Art Guide Australia Podcast (Art Guide Australia)

“Well, what I’d always noticed is the way men always had to be the drivers, right? And this was kind of a symbol of how they behaved in real life, in marriages and relationships, in business world, in politics, everywhere. They were always having to be the drivers.” So says Maragaret Dodd in the ninth episode of The Long Run, a podcast dedicated to talking with artists who have been practicing for 60 years.

Many people first discover Dodd’s practice through her brilliant ceramic holden cars from the early 1970s, where some are dressed up as brides, others as mothers and babies. Titled This Woman is Not a Car, the series also included a film of the same title. Based in feminist concerns, the iconic collection looks at themes central to Dodd’s work: femininity and masculinity, sexuality, capitalism and the links between car manufacturing and personal and national identity. They were recently collected in Dodd’s 2020 exhibition Margaret Dodd: New acquisitions at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Dodd talks about all of these things. She talks of her upbringing in Adelaide, her move to America with her husband (he was a physicist invited to work at Yale), and her time studying art in California. Dodd also reflects on how she became part of the funk ceramics movement in the 1960s, which bought much humour and less convention to ceramics.

From here Dodd tells us her thoughts on being a housewife, the isolation she felt when she moved back to Adelaide after being in the United States, how this influenced the profound feminism of her work, the links between sexism and cars, and the reactions to her film This Woman Is Not A Car.

Dodd’s work is also currently showing in two exhibitions:

GAGPROJECTS at Explore Sydney Contemporary
Online
11—21 November

Clay Dynasty
Powerhouse Museum
11 October—29 January 2023

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.
Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“Black and white photography has always been my…I suppose it’s just kind of my life,” says Mervyn Bishop on his 60-year photography practice. 

Bishop is a Murri man and is Australia’s first Aboriginal photojournalist and documentary photographer. In the early 1960s, when he was just 17, he began a four-year cadetship with The Sydney Morning Herald. Later in the 1970s Bishop took a government position as a photographer for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. It was during this time he took one of his most iconic images of prime minister Gough Whitlam and Aboriginal rights activist Vincent Lingiari. 

The first solo exhibition of Bishop’s images came about in 1991 and was curated by artist Tracey Moffatt, and he currently has a major survey Mervyn Bishop: The Exhibition at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. 

Bishop began taking photos when he was young, and we talk about the influence of his mother in steering him toward photography, as well as the years at The Sydney Morning Herald. We also discuss the stories behind some of his most iconic images, and the emotional aspects of his work. And as a photographer who’s known for capturing incredibly empathic moments, we talk about how Bishop gets photography to such an intimate place. 

This episode of The Long Run is part of an ongoing podcast series, and you can listen back to previous episodes with Suzanne Archer, Robert Owen, Gareth Sansom, Wendy Stavrianos and John Wolseley. You can also subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, so you never miss an episode. And don’t forget to rate and follow the podcast. 

Mervyn Bishop: The Exhibition

National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

Until 1 August

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“I’m doing that something humans do: I’m trying to explain this time to myself by making something from it and about it,” says artist Kate Tucker. “I’m trying to make myself something that I need to live now.”

Tucker is our first guest for a new podcast mini-series on art, creating and care, linking with the NETS Victoria touring exhibition Notions Of Care. The show brings together five artists and groups to consider care in art making, whether through materials, how we relate to one another, and as an approach to the world.

Tucker works across painting, sculpture and installation, creating incredible assemblage-like pieces that are compelling in their construction. Tucker’s process involves the layering of various materials and textures, expanding our idea of what painting can be by subverting familiar notions of the form.

Tucker talks about what care means to her, and what it means to approach an art practice with care. We also talk about detaching from external notions of success, how and why she creates her works, and the importance of having aesthetic experiences.

