REVIEW: Lynda Draper’s Garden of Earthly Delights

I first encountered a Lynda Draper in the group exhibition "Thinking Through Pink" in 2022 at Wollongong Art Gallery. With its rosy lustre, "Here comes the dawn," 2020, transcended its curatorial brief appearing like some trickster-specimen cultivated within the unique microclimate of Dharawal Country. Origin of the magnificent Gymea Lily and the Illawarra Flame Tree, this is also where Draper has made her home and studio since the late 1980s and where Glimmer, her first survey exhibition, was mostly realised.

Installation view: "Lynda Draper: Glimmer," 2025. Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney. Curator Emily Rolfe. Exhibition design by Youssofzay Hart. Photographed by Silversalt Photography.

A stone’s throw from the Illawarra escarpment at Campbelltown Arts Centre, the introduction to Draper’s ecosphere is a gathering of rainbow forms which, as an entrée, signal a period of transition and presents the most heterogenous arrangement in Glimmer. Cultural references are pluralist and synthesised across archetypal forms suggestive of Haniwa (Japanese unglazed clay mortuary figures), Yoruba masks, magical charms, anime, and children’s drawings—although none are explicitly tied to the once-transgressive twentieth century domains of primitivism or Outsider art; it’s more playful than that. Across an assorted cast the works give the appearance of low-fi materiality (fingerpaint, plasticine, bubble-gum) with all the durability and technical prowess of an advanced ceramics practice.

From this eclectic threshold—suggesting a working studio without the didactic props—four discrete gallery spaces present focused reflections on the Aladdin’s Cave theme foregrounded in the exhibition’s evocative title. The chronology across forty years of practice is navigated by way of a glossy booklet and beautifully augmented by Youssofzay Hart’s polished exhibition design—not always the case when architect-designers shape the audience experience. Comprising 158 works in total, Glimmer could have easily become death-by-plinth. Instead, round cut display tables with fine metal legs create layered tableaus and elegant shadows, with well-chosen coloured walls offering a subsidiary mnemonic: butter yellow for the earliest 1980s vessels, duck-egg blue for the exquisitely detailed, Boschian narratives of Draper’s master of arts (2006–2010) studio work.

Installation view: Lynda Draper: Glimmer, 2025. Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney. Curator Emily Rolfe. Exhibition design by Youssofzay Hart. Photographed by Silversalt Photography.

Because Here comes the dawn had initially stirred my botanical imagination, to see it with its genus en masse was like entering a cactus garden or swimming through a partially bleached coral reef. Within a gallery of forest green, these fantastical rococo-hybrid structures of snaking clay decorated with idiosyncratic features seem to be equal parts animal, mineral, and vegetable. Nature metaphors aside, the expansive series made over six years followed a ceramic residency in 2018 at the Palace of Versailles, first exhibited at the Lefebvre & Fils gallery in Paris at the heart of European culture. Considered in this light, the sculptures hint at eccentric chandeliers, candelabras, and tiaras or the high-calorie centrepieces of Marie Antoinette’s mythologised high-teas, all built on the foundations of the humble coiling technique.

Another captivating room contains pieces inspired by the (no-doubt strange) experience of purchasing a house in Thirroul in 1988 along with all its contents, some dating back to the 1880s. With the historical and colonial reckoning that many Anglo-Australian artists process through their work, the domestic and industrial vernacular takes on uncanny powers. Jugs, sieves, and basins transcend their origins in a surrealist treasure-trove thick with suggestion (I saw hearts and vascular systems; others may intuit drinking vessels and drains).

Emitting translucent white light, the installation Still Life, 1993, and recreated in 2025, in ceramic and wax proves Draper’s sense of space and an investigation into tactile minimalism. Fluency with material experimentation is also evident in the most recent works, which incorporate bronze and glass resulting from a 2024 residency at Canberra Glassworks. Exquisite corpses of material spirited presence, they seem to channel some yet to be realised apotheosis. Pearl, Apparition II, and Spook, all 2025, beg to be touched, as if to test Draper’s observation that “. . . with clay, one shapes form, with glass, light.” A more tactile opportunity to engage with this insight is in nearby Queen Street, Campbelltown, where Draper’s publicly commissioned Shimmer, 2025, leaves a more enduring and robust legacy.

Installation view: Lynda Draper: Glimmer, 2025. Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney. Curator Emily Rolfe. Exhibition design by Youssofzay Hart. Photographed by Silversalt Photography.

While Draper shares some common ground with Sydney-based ceramic and multidisciplinary artists such as Nell, Glenn Barkley, and Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, hers are distinct variations on the totemic object. In the past, studio leaders had substantial influence on their students. To what extent that remains true in the seething digital metaverse is unclear, but Draper’s decades of teaching and her seven years as head of ceramics at the National Art School in Sydney (until 2022) is guaranteed to shine through in the work of others. There is a parallel thesis in Glimmer for those nostalgic for the ambient zeitgeist of design and fashion over the past four decades, from the 1980s Sydney share-house to the grunge-DIY aesthetics of the 1990s and the carnivalesque spectacle of the more-or-less now.

Draper’s glimmering apothecary proves Matisse’s claim that objects (as subjects) are like actors, and a good actor can perform many roles. A disingenuous master, he didn’t mention the essential element of the artist-director, whose perceptive and persistent response to the muse is how the artwork triumphs. I suppose that goes without saying. Draper says it in clay.

EXHIBITION
Lynda Draper: Glimmer
6 December 2025 – 22 February 2026
Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney

Lynda Draper, Shimmer, October 2025 – ongoing, Campbelltown Plaza, Queen Street, Campbelltown, New South Wales. Commissioned by Campbelltown City Council, 2025. Fabricated by Curio Projects.

Images courtesy of the artist, Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales and Sullivan+ Strumpf, Sydney.

Dr Una Rey is an artist, writer, curator and scholar based in the Illawarra.

This article was first published in Artist Profile Issue 74.