EDITOR’S NOTE
Adam Ford’s cover essay on Warraba Weatherall positions the artist as a leading thinker of explication and visual experience, demonstrating how conceptual rigor and perceptual attentiveness productively coexist in contemporary art. Ford emphasises how Weatherall transforms archival and museological materials into active tools of inquiry, making the operations of power and omission legible through material and form. Works like Trace, 2025, exemplify this approach, where Kamilaroi designs and historical instruments converge to reveal systemic violence and ancestral continuity. Ford’s critique of Weatherall’s practice demonstrates that looking is never passive. Visual experience is sharpened by concept, and explication becomes both method and aesthetic, producing work that is intellectually and sensorially powerful.
In early February 2026 the arts sector was scarcely alarmed by Caitlin Cassidy’s Guardian article on the demise of arts education. After all we know it already. If the decline in the provision and uptake of degrees in the creative arts commenced with Dawkins’s commercialisation of higher education through the introduction of economies of scale, market competition, and user pays (HECS), it was the Scott Morrison government that smashed it. The Job-Ready Graduates (JRG) scheme, introduced by Morrison in 2020, significantly increased the cost of humanities and arts degrees in Australia with the intention of encouraging students to choose STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) over “softer” degrees producing graduates who were apparently not “job ready.” Arts degrees have become some of the most expensive undergraduate degrees in the country. The JRG, in conjunction with indexation means that in 2026, an art degree can cost up to $55,000 AUD. With reduced numbers of creative arts students, more courses have been axed. But then who would want to use the right side of their brain anyway. The consequences are working their way through our society, influencing how creative practices are provided in schools, reducing career choices and opportunities, and undermining artistic quality.
With the current government, no one knows what The Hon. Tony Burke, Minister for Home Affairs, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Cyber Security, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Leader of the House, is doing to readdress the decline in art’s education from primary, secondary and higher education. The minister’s first approach should be to go and buy the book RETHINKING THE CONTEMPORARY ART SCHOOL: THE ARTIST, THE PHD, AND THE ACADEMY, 2010, edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos. In their book, Buckley and Conomos warned that the future of conceptual rigor in art was under threat from institutional consolidation, managerial imperatives, and the pressures of economic rationalism. They emphasised that the one-to-one mentorship, sustained studio discourse, and research-led pedagogy essential to producing intellectually and sensorially compelling work was increasingly vulnerable. I trust after reading Buckley and Conomos’s book the minister will have a profound understanding as to why arts degrees are under siege from the JRG scheme. And why as the minister he must act to cut fees, secure funding, and champion creative education in the Universities Accord, before an entire generation of artists is lost.
Throughout this issue explication and visual experience is carefully balanced, offering many insightful analyses alongside immersive imagery as events unfold both locally and internationally. Mikala Tai in Paris reviews Hoda Afshar: Perfomer l’invisible (Performing the Invisible) at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, as Iran faces internal unrest, regional pressures, and political instability. Lansheng Zhang travels to Taiwan’s Yillan Museum of Art to review Echoed Worlds: Taiwan and Australia Contemporary Art Exhibition. He says it is an exhibition that “affirms the value of sustained, if imperfect, cross-cultural engagement,” as global tensions persist in the region. Artists open their studios to us. Sonia Legge gives a heartfelt tribute to the artist’s great friend, Geoffrey Legge, and Alex Wisser writes a poem to the beloved Michael Petchovski. From the previous issue to this one I acknowledge the passing of artists Elizabeth Newman and Jennifer Joseph, visionary gallery director, curator Dr Maudie Palmer AO, and Dr Ashley Crawford, a generous soul with incisive presence always listening deeply, a fighter for art, offering loyalty, humour, and unwavering belief in the artist’s work and life―their memories eternal.
Kon Gouriotis, Editor
Artist Profile acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we work.
CONTENTS
ISSUE
Hybridity or Digital Assimilation? The Double Edge of the Multi-Media-Swiss Army Knife by Aleks Wansbrough
COVER FEATURE
Warraba Weatherall by Adam Ford
PROFILES
Maggie Jeffries by Lucy Hawthorne
Mike Parr by Peter Hill
Joe Frost by Rhonda Davis
Leonard Brown by Sasha Grishan
Adam Nudelman by Inga Walton
Terry Burrows by Brad Buckley
INSIGHT
Process: This is a Woodridge Kid Speaking by Jake Moss
Poem: Explaining to a star the limits of human love by Alex Wisser
Poster: Jolon Larter
Tribute: The Ocker Funkism of Geoffery Legge by Sonia Legge
Essay: Annette Larkin: The Business of Art by Julie Ewington
Essay: Janet Koongotema by Louise Martin-Chew
Essay: Clean Edges and a Messy Studio: The Abstraction of Evie Adasal by Tai Mitsuji
Essay: Alison McDonald: The Long Arc of Momentum by Bradley Vincent
Review: Lynda Draper’s Garden of Earthly Delights by Una Rey
Review: The Lightness of Being by Ian McLean
Review: Spectacle and Substance by Sarah Hetherington
Review: Westwood / Kawakubo: In Dialogue by Laura Jocic
Review: Super Kungka / Super Women by Sophia Cai
Review: To repost, to reprint by Mikala Tai
Review: Resonant Geographies: Echoed Worlds at the Yilan Museum of Art, Taiwan by Lansheng Zhang
Review: Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light by Peter McKay
Review: Abattoir Blues, Ron Mueck’s Sculpted Humanity by Mark Mordue
Review: Temporal Inspiration: The Enduring Legacy of Alan Peascod + Atemporal: The animated vessel by Avital Sheffer by Paul Donnelly
Book Review: Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee by Alan Krell
Review: Enrico Taglietti: Architect for the People by H.R. Hyatt-Johnston
Preview: Sriwhana Spong: A State of Unknowing by Bronwyn Watson
Preview: Michaye Boulter: Light into time by Andrew Harper
Preview: Michael McWilliams: Vivid Encounters by Brook Boland
Discovery: Chris Gaynor: 3 Boiled Eggs 5 Olives 12 Paintings by Nathan Shepherdson
Short story: Playing the Game by Nola Farman
