Kendal Murray’s miniature sculptures are a fascinating combination of materials including repurposed domestic objects ranging from crockery and compact mirrors to children’s toys. For Murray, these items become the foundation for her to create new worlds with an abundance of vegetation ready for exploration.
As the Sydney-based artist explains, her latest exhibition “looks at the significant relationship between childhood play in nature, children’s wellbeing, and the cultivation of their environmental identity.” There’s a meticulous balance between the familiar and the otherworldly in these works—appealing to the imagination. In Daytime Climb, High Time Rhyme, 2022, a teacup forms a mountain that two figures have scaled—they stand at the top and gaze across the horizon. Meanwhile, Run, Run, Fun Won, 2022, features a figure running with two dogs through grasslands—the landscape brimming out of a clutch purse.
The rhyming titles of Murray’s sculptures encourage us to embrace our curiosity and look closer at the intricate details of these creations. View, in pictures, Murray’s captivating and inventive works for In the Smile of a Tree.
In the Smile of a Tree
Kendal Murray
Flinders Lane Gallery
7 September—15 October
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
Radical Textiles, A new exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, shows us how textiles evoke material memories while keeping the radical lineage of needle and thread alive.
Emma Phillips has a knack for catching moments of unbridled humanity. In her latest exhibition at ReadingRoom, she shines a light on the breadth of her practice, amalgamating several projects from the last decade.
