Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 73 i Artist Profile

Join the tour

Come, come, whoever you are, Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving - it doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a hundred times. Come, come yet again.Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273) Arts & Cultural Exchange invite you to participate in an exciting new arts patrons program designed to support ACE in fostering the vibrant and diverse artists of Western Sydney. You will not only embark on an unforgettable art tour, your support of ACE will directly support emerging creatives from underrepresented communities to realise their potential. ACE Italy is also a program designed to celebrate artist Khaled Sabsabi’s commission by Creative Australia to represent Australia at the 61st Biennale Arte 2026 Led by art experts, Kon Gouriotis OAM and ACE Executive Director…

1 min

Jim Lambie: The Language of the City

For most painters, tape has a prophylactic function. Stuck temporarily onto a canvas (or a doorframe, for that matter), tape protects what lies beneath or preserves the integrity of a newly painted edge or line. There are figurative muralists like the Tape Art duo Michael Townsend and Leah Smith; there have been moments in recent art history where tape has been greatly publicised, like Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, 2019—but these exceptions prove the rule. Tape is a painter’s tool—few have seen it as anything more. For Jim Lambie, tape is a medium. After making works by resurfacing clothes with tape in the late nineties, Lambie created his initial Zobop installation on the floor of his first solo exhibition with Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, in 1999. In so doing, he created a singular…

Paul Hopmeier

Hegel’s philosophy on dialectics echoes the ingenious pragmatism that sculptor Paul Hopmeier has brought to his practice spanning five decades. Hopmeier’s oeuvre is unpredictable, as he weighs into abstraction, portraiture, still life, and realism. Each work has its life story association: “I share what is common to hear from artists: they don’t remember making a particular work, they don’t know how it happened, nor understand why it has that bit of magic… it’s an expression of being human.” Hopmeier’s artistic pragmatism is refreshing in an age increasingly defined by selfhood. He has no disillusions about claiming fame as a sculptor, where his work could be considered to sit outside the Australian sculpture canon. That is not to say that Hopmeier’s work is not of significance, but rather it shows how…

7 min

The Spectral and Speculative Works of Sue Kneebone

“I’m looking to be a medium for the archive. I want to ‘seance up’ the spirit of the evidence.” Ross Gibson, Photofile, 1999. There is a seance-like quality to recalling the work of Sue Kneebone, in conjuring up the distinct atmosphere and effects of the worlds she creates in her installations. Kneebone’s projects are full of captivating-yet-disturbing, familiar-though-elusive artefacts, which she combines with other media to create her “theatre of objects.” Like Ross Gibson, she has “seanced up” the spirit of the archive to channel these worlds. In her SALA Festival feature exhibition at Adelaide Central Gallery, The Last Tide Waiter, 2025, the artist has ushered forth her nineteenth century ancestor, Christopher Kneebone, who worked as a customs officer on the island of Mauritius off the east coast of Africa…

Catherine Clayton-Smith

I recently left my home-studio on the Vaucluse clifftops in Sydney, with the whale and ocean views, and have set up a new studio in Collingwood, Melbourne. At the time of writing I am deep in preparation for my solo exhibition with Olsen Gallery, in February 2026. Just like moving cities, beginning a new series of work often feels like standing at the edge of something vast and unknown. In the studio I never feel as though I am simply beginning a painting, but instead entering into an ongoing conversation. It is both terrifying and exhilarating, full of the possibility of failure or breakthrough. I trust that I will make something compelling and have the courage to push through the small heartbreaks that come when I must paint over moments…

Judging art prizes in Australia

Everyone loves an art prize Australia’s addiction to art prizes is difficult to comprehend. To the best of my knowledge, Australia has more art prizes per head of population than any other country in the world. There are about seventy-five major art prizes and up to 900 smaller ones. Some may explain it as part of our national betting culture, others see it as a product of the undeniable and inexplicable success of the Archibald Prize or simply the need to democratise the “white cube” and to bring art to the level of a horse race where everyone feels free to have their say and to take a punt. In an art competition is everyone—the artist, organiser and viewing public—a winner? For artists there is the glittering hope of the…

