Suggested Reading
Creativity beyond mortality
Have you ever wondered if someone who is no longer alive could create art? In answer to this question, biological artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Ringold, in collaboration with the now deceased Alvin Lucier, have extended the experimental composer’s “ideas about the resonance of sound” for their immersive exhibition, Revivification at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Shadow and light
A quiet power pulses through It’s Always Been Always at Fremantle Arts Centre, where six First Nations women artists reflect on kinship, Country and cultural memory.
Rosamund Brennan
Sammy Hawker’s acts of co-creation
Under Sammy Hawker’s gentle guidance, whale song takes shape, ocean water becomes collaborator, salt crystals scatter themselves like stars across analogue film, and ashes murmur secrets onto silver nitrate-soaked paper. Through what she terms “facilitated acts of co-creation,” Hawker gives voice to places, materials, and the more-than-human world.
Camilla Wagstaff
Danie Mellor contemplates history and memory
Marru translates to “becoming visible” in Danie Mellor’s ancestral Dyirbal language (of Far North Queensland). In his current exhibition Danie Mellor: marru | the unseen visible at Queensland Art Gallery, the title reflects the work’s gentle ruminations on the complexities of the history of colonisation entwined with personal memories.
Barnaby Smith
The Ramsay Art Prize takes the temperature of contemporary art
Every two years, the Ramsay Art Prize opens to Australian artists under 40 working in any medium. Presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia and supported in perpetuity by the James & Diana Ramsay foundation, the prize seeks to spotlight contemporary artists at a formative moment in their careers.
Walter Marsh
Nikki Lam’s ‘Unshakeable Destiny’
Premiering at the Sydney Film Festival, artist, curator and filmmaker Nikki Lam’s The Unshakeable Destiny trilogy, shot on 16mm, Super 8 and digital, explores her hyphenated identity as a “settler-migrant”, through an upbringing in “city-state” Hong Kong and the enduring influence this has over her artistic practice in Australia.