Author Archives: Artist Profile
Susie Choi
In an autumn downpour I arrive at the Annandale studio of Susie Choi. The rain seems to rattle the bones of the old warehouse space, which is shared with fellow artists Glenn Barkley and Mechelle Bounpraseuth. Choi is painting colourful stripes on a large ceramic form which, she tells me, will hang from the ceiling; […]
Camel Milk
The SS Club has been like a second home to me for the last 20 years. It is a strange place caught in a surreal time bubble as it was set up by the Nazi SS when they were searching for the lost Arian tribe. There is a shooting gallery in the basement which still […]
Issue 67
Artist Profile acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we work. EDITOR’S NOTE Two important firsts happened in Australasia in April for Indigenous artists worldwide. Archie Moore’s exhibition kith and kin at the Australia Pavilion and Mataaho Collective’s installation Takapau, in the main exhibition Stranieri Ovunque – […]
Dhuluny: the war that never ended
The exhibition interweaves the works of contemporary Wiradyuri artists, their predecessors and ancestors, with settler pastoral works to shape the experiences incited by the declaration of martial law on 14 August 1824. Dhuluny, meaning “truth” and “that which is direct,” recounts the frontier violence that ensued following the declaration and the systematic colonial killing of […]
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Dale Frank: Nobody’s Sweetie
Dale Frank is not an easy subject for a documentary. At the after-screening session at the Art Gallery of NSW, the film’s director spoke of the difficulty of filming and editing the project. According to Jenny Hicks, Frank’s documentarian, when the camera would roll, Frank would leave the room. It took a while for Frank […]
Hiroshi Sugimoto
The esteemed contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has spent much of his creative practice questioning and reflecting on the transience of time, human existence and consciousness, the importance of art, invention, and the nature of infinity. Known principally for his sustained photographic explorations that have engaged him for over fifty years, his broad creative practice also […]
Evelyn Chapman Art Award
Established in 2018, the $50,000 Evelyn Chapman Art Award is presented to an Australian painter under forty-five years to support their further artistic education and practice. This flexible award–which is essentially a scholarship̶ can be used to support the winning artist at a recognised art school or cultural organisation approved by the Trustee, in Australia […]
Zoe Grey
Zoe Grey’s exhibition of paintings, drawings, and ceramics is inspired by mountainous islands on opposite sides of the world. Grey’s relationship to her hometown of Marrawah, on Tasmania’s west coast, has long informed her art-making. Her exhibition at Despard Gallery in Hobart Could You Ever Know Every Fold in the Mountain? continues her exploration of […]
Portia Geach Memorial Award, portraiture by Australian female artists
Influential art critic, John McDonald, must have had tongue firmly in cheek when he questioned whether the 2023 Portia Geach Memorial Award at the S. H. Ervin Gallery had “gone political,” in his Sydney Morning Herald column last year. McDonald’s concern was in relation to Kate Stevens’ entry The Whistleblower, taking out the prize. David […]
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A Throw Of The Dice
While known for his large arrangements of canvasboards, famed contemporary artist Imants Tillers also writes. About art and artists. About making contemporary art in Australia. About his relationship to his Latvian heritage. On one occasion, he writes of his repeated attempts to paint a portrait of Murray Bail (first published in Heat, 1998). “This work […]
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Tagged Imants Tillers, Janet Laurence, John Davis, John Young, Julie Rrap, Robert Owen
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Zac Langdon-Pole
This description makes Zac Langdon-Pole’s practice sound playful, based in small acts of curious deployment of things, ideas, and words—the tangible and intangible, perceptible and imagined. And there is an element of play as it might be understood as testing the parameters and potential of the world—its material forms and organising principles. But Langdon-Pole’s work […]
undo the day
The curatorial notes for undo the day, an exhibition at Sydney’s National Art School Gallery featuring works by ten contemporary Australian artists, make no mention of the pandemic but it is hard not to see the show in light of the adjustments made to our shared consciousness over the last four years. Proceeding from the observation that […]
Clara Adolphs
Growing up the youngest of three sisters in the northern parts of suburban Sydney, Clara Adolphs was largely left to her own devices. With fertile imagination, she hatched a fictitious world – what she named her “natural game” – as a place to escape and explore. Today, it seems, Adophs is still playing her “natural […]
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Tagged 18th adelaide biennial, Clara Adolphs, inner sanctum, Ngununggula
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Blak Douglas vs The Commonwealth
Adam Douglas Hill, better known by his longstanding moniker Blak Douglas, is an Indigenous artist with strong connections to Western Sydney and the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern. This is important to preface, as the documentary’s provocative title, Blak Douglas vs The Commonwealth, focusses on the histories and experiences of Indigenous people from New South […]
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Tagged Blak Douglas vs The Commonwealth, Documentary
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Nina Sanadze
The past several years have seen numerous protests and acts of vandalism directed against public monuments deemed to be offensive, particularly during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 sparked by the death of George Floyd (1973-2020) in the United States. In Australia, the defacement of statues and sites associated with navigator Captain James Cook […]
Everything Yields
Everything yields to experiment, declares Wedgwood, crucible ablaze, clay pouring a pure species of plumbago, three feet down shallow and muscle-white, seam thick in the strata. Phillip turns to the porcelain light, considers this rich Terra Australis; how everything yields. To experiment, Banks unearths boxes close with sea-fever and straw. No. 1 a fine pigment, […]
Joe Furlonger Landscape
Landscape has been a dominant force in Australian art since colonial times, a place for myth and legend to play out, the supreme example being Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, 1946-47, where human and landscape meld and morph into one mythic dreaming. Then there is Fred Williams who reinvented how to describe and see the […]
Australian Artists At The 23rd Japan International Art Exchange Exhibition
This year, fourteen artists from Australia presented nineteen works, advised by Perth based artist couple Peteris and Jillian Ciemitis, representing a diverse range of artistic practices. The participating artists from Australia include Jordan Andreotta, Jill Ansell, Michelle Campbell, Jillian Ciemitis, Peteris Ciemitis, Desiree Crossing, Amy Dynan, Helen Forbes, James Gardiner, Andrew McDonald, Jane Pestell-Litten, Ralph […]
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Judy Watson: mundunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri
The title of Judy Watson’s forty-year survey at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) is from a poem written by her son Otis Carmichael in Waanyi language, and translates as “tomorrow the tree grows stronger.” In this context it underlines a central thread running through the exhibition. Each work has seductive visual qualities, and fits within […]
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Tagged Judy Watson, mundunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri, Queensland Art Gallery
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Kon Gouriotis OAM in conversation with Joe Furlonger
You’re invited! This Saturday, 29th of June at 3pm, Artist Profile’s editor, Kon Gouriotis, will be in conversation with Joe Furlonger, at Defiance Gallery, Sydney, to open Furlonger’s new exhibition: Landscape. A long-time lover of Furlonger’s work, Kon will be chatting to him about his methods, practice and career in what we know will be […]
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Tagged Defiance Gallery, Joe Furlonger, Kon Gouriotis
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George Gittoes: Ukraine Guernica
The internationally renowned artist George Gittoes has no qualms in catapulting himself into dangerous, hyperreal war zones. He has been doing this for the last fifty years. The unstoppable Gittoes with his wife and collaborator, artist Hellen Rose, left the haven of their Werri Beach, New South Wales, home soon after the news came in […]
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Guillaume Dillée: Dystopia
Guillaume Dillée works are a part of an expanding movement of local and international artists that have devoted their practice to detailing the devasting effects of climate change. Dillée paintings seek to dissect the relationship between humankind and nature. While artists such as David Buckland exhibit the widespread realities of climate change, Dillée isolates landscapes […]
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Tagged Dystopia, Guillaume Dillée, Guillaume Dillée: Dystopia, Stockroom
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Idris Murphy
In Australia there is an ongoing tradition of landscape painting that goes back for more than two centuries. There is also another tradition in Australian art that can be termed “painting country” that goes back millennia and is still thriving today. The Western European landscape tradition, that was imported to Australia, involves observing and recording […]