9 min

Helen Britton: The Story So Far

There is something quietly radical about an exhibition that asks you to slow down and observe the minutiae of the everyday. Helen Britton’s recent survey exhibition, The Story So Far, set over two levels of the Australian Design Centre (ADC), is an intimate meditation on memory, place, and the objects that shape our creative lives. As the tenth artist celebrated in ADC’s Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft series—a program that has championed Australia’s finest practitioners for over two decades—Britton traces the origins of her multi-disciplinary practice back to a house on the Clarence River. Britton, an award-winning, internationally acclaimed Australian artist, originally from Newcastle now based in Munich, Germany, is renowned for her contemporary jewellery work. Her practice also encompasses sculpture, painting, installation, drawing, and photography—all informed by popular…

J.W. Power: Art, war and the avant-garde

Australian art history still holds many gaps. The life and work of John Joseph Wardell Power (1881–1943) is one of them. Curated by Ann Stephen, senior curator of art at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, and her collaborator ADS Donaldson, J.W. Power: Art, War and the avant-garde seeks to redress that gap and place Power where he rightfully belongs: as one of the most accomplished Australian artists in the interwar period. However, it is Power’s philanthropic legacy for which he is best known. Revealed in 1962, nineteen years after he died and following the death of the artist’s widow Edith Mary Power, his bequest, the largest for its time, enabled the establishment of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Power Collection…

Eating Badly but Dressing Like a Celebrity: John Berger and Me by Nikos Papastergiadis

The measure of how much I enjoyed this book is that as I was reading it I was also compiling my list of Top Ten Books of the 21st Century for ABC Radio National’s poll of its audience. I placed John Berger and Me, 2024, by Nikos Papastergiadis in second place behind Wittgenstein’s Poker, 2001, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, just ahead of Peter Schjeldahl’s The Art of Dying, 2024, and Lori Waxman’s wonderful text on the history of psychogeography, Keep Walking Intently, 2017. The book begins, “John Berger will be 100 in 2026,’’ so it is a timely milestone for a publication. However, Papastergiadis soon qualifies this by saying, “John Berger was born in London and died at the age of ninety in the suburbs of Paris.” Yet…

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online subscribe.artistprofile.com.au by phone 02 8227 6486 by post Artist Profile Subscriptions, PO Box 156, Alexandria, NSW 1435 Gary Deirmendjian is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists in Australia. He has a unique talent for seeing and capturing the everyday as few others do. The watchful series, 2023, is perhaps one of his quirkiest works: “it’s me being watchful in the world. they’re my eyes, no one else’s. something as you know i get accused of often, in a complementary way… ‘you’re always looking/observing/watching’… ‘youseethingsthat…’ i have always been wishful of being under a cloak of invisibility, watching life happen outside, in the street. i started pasting eyesonbrick up in Sophia Street, Surry Hills, in late August 2023, and after two years decided to put an end…

1 min

Editor’s Note

In this issue there is a moving tribute to William Robinson AO who died in August. Back in 2017 William appeared on the cover of Artist Profile issue 41. He was surprised to be asked. Louise Martin-Chew interviewed William then and she has written the tribute for him now. There are many insightful moments in the tribute especially from the artist to other artists, including this comment from William: “If you are going to do anything… you don’t have to make a lot of symphonic paintings—but you do have to make some…. One of the important things to me was the survival of the earth.” William highlights two unexpected themes within many of the articles in this issue. One is the belief that artists influenced by continual flow see change…

2 min

Mark-making and deep time: Harrison Bowe on the edge of Tasmania

Harrison Bowe’s paintings are more than just visual representations of the Tasmanian landscape. The young painter seeks to convey the emotional connection he has with the environment, capturing its energy and movement through mark-making: “There’s the landscape itself and how it looks and feels, but it’s also my perception… I want to capture how it feels to me.” His sublime mountainscapes capture the feeling of awe experienced in the remote Tasmanian wilderness. By comparison, Bowe observes, humans are a “beautiful insignificance… I’m an ant in the world.” Bowe’s path to painting Tasmanian landscapes was not direct. After leaving school early, he worked at the Cadbury Factory in Hobart, finding early expression through graffiti. Painting was an escape, and he remembers spending his Cadbury wages on paint. A chance invitation to…