Notions Of Care
Ararat Gallery TAMA
Until 26 February 2023

A kind thank you to our sponsors for this series. The show Notions of Care is a Bus Projects exhibition touring with NETS Victoria, which is curated by Kathryne Genevieve Honey and Nina Mulhall. This project is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and received assistance from NETS Victoria’s Exhibition Development Fund 2020, supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

You can subscribe to the Art Guide podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and don’t forget to rate the show as it helps people find us.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

Raising children, having an art practice and making it through isolation—how do you do it in a way that works for everyone in the family? In this second edition of Faraway, so close—a podcast dedicated to considering the anxieties and opportunities emerging in the arts in our new COVID-19 world—we’re considering what parenting and creating looks like during isolation with artists Tai Snaith and Ross Coulter. While schools have gradually started reopening this week, the pair talk through how they make life work at a day-to-day level, looking after young children while working, the stress they’re feeling right now and how they’re coping, and the ways in which, rather than keeping a strict divide between art and family, they’re bringing art into their family life, and expanding the idea of art altogether. As Snaith says, “... it sort of made me think, ‘Maybe what I do is something I can share with the kids and we can make that part of the school thing’. So I was starting to feel a bit like, how do I juggle all of these things and have my practice and have the kids at home. And I think I just went through a phase of thinking, ‘Okay, I’ve got to try and combine them somehow’”. Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus. Music and engineering by Mino Peric.

For David Hurlston curating is both a conceptual and physical process: he’s concerned with how viewers move through gallery spaces and how they read artworks. “It’s just about making a really tangible and interesting and educative experience, and I think that happens in the real world, in the real space,” he says.

Having been a curator at the National Gallery of Victoria for over 25 years, David Hurlston’s name is synonymous with the curatorial field of Australian art. While his current role is Senior Curator, Australian Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts to 1980, David has worked in a number of curatorial roles at the National Gallery of Victoria including Curator, Australian art exhibitions (2002-2007), Program Coordinator (1999-2002) and Access Gallery Curator (1993-1999).

As Hurlston explains in the podcast, curating is centred on collaboration, listening and negotiation: elements which have come into play when curating survey shows on well-known artists including Ron Mueck, David Hockney, Deborah Halpern, Ian Strange and more.

Hurlston also discusses the push and pull between entertaining and informing gallery visitors, his childhood experience of regularly visiting NGV, his background as an artist, what curating has meant to him over the years, and what the label of ‘curator of Australian art’ signifies today.

See more at Art Guide Australia online: www.artguide.com.au

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.

What does it mean to create and innovate over six decades? Art Guide Australia’s newest podcast series The Long Run considers this question with three artists who have had careers spanning sixty years, each reflecting on their art and lives. What can they teach us about the life-stages of an artist?

In the second episode we speak with landscape painter Wendy Stavrianos. Working from regional Victoria, Stavrianos is known for her densely layered landscape paintings and use of line in painting, creating works that evoke different environments in ways that are beautiful, psychological and mysterious. From her early work in the 1960s, to her well-known Rape of a Northern Land series painted in Darwin in the 1970s, and her recent large-scale paintings, Stavrianos is integral to understanding landscape painting in Australia. 

In this episode Stavrianos talks about her childhood and youth, and how this set the scene for her to become an artist. She also discusses the gender barriers she encountered as a female painter, how she came to landscape painting, her incredible empathy with the environment and nature, and how mortality and mystery infiltrate her work.

The conversation is an interesting accompaniment to our first episode of The Long Run, where avant-garde painter Gareth Sansom talks about the mechanics and chance of making art, and his feelings on mortality and time. 

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, music and engineering by Mino Peric.

Wendy Stavrianos is represented by Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne

Creating, evolving and innovating over decades takes great stamina. Art Guide Australia’s latest podcast series features conversations with three established Australian artists who each reflect on their art and lives. What can they teach us about the life-stages of an artist?

Our first episode in The Long Run features a lively conversation with Gareth Sansom. Based in Melbourne, Sansom is regarded as one of Australia’s most well-known and esteemed avant-garde painters. He had his first exhibition in 1959, and since then has gone on to create admired and debated works that look into pop culture, sexual transgression, the unconscious, and the history of painting itself. In works that are simultaneously chaotic and balanced, Sansom layers and blends everything from abstraction to collage to T.S. Eliot to Swedish film.

Sansom talks about his talent in drawing, his great sense of ambition, the importance of chance in painting, his thoughts on death, and what changes he’s noticed over a 60-year practice and what remains the same. 

Sansom’s latest exhibition A Case of the Old and the New is currently showing online with STATION gallery.

