Artist Profile

As its social and political implications have unpacked over the last half-century, the word ‘identity’ has continued to accumulate meanings. From ‘self’ to ‘individuality’, the idea came to include a question of the separation of majority and minorit

I was thinking of this last November when I visited the multisensory light and sound spectacular Van Gogh Alive, at Sydney’s Royal Hall of Industries, Moore Park, where, across the forty-five minute length of the show, 3000 projections of Van Gogh’s

What is the importance of painting for you? By painting, I’m trying to understand or identify something, and in doing so it can be a release. Painting helps me understand, see and feel, and help resolve trauma – I don’t necessarily want to go anywher

How would you describe your art to a stranger? My art is essentially abstract. When you are trying to think about the bigger picture, about being human, about where we sit in the world, and about how we are, abstraction is a way of communicating more

Bill Henson is preparing for an upcoming show. He says that ‘new pictures grow out of old pictures. With these recently completed works there has been a twenty-two year gestation period.’ Particular modes of figuration, themes, and textures have rema

Tira Walsh graduated from Unitec, Auckland, with a Masters of Creative Practice in 2018, having made the decision to pursue painting several years after the birth of her fourth child. Since graduating, Walsh has established herself as a formidable ta

You grew up in Bandjalang country in the Northern Rivers of NSW? I was born in Lismore and lived there till I was twelve. I thought I was going to be there forever but then we moved to Kyogle because my father became the manager of the Norco butter f

Fiona Foley says Australia’s history of brutality doesn’t surprise her as much anymore. But it ‘has been a burning question for me since I was a child of about five, sitting on the beach at Urangan looking across to Fraser Island, thinking, “Why aren

One sunny Monday afternoon, I arrived out the front of Henry Curchod’s studio building only to realise that it was much more than that. As the artist ushered me around to the side of the building, I noticed a shiny black car sitting adjacent to the e

Olga Cironis is a collector of stories; a salvager of innocuous fragments of life’s unseen moments, otherwise confined to individual memory. For Cironis, personal stories have collective meaning, and to share these stories is to give power to voices

‘Seeing and Being Seen’, William Yang’s latest project, has had a long gestation. It was first proposed by former Queensland Art Gallery /Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) curator Aaron Seeto four years ago, before being picked up by another QAGOMA cura

As one of her favourite writers, Jorge Luis Borges, once observed, ‘A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must fe

It’s a studio visit like no other. I pull over on a dirt road just outside Westbury in Northern Tasmania and do a U-turn before re-reading the instructions: ‘After the willow trees, then across the creek.’ On my second attempt to find Simms’ camp – h

During my last years of art school, at a critical point in my studies, on the verge of establishing my practice, a respected lecturer and accomplished artist told me I can’t sustain a practice on autobiographical themes. I was totally and utterly dej

Although now based in Melbourne, I spent my childhood on the Central Pacific Ocean island Banaba, part of the nation of Kiribati. In between bouts of study – including Melbourne University, Victorian College of the Arts and RMIT University – I lived

For many Western Australians, Ross Seaton (1944–2020) was the ‘Walking Man.’ He is a vivid memory, a point of reference, a marker in our unfolding lives. A feature of the local landscape for decades, he pushed his wheelbarrow along Stirling Highway,

In 1875 New York, Madame Helena Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society. Theosophists held that spiritual progress and an understanding of God may be attained via intuition, the occult, and working on personal and societal improvement. Blavatsk

In 2007, Gillian Sanbrook bought Bibbaringa, a 950-hectare property located in Wymah Valley on the south west slopes of New South Wales. At the time, the land had suffered from overuse – too many livestock led to the degradation and reduction of grou

‘Mare Incognitum’ is a concept that explores the ideas of undisclosed seas – Freud also used this term as a metaphor for the unconscious human mind. In his forthcoming exhibition at Olsen Gallery, Stephen Bird poses questions for exploring the unknow

‘Rituals of the herd’ marks Charmaine Pike’s first Sydney ‘Rituals exhibition since 2017. Moving to the next body of work after a successful exhibition, the artist found her work was ‘getting too tight and a little hard edged.’ She was losing the loo

Marking the Bend in the Track 2 (2020) is a new watercolour work on the program in ‘From the Mountain to the Sky: Guy Warren Drawings’. Looking at it, we follow an ochre path through the space of the picture, up and away to the right, the colour beco

The impressively comprehensive survey of Streeton’s career curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe for the Art Gallery of New South Wales (7 November 2020 to 14 February 2021) gave us ample material to answer this question. That’s what good surveys do – they pr

There is some irony in the term ‘endangered artefacts’ given that Victoria Reichelt’s work appears to be a painted photographic facsimile. The style itself is another near-redundant form used to dazzle the untutored and too often, in less capable han

When the great Canadian-born painter Philip Guston’s daughter Musa Mayer wrote a compelling biography Night Studio (1988) about the problems of having a never-around workaholic father, many were shocked by his apparent parental neglect. And it was no

Having recently graduated from the National Art School, majoring in ceramics, Parker is searching for her own frames of beauty. As a young artist of Australian and African American heritage, she re-examines the ostensible ‘primitivity’ of the ceramic