Lee’s Metropolis

Complex and incisive, Rosemary Lee’s drawings seem to come from a higher plane of perception. An artist of the city, her frenetic yet familiar metropolis has its origins in a series of localities along Sydney’s western rail line. From Central Station to Ashfield and beyond, she has found the motifs and textures on which her distinctive, graphic sensibility can grip. It is a place where cranes hover over plain, red-brick shopping precincts, lunch is eaten in the food hall after shopping at the cut-price pharmacy and every observed thing seems to intersect with a dozen others. While the economic pressures that shape the city are palpable in her pictures, Lee is less a social realist than an artist of the everyday. The sense of a story, true or not, reverberates…

5 min

Shanti Shea An

Shanti Shea An’s oil paintings offer glimpses of seemingly familiar moments, yet each image resists easy entry. Figures are seen turned away, reflective surfaces create visual doubles, and thresholds—windows and doorways—become quiet intermediary frames, at once inviting the viewer in, and keeping them at bay. “There’s something about the mystery of painting, the mystery of the rectangle, about surface and depth, that I’m pretty fixated on,” she says. Born in Adelaide in 1993, An grew up in Canberra. And whilst she was an avid drawer as a child, it wasn’t until visiting university campuses at the completion of high school, that it occurred to her to become an artist: “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. There were lots of different things I was interested in, writing, history, philosophy,…

Nature’s Sacred Geometry: Lae Oldmeadow’s The Garden

Lae Oldmeadow’s devotional artwork transforms fallen Australian flora into meditative sculptural totems by weaving environmental consciousness and spiritual attunement. His masterfulness arouses nature’s cycles of growth, decay, and renewal. In the hushed sanctuary of the Dulcie Lindsey Gallery, in the New England Regional Art Museum (NERAM), Lae Oldmeadow will soon be presenting The Garden, a monumental exhibition that will see the transformation of the detritus of the Australian landscape into vessels of profound spiritual contemplation. After nearly two decades of development, this body of work will stand as both artistic achievement and environmental manifesto, positioning Oldmeadow as one of New South Wales Northern Rivers’ most compelling contemporary voices. Oldmeadow’s artistic persona embodies what might be called the “nature mystic”—a figure who exists in profound communion with natural forces and draws…

7 min

William Robinson: A Symphonic Spirit

When I interviewed Bill Robinson AO for Artist Profile in 2017, he expressed his sense of art as existing in the “silences within the movements.” For him, a breath expressed the humanity in the work: “Music and its cadences sometimes have nearly a stop, a long comma, and it goes on again. The closer all of these things are to the human being as a physical thing, as a moving breathing object, the better art it is.” The Creation Landscapes, 1988–2004, Robinson’s most ambitious paintings, expand with breath, and the darkness that overwhelmed his family at that time. Yet he also imbued these large works with space and light. Robinson was a magnificent presence—as an artist, teacher, and creator—in Brisbane and Queensland until his death on 26 August 2025. In…

8 min

Thomas Demand: The Object Lesson

Curated and designed by the German artist Thomas Demand, Kaldor Public Art Project 38: Thomas Demand: The Object Lesson features examples of work selected from the John Kaldor Family Collection gifted to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It represents the second time Demand has collaborated with the renowned art impresario and philanthropist, John Kaldor. The first was in 2012, Kaldor Public Art Project 25: The Dailies, at the Commercial Travellers’ Association in Sydney. On the fourth floor of the hotel, Demand installed photographs of large paper models of everyday scenes he had created, photographed, and then destroyed. From constructing models to often designing the interiors of his own exhibitions, the artist has now taken up Kaldor’s invitation to create a special space for some of this exceptional collection.…

Ken Done: Done Right

The central room of Ken Done: No Rules features a 360-degree, animated projection of Done’s artworks, welcoming audiences into his particular vision of the world around us. What follows at Home of the Arts (HOTA) is a sweeping survey of a painter whose practice has spanned decades and shaped the visual identity of contemporary Australia. Seeing his work together here feels not only timely but inevitable, as though the bright, sun-soaked world of the Gold Coast of Queensland has been waiting to host such a celebratory showcase. The survey presents Done not merely as a painter of recognisable motifs—the beach, the reef, the luminous domestic scene—but as an artist who has built a career by merging personal vision with public imagination. This is a show that captures both the intimacy…