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney. 

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, music and engineering by Mino Peric. 

What are the links between feminism, contemporary art and disability? FEM-aFFINITY, a new three-part podcast series, delves into this question by focussing on an exhibition of the same title. 

First exhibited in 2019, FEM-aFFINITY is a collaborative, female-led show. It features a series of collaborations between seven female artists who practice from Melbourne’s Arts Project Australia, a studio and gallery for artists with an intellectual disability, and seven female contemporary artists.

This first episode features artist, curator and academic Catherine Bell who not only curated the exhibition, but made the collaborations happen. 

Bell talks about the process behind the show, as well as the subjective nature of feminism and what the word means to her. She also discusses how she became familiar with Arts Project Australia, her collaborations with artist Cathy Staughton, and what it means to break down art world structures to give a voice to marginalised artists.

FEM-aFFINITY is a nationally touring exhibition, and is currently showing at Melbourne’s Bunjil Place Gallery. Exhibiting artists include; Bronwyn Hack, Cathy Staughton, Dorothy Berry, Eden Menta, Fulli Andrinopoulos, Heather Shimmen, Helga Groves, Jane Trengove, Janelle Low, Jill Orr, Lisa Reid, Prudence Flint, Wendy Dawson and Yvette Coppersmith.

FEM-aFFINITY
Bunjil Place Gallery
30 January—14 March

Riddoch Art Gallery
22 May—4 July

Benalla Art Gallery
6 August—17 October

This series is kindly sponsored by NETS Victoria who are nationally touring FEM-aFFINITY, assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Patrick Telfer. Music by Mino Peric.

“Not only is it exhibition making,” says independent curator Andy Butler when talking of his curatorial practice, “I think it’s advocacy in a lot of ways for particular artists’ practices, for the arts more broadly, for particular ideas that you want to see circulate within the contemporary art world and contemporary art discourse.”

Along with being an independent curator, Butler is a Filipino-Australian writer and artist who continuously looks at the dynamics of power, systemic racism and racial hierarchies within a contemporary art context. As Butler explains in the third episode of our Conversations with Curators series, independent curating provides a malleable space for exploring power and racism, allowing him to work closely with artists and to take greater curatorial risks.

Although Butler is still in the earlier stages of his curatorial career, he’s recently curated a number of exhibitions that have garnered considerable attention including Those Monuments Don’t Know us at Bundoora Homestead and Always there and all a part at Melbourne artist-run gallery BLINDSIDE.

In the podcast conversation Butler talks about these shows, explaining his impetus to illustrate the complexity of artists and their work, and to focus on having meaningful engagements and discussions on racism and colonialism in both art and life. “At least in the exhibitions I’ve curated, I’ve tried to move away from this sense that exhibitions like this are just celebrating diversity — they’re actually more about whiteness,” explains Butler. “They’re more about structures of power that people from all of these [different] backgrounds are all navigating in these different ways.”

See more at Art Guide Australia online: www.artguide.com.au

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.

“It’s really about looking at images and putting them together, and looking at how they behave,” says David Noonan in our latest podcast series Artists Abroad, talking with artists who’ve moved to London and what the move has meant for their practice—while also chatting about the art itself.   

Ballarat-born, Noonan has lived and worked in London since 2005. He’s acclaimed and internationally exhibited for his stunning black-and-white works created from both figurative and abstract found images that stem from theatre, dance, subcultures and social media. The works span video to collage to tapestry, looking at the interplay of the figurative and abstract, but also more emotive states like mystery and the uncanny. 

Noonan’s most recent Australian show at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Only when it’s cloudless, functions like one large installation where the works often capture moments not necessarily of performance, but when the mask drops. There is something both defiant and vulnerable at play. 

Noonan talks about growing up in Ballarat, his trips to London and his eventual move, and if he feels leaving Australia has changed the trajectory of his practice and career. We also chat about how Noonan creates his works, questions on authenticity, and how he’s recently bought colour into his practice. 

Only when it’s cloudless
David Noonan
TarraWarra Museum of Art
Until 10 July

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“I decided that art essentially is a communication, so my basis of my work is conceptual,” says artist Bonita Ely, a pioneer in environmental art in Australia, in our latest episode of The Long Run, a podcast talking with artists who have 60-year practices.

