Lesley Dumbrell with her dogs. Photograph supplied by Lesley Dumbrell.
Working between Melbourne and Bangkok, Lesley Dumbrell has sent us smartphone snaps of home life: creating, gardening and pets.
Taken during May 2020, and featured in our July/August magazine, Dumbrell is one of ten profiled artists who documented their life with their smartphone. Dumbrell details poignant moments in her Bangkok surroundings — read our full profile where she talks about working abroad, and how, for over 50 years, she’s been breaking gender barriers in abstract art.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Peter Hill interviews Simryn Gill about the exhibition Stolon Press: Flat earth at Monash University Museum of Art.
The cancellation of Khaled Sabsabi’s presentation at Venice Biennale signals a long-simmering breakdown of trust between artists and institutions—one that risks threatening the breadth and depth of artistic expression in Australia for generations to come. Dee Jefferson reports.