5 min

Sammy Hawker: Worlds Around Us

Sammy Hawker’s exhibition Worlds Around Us, 2025, at the Tweed Regional Gallery, New South Wales, greeted me before I arrived. Walking down the hallway towards it, I was lured by sounds of squeaking, clicking, and elongated moaning. The source of these intonations was clarified by Humpback whale migrating south, 2024, a large photograph capturing the final movement of a breaching whale, its tail punctuating the sky like an exclamation. The exhibition features black and white photographic prints, as well as a looped video projection accompanied by hydrophone recordings. Positioned near the entrance hangs a simple typewritten page on which is written: “‘… and the ocean holds the whales as lightly as the body holds the soul…’ Ursula K. Le Guin.” Reading this message I felt inquisitive as though embarking on…

3 min

Zuza Zochowski

Zuza Zochowski returns again and again to Port Kembla’s inner harbour to paint the shifting industrial landscape. Every day the view offers her something new. Sometimes it’s the container ships that catch her eye, hovering on the horizon. At others, the emergency beacons and buoys that begin to blink in the early evening. “I’m interested always in showing not only the environment, but also the human structures and human forms which make up who we are, and are part of the environment as well,” Zochowski explains. This major trade gateway that keeps drawing her attention, with its gritty steelworks, turquoise beaches, and curving escarpment in the distance, is always changing. Even its future remains uncertain with the promise of redevelopment and rumours of a nuclear submarine base or hydrogen hub.…

3 min

Part 2: Does the demand for accountability really account for art?

The art critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–78) asserted that “A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.” He continued, “The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence.” Rosenberg was describing action painting, better known as abstract expressionism, but while Rosenberg was precise about the art movement being distinct, it is now common to view all art as an expression of the artist. Rosenberg, in his celebration of the individual, could not have predicted the extent that the artist’s own biography would come to jeopardise and overshadow their work. Paradoxically, the very attempt to elevate the artist as self-expressive genius opened the way to denigrating the work as a reflection on the artist’s deeds. If the artist is a “toxic” person does…

GARY WILLIS: The Masked Traveller

Ah, watch outYou might get what you’re afterCool babiesStrange but not a strangerI’m an ordinary guyBurning down the house Burning Down the House, 1983 Talking Heads Primogeniture is the system used in the United Kingdom, where the first-born male child historically inherits their parents’ estate, including the throne and titles at the higher echelons of society. Gary Willis’s father, Cash Willis, a successful self-made businessman, saw Willis, his first-born son, as the inheritor of his considerable business empire, which included a chain of butcher shops and stud cattle farms across the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales. As a relatively young man, Willis began his “apprenticeship” in the family business working in several of the butcher shops, while studying commercial law and accountancy at Canberra Institute of Technology (now…

7 min

Deborah Halpern: Whimsical Joy

Deborah Halpern’s studio is engulfed with works in progress, occasionally dispersed with other images and sculptures that illicit happiness. In the vast double window space, Halpern is surrounded by her creatures in various states of becoming. Sculptures in their nascent fibreglass stages are lined up on the shelves, others hang from the ceiling on self-crafted pully systems, anticipating their turn. Large format paintings cling to the walls, decorated with the unforgiving medium of spray paints. And maquettes for the larger sculptures congregate in a vitrine like a cabinet of curiosities. The pursuit of an artistic life was inevitable for Halpern. She grew up (and still lives) in the small, bushy “really far out” suburb of Warrandyte. In the 1960s, the suburb northeast of Melbourne was a“mishmash of creative people,” home…

Alex Hamilton

Kaleidoscopic, layered, and architectural, Alex Hamilton’s drawings unfurl like cities glimpsed in dreams: fragmented, symbolic, and charged with an uncanny, nostalgic familiarity. Rendered with pigment pens, markers, photocopies, layers of Perspex and hand-tinted ink washes, these works feel both ancient and algorithmic, as if filtered through a clouded lens and then refracted through a broken scanner. Crumples are Half Box Half Door, 2025, his recent solo exhibition at Jacob Hoerner Galleries in St. Kilda, brings together a series of large-scale works on paper. Tinted with blanched fluorescents and embellished with enigmatic fragments: “makeshift,” “eminent nowhere,” “transparent head,” text, gesture, and absence form the backbone of these works, an eroded poetic logic where architectural forms become ciphers and gaps become as significant as marks. Based in Melbourne, Hamilton’s cross-disciplinary practice covers drawing,…

POEM: HASIB HOURANI

NESTING i make itso that that every place i live is my home soi put my bed on the wall closest to the window, alwaysfurthest from the door, alwaysi keep my window open, alwaysexcept the one in this new place has been painted shutand there is nothing sharp enough to chip awayat the thing that lacquers me vacuum-packed heaviest in the morning manof stone man of slipman unable to liftthe limbs that spent the night settlingspeakremember my body when it leaves a man on the street is trying to sell me something anything he can think of a rock pure gold a postage stamp a feather he says twenty shekel twenty shekel just twenty shekel and i wake up with red dots on my arms and legs. loose bed sheets.…

1 min

SABBIA: Standing Tall at Twenty

Anna Grigson gave herself two years. If the vision faltered, she’d walk away. But this was never just a business plan, it was a calling. Backed by an unshakable belief in the art she loved, the support of her sister and co-director Maria Grimaldi, and quiet encouragement from their Italian father, she stepped into the uncertain world of commercial gallery ownership. They named the gallery Sabbia, Italian for sand or grit. It was 2005. Quadrivium, a cornerstone of Sydney’s contemporary art scene, had just shut its doors in the Queen Victoria Building. Grigson had been curator for seven years during its heyday, fuelled by the momentum of the studio crafts movement. While the gallery displayed diverse media, it was its cutting-edge studio glass that received international acclaim. Now, Grigson was…

Zen and the Void: the spiritual quest of Royston Harper

Transforming the space with a quiet grandeur evocative of contemplation, a large reclining Buddha in gold leaf captures your attention on entering Mudgee Arts Precinct gallery. Lining the walls Royston Harper’s (1938–2023) refined minimalist works seemingly respond with an energy that is as explosive as it is contained. Delicately shaded, nuanced, and bold, in a restrained palette of greys, black, and whites, the discourse with Buddhism and the discipline of calligraphy—in Harper’s hands a form of action painting—is unmistakable. Co-curators and longtime friends Helen Hyatt-Johnston, Brad Buckley, Noel Thurgate and gallery curator Lizzy Gallaway, selected the Buddha from Harper’s extensive collection of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist artefacts (hundreds of scrolls, paintings, sculptures, and writings) by way of homage to Harper’s devotion to Ch’an Buddhist principles, both as a way of being…

Mitch Cairns: Restless Legs

Sydney-based artist Mitch Cairns exhibits a compelling project of recent oil paintings, bronze casts, new works on paper, and sculpture presented in the soaring central space of Wollongong Art Gallery. Clever, playful, and complex juxtapositions articulate the gallery spaces in a coherent visual and linguistic flow. Mitch Cairns: Restless Legs was commissioned for the Contemporary Projects series at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, where it was first presented in early 2025. Cairns is no stranger to the AGNSW, having won the Archibald Prize in 2017 with a portrait of partner and fellow artist Agatha Gothe-Snape, but Restless Legs was his first solo exhibition in the new galleries of Naala Badu. The project’s central theme emerged when the artist experienced restless legs while trying to read in…

5 min

The Talented Arrowsmith-Todd

Ruby Arrowsmith–Todd started attending the AGNSW film program in its early days as a self-educated, die-hard film fan, immersing herself in the cinematic sea of curator Robert Herbert’s vision. His film program ran for seventeen years before his untimely death. He would be a mentor for Arrowsmith-Todd, as well as a close friend, and under an internship taught her how to project films, source prints, and write to distributors, as well as develop film programs. Arrowsmith-Todd got an “out of the blue” phone call from an extremely unwell Herbert, asking her to help take over his schedule as he knew she had the institutional know-how at that stage to deliver his final program. It was an incredible privilege despite being a great moment of cognitive dissonance; and offered an amazing…