Known for her sculpture, installations and performance art, Ely’s work is considered ground breaking, particularly through her feminist and environmentally driven works.  She’s an often-cited influence for many environmental artists, and her works have been exhibited at documenta 14, and collected by institutions like New York’s Museum of Modern Art.  

Ely grew up in the rural Victorian town of Robinvale, and she spent time at the Murray River, the degradation of which would become a crucial topic in her art from the 1970s onwards. Her first major work relating to the river was the 1980 performance, Murray River Punch, which is a highly significant work that we talk through. Throughout the decades, her art has tracked severe ecological decline in across the Australian landscape.  

Ely also discusses her upbringing, creating art at a young age, and the freedom her parents her gave her to pursue her interests. The artist also explains how she came to performance art, and the role of trauma in her work at levels personal, ecological and political. Finally Ely talks through her role in Australia’s feminist art movement, and her idea of art as a catalyst.

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney. Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

 

I would ask you the question, does it help to feel scared?” wonders Lucy McRae.  

How do you think about the future at a time when the future feels so uncertain? In this third edition of Faraway, so close—a podcast dedicated to considering the anxieties and opportunities emerging in the arts in our new COVID-19 world—artists Cyrus Tang and Lucy McRae give their thoughts and feelings on where we are now, and where we’re headed next.

While Cyrus talks about loss and transformation, sitting with anxiety, and her experience of migrating from Hong Kong over 15 years ago, Lucy discusses what it’s like in Los Angeles, the importance of resilience and optimism, the fallibility of human bodies, and the future of art, biology and technology in our ‘new normal’.  

As Lucy sums up, “There’s a potential revolution rendering in the background, and the opportunity that comes out of hitting rock bottom, despite the discomfort and the suffering, is a really great to create change and transformation.”

You can subscribe to the Art Guide podcast on iTunes or Spotify, and listen back to the first episode of Faraway, so close with artist Yvette Coppersmith and curator/director Alexie Glass-Kantor on solitude, and episode two with artists Tai Snaith and Ross Coulter on creating and parenting.

 

“Then we’ll get real systemic change,” says Eugenia Lim when talking about making structural changes in the art world that reflect genuine diversity, “but I think we’re still just the tip of the iceberg. It’s still quite surface, but it’s good to be even pushing and talking about these things I think.” 

At a moment where politics and individuals feel increasingly divided, Lim creates videos, film and installations that look beyond divisiveness, capitalism and exploitation, to forefront the power of collectivity—something she speaks to in our latest podcast series Conflated.

This series centres on the ideas of inflation and conflation, linking with a touring exhibition also titled, Conflated. In ways both metaphorical and material, the show looks at ideas of inflation and deflation through creative, environmental, and political ways. And one of the artists in the show is Lim. 

Lim is an Australian artist of Chinese-Singaporean descent and her work partly explores this by subverting cultural stereotypes in ways both intelligent and very witty. In past works she’s taken on invented personas, inhabiting them across multiple videos, performances and sites. 

Lim is also one of the previous co-directors of the experimental art organisation Aphids, and we talk about one of Aphids’s latest performance works EASY RIDERS, which looks at the gig economy and capitalism—and we discuss how worker exploitation is an ongoing concern in Eugenia’s work. In addition to her thought-provoking practice, Lim also has co-directed the inaugural Channels Festival, and she was founding editor of the journal Assemble Papers. 

In our conversation she talks through her latest work with Kyneton locals, an area in regional Victoria, and how her work speaks to collective acts and what this means in a divisive political time like the one we’re living. 

You can also listen back to the first episode of this series with artist Zoë Bastin on conflation, bodies and transformative politics, and the second episode with David Cross on inflatables, experimentation and precarity.

With a current showing at ANU School of Art and Design Gallery, NETS Victoria are touring Conflated nationally throughout 2022 and 2023:

ANU School of Art and Design Gallery
(Canberra ACT)
29 September—4 November

Logan Art Gallery
(Logan QLD)
29 July 2023—3 September 2023

Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery
(Swan Hill VIC)
1 October 2023—3 December 2023

This series is kindly sponsored by NETS Victoria who are nationally touring Conflated, assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program and the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

Even Agatha Gothe-Snape struggles to define her art. While performancemay be the easiest description, there are many avenues winding through her practice including dance, collaboration, text, public works, PowerPoint slide presentations, augmented reality and documentary. If the form of Snape’s work can be slippery, so too can the content. Broadly speaking, much of her work looks at artistic processes, the canon of art history, and the social and aesthetic contexts that artworks sit within. 

In a career barely brushing one decade, Gothe-Snape has exhibited widely. She’s the only artist to have shown in all iterations of the Sydney exhibition series The National, and was also included in the 20th Biennale of Sydney — not to mention she’s also the subject of an Archibald-winning painting, created by her partner Mitch Cairns. 

Most recently, Gothe-Snape was commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects for the exhibition Making art public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects. For the show, Agatha created Lion’s honey, an ongoing performance in which a single person reads to themselves each day in the gallery. It’s this work that becomes the focus of the podcast, with Gothe-Snape recounting how the performances came to fruition — just when she was at the edge of refusing a commission — it was hearing a fable that brought her back into creating. It’s Gothe-Snape’s telling of the story that gives such an insight into her practice, and how she thinks about art. 

Gothe-Snape also talks about the experience of being part of an artistic family, why she eventually went to art school, the role of language in her work, her thoughts on John Hughes and the art canon, and her struggles with the label of “art”. 

See more at Art Guide online: www.artguide.com.au/podcast

What does it mean to be in isolation, but in isolation together? In this first edition of our new podcast series Faraway, so close, we take a personal look at solitude, creativity and the arts under COVID-19, talking with Archibald-winning artist Yvette Coppersmith and executive director of Artspace, Alexie Glass-Kantor. “We’re just going to have to be more accountable, more present, more determined, to be open to creating space for complexity, contradiction and difference, and for supporting communities who are most affected and most vulnerable to the turbulences of the moment we find ourselves in…” says Alexie Glass-Kantor when thinking of creative life beyond COVID-19.

When Anna Davis discusses being a curator, she talks about collaboration, conversation and experimentation: “It’s about working with artists and working with ideas.” It’s also about the relationships: “The exhibition really starts to take shape in a real sense once the artists are really talking. I think when you get the chance to work with someone like Jenny Watson or Louise Hearman and it’s over a number of years, which is fantastic, you get to develop this relationship with them and hopefully a level of trust comes through that.” Having held the position of Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) for the past decade, Davis has curated a vast array of contemporary exhibitions, which she discusses in the first episode of Art Guide’s four-part series ‘Conversations with Curators’. Anna discusses how she came to curating, what her past life as a “lapsed artist” offers her curatorial practice, the experience of curating major solo shows and the ethical implications of her work. See more at Art Guide Australia online: www.artguide.com.au Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.

“In some ways I don’t think of my life and art as separate things, I think it’s one in the same thing,” says artist Louise Weaver when speaking of her creative pursuits. “I don’t see it as a career as much as something that is an extension of my life and would go on regardless of whether I had opportunities to exhibit or not.”

With a practice spanning three decades and multiple mediums, Weaver has continuously worked both within and beyond a variety of juxtapositions: nature and culture, metamorphosis and concealment, reality and unreality, and the beautiful and the uncanny. Becoming well-known in the 90s for her crotchet animal forms, over time Weaver has created a vast array of painting, installation and sculptural works, threading interests in mythology, shamanism, the fantastic, the domestic, high fashion, art history and ecological awareness.

Weaver discusses these elements in the podcast interview, and further builds upon an earlier conversation published in Art Guide’s January/February 2020 issue, which can now be found online.

In particular Weaver talks through her major survey exhibition 'Between appearances: the Art of Louise Weaver', showing at Buxton Contemporary, and filters through the ideas and associations that inform her tactile works. She also discusses the dream-like qualities found in her work, her studio process, how she gets beyond self-doubt, questions of gender and creativity, and what she means when she says creating art is how she relates to the world.

See more at Art Guide online: www.artguide.com.au/podcast

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse L. Warren.

“If you can get through the conventional way of relating, then often you find that there are these meeting points of understanding,” says Vivienne Binns in our latest episode of The Long Run series featuring conversations with artists who have 60-year practices. 

A pioneer in feminist and community driven art, Binns has been at the forefront of critically engaged, feminist art from the 1960s onward. While painting is her central practice, she has also worked across printmaking, performance, sculpture and drawing. It is no understatement to say that her art and activism has changed the Australian contemporary art landscape. 

Binns largely grew up in Sydney and in the 1950s attended the National Art School. She became known in the 1960s for her solo show at Watters Gallery where she exhibited paintings on female sexuality and genitals. As history writes it, these images caused a controversy. 

From here Binns co-founded the Sydney Chapter of the Women’s Art Movement in 1974, which was integral in supporting women artists, and has spent decades involved in many community art projects, as well as continuing her own painting practice. Alongside exhibiting at national and international institutions, as an educator Binns has been integral in mentoring generations of artists, and in 2021 was the recipient of the Australia Council Award for Visual Arts.

Binns talks about her childhood, and in particular her mother and the importance of women’s domestic work, as well as her time at art school. We also talk about Vivienne’s long-standing inquiry into what art really is, and how this links to her own thoughts about womanhood and sexuality.

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“The art world is becoming arguably much more interesting now as a result of these kinds of developments,” says curator and director Jonathan Watkins in the third episode of Art Abroad. “I’m certainly not a lone voice, there are a lot of people challenging these fundamental assumptions about what we’re dealing with and why we’re dealing with it.”

While Art Abroad focusses on those involved in art who moved from Australia and ended up in London, Watkins is the director of the renowned Ikon gallery in Birmingham, two hours outside of London. 

Born in the UK, at age 12 Watkins came to Australia with his parents. He studied art history in Sydney, and eventually moved back to London in the 1980s, holding curatorial roles at Chisenhale and Serpentine galleries. 

In 1999 he became director of Ikon, a role he’s held for 23 years. Started in the 1960s, Ikon is a gallery that at once gives accessible and challenging notions of contemporary art. In an interesting link to Australia, Jonathan’s predecessor in the role was none other than Elizabeth Ann MacGregor. However after two decades at the gallery, Jonathan will be stepping down next month. We talk about this, as well as his moves to and from the UK, and the international outlook of his practice. He was the artistic director of the Biennale of Sydney in 1998, then headed the Tate Triennial in 2003, and the Shanghai Biennale in 2006—and that’s just to name a few.

Finally Watkins talks about making contemporary art accessible while not reducing its potency, and what will define this current period of art. 

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney. Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“I think it is also about the fact that, in terms of power structures, artists want to—as much as they can—remove mechanisms that hinder their capacity for creative freedom,” says David Cross in the second episode of our latest podcast, Conflated.  

Conflated looks at ideas of inflation and conflation, linking with a touring exhibition also titled, Conflated. Whether metaphorical or material, the show explores how ideas of inflation and deflation can be taken in creative, environmental, and political ways. And one of the 11 artists showing is David Cross.  

New Zealand-born but living and working in Melbourne, Cross has a truly expansive practice—as well as being an artist he’s a curator, academic, art professor, writer and musician. For his art practice, he’s known for creating works that use inflatables in performative ways, looking at dualities such as protection and precarity, and the inter-relationships between people.  

Cross talks about how he became interested in inflatables, what he’s showing for Conflated, and his aspiration to create works that are at once playful without being contrived. As an academic and professor in art schools, Cross also talks about art school models and the push and pull between experimentation and precarity, as well as the professionalism of the art world.  

You can also listen back to the first episode of this series with artist Zoë Bastin on conflation, bodies and transformative politics.  

With a current showing at ANU School of Art and Design Gallery, NETS Victoria are touring Conflated nationally throughout 2022 and 2023:

ANU School of Art and Design Gallery
(Canberra ACT)
29 September—4 November

Logan Art Gallery
(Logan QLD)
29 July 2023—3 September 2023

Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery
(Swan Hill VIC)
1 October 2023—3 December 2023

This series is kindly sponsored by NETS Victoria who are nationally touring Conflated, assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program and the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

 

“I guess that is the thread, that I am very open to influences that come into my life, you know, and I respond to them,” says Suzanne Archer in The Long Run, Art Guide’s latest podcast series featuring interviews with artists who have 60-year practices.

Based just outside of Sydney in the bushy suburb of Wedderburn, Archer has long-created layered and dense drawings and paintings, alongside sculpture and installations. With a practice always slightly edging on the mysterious, Archer’s work looks at nature, mortality, disgust and decay. Born in Surrey in the United Kingdom, Archer moved to Australia in 1965 and has since gone on to win numerous awards including the Wynne and Dobell Prizes.

In a very open conversation, Archer talks about how her immediate environment in Wedderburn pervades her art practice, from conscious to unconscious levels. She further discusses her first exhibition and what she feels about the idea of being called a ‘female painter’, as well as taking about having children and an art practice. Finally, Archer tells us how mortality plays out in her work, her decision to break from traditional portraiture, and what it was like for her to recently reflect on a career of 60 years.

This episode of The Long Run is an ongoing podcast series, and you can listen back to previous episodes with Robert Owen, Gareth Sansom, Wendy Stavrianos and John Wolseley. You can also subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, so you never miss an episode.

Suzanne Archer is represented by Nicholas Thompson Gallery in Melbourne.

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“And I definitely think that’s what landscape is for me, it is a questioning about living and life and what we do in places and what we leave behind,” says Polly Stanton in our latest podcast, talking about how her art practice looks at the entwined relationship between culture and nature.

Stanton is part of the exhibition that gives this podcast it’s title, Notions of Care. The exhibition brings together five artists and groups to consider care in art making, through materials, how we relate to one another, and as an approach to the world.

Stanton is an artist and filmmaker who primarily creates moving image works that look at how human action and use of the landscape effect not only the landscape itself, but how we perceive and interpret the landscape. Her practice focuses on sound and visuals, with an immersive process which sees Stanton spending much time in the sites she captures, from the Goldfields of Victoria to the landscape of Queenstown.

We start by talking about care in the arts, and how Stanton grew up with parents in the entertainment industry, where she early on witnessed the struggle to sustain a creative practice. We also talk through her early work in cinema and screenwriting, and the eventual shift into contemporary art.

Stanton takes us through her process of working in the landscape, and how it’s not about romanticising the environment but about understanding the world in non-didactic ways. And for someone whose work deals directly with human effects on the environment, and with ever-growing climate change threat, Stanton tells us how she feels about the future.

You can listen back to previous episodes in this series with Kate Tucker and Katie West.

Notions Of Care
Ararat Gallery TAMA
Until 26 February 2023

“The ideas that we attribute to bodies are arbitrary and often accepted but don’t really exist,” says Zoë Bastin in our latest podcast series, Conflated. “Bodies are very malleable substances that can become whatever they want.”

Conflated is a short series centred on the ideas of inflation and conflation, linking with a touring exhibition aptly titled, Conflated. Whether metaphorical or material, ideas of inflation and deflation can be taken in creative, environmental, and political ways. The 11 contemporary artists in Conflated show this in myriad forms—which Bastin speaks to.

Bastin is one of the co-curators and exhibiting artists in Conflated. While known for her dance and choreography practice, Bastin also works across sculpture, video, radio and printmaking.

Bastin talks about the ideas behind Conflated—both as an exhibition and a concept—as well as how she began dancing at an incredibly young age, how dance can be a gendered form, and what transformative possibilities Bastin looks to beyond this. We also talk about queer politics, shame, how bodies are objectified in art and life, and Bastin’s advice to younger artists.

With a current showing at ANU School of Art and Design Gallery, NETS Victoria are touring Conflated nationally throughout 2022 and 2023:

ANU School of Art and Design Gallery
(Canberra ACT)
29 September—4 November

Logan Art Gallery
(Logan QLD)
29 July 2023—3 September 2023

Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery
(Swan Hill VIC)
1 October 2023—3 December 2023

This series is kindly sponsored by NETS Victoria who are nationally touring Conflated, assisted by assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program and the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria. 

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“Each curator is unique like every artist is unique, I believe,” says Nici Cumpston, who holds the dual positions of Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia and artistic director of TARNATHI. Not to mention that Cumpston, a Barkindji woman