source, construct and amalgamate a range of inexplicable and beguiling images. His processes are reliant upon the synchronicity of accidents, as the artist comments, ‘one image activates a dormant one and someth

‘A lot of humans forget we are organic entities, the same as every other creature on the planet, and we’ve only been here for a short time. I am very pessimistic about the plight of human beings. We don’t learn much, I mean, we’ve been wreaking havoc

Your Mum and Dad are artists – did you grow up knowing you’d follow this path? Yes, it was the only way for me. My parents made their living making pots and selling them at craft markets and teaching pottery, sculpture and painting. Every year they’d

Bessie Davidson was one of a cohort of female Australian artists who, at the turn of the nineteenth century, sought to expand their lives and artistic careers by travelling to the cultural centres of Europe. Davidson was one of the few who remained i

Stelarc was born in Cyprus in 1946, immigrating to Victoria as a young child with his family in the 1950s. His parents had no formal education, with his father having many jobs including being taxi driver, mechanic, tailor and eventually owning a vin

The eldest of thirteen children, Laurie Nilsen was born in 1953 and grew up in a tent in the public camping reserve on the banks of Bungil Creek, Roma, south-west Queensland. As a teenager he moved to Brisbane to pursue a career as a jockey. He then

Is it too early to call Joseph Beuys Cafe the sleeper success of the 2020 Melbourne arts calendar? An appointment-only gallery established by collector Ian George, this is the only space in Australia dedicated to the seminal figure of late-modern Con

Art is a fascinating thing. What is it? Is it man explaining to others what he sees, how he feels, his truth, his place in the cosmos? It can be. Can U Dig It? immediately popped into my head when I was looking at Madeleine Kelly’s densely populated

The eye, the aesthetic lens of artists, has made an indelible impression upon our everyday. A motorway overpass is very Jeffrey Smart, a hillside of saplings is rather Fred Williams, a backlit side-table covered in flowers is just so ‘Olley.’ So too,

One hundred and twenty-two works displayed chronologically in purpose designed spaces make up the retrospective, assembled by Michael Hawker, curator Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery. Molvig’s practice is introduced through a number of smalle

Rosina Gunjarrwanga (born in Darwin, 1988) is related to many significant artists, including her mother Belinj Susan Marawarr and the renowned Balang John Mawurndjul AM. The catalogue essay for ‘Primavera,’ prepared by Maningrida Arts & Culture, note

In the Aegean archipelago, islands call to you. A luminous pulse in the gathering twilight encircled in an aqua sea. Long after they dissolve into distant light-flicker, they return to hover inside, as afterimage. In memory, they ignite an impossible

What kind of book might an artist and a writer create together, given free reign? This is the question proposed by the kōrero series, a venture by Massey University Press enabling the artists and writers of New Zealand to explore the weaving together

My art making process involves constructing miniature fictive spaces based on familiar architecture that I photograph and film. The camera lens magnifies the model and reveals that the photograph has been constructed with a handmade materialised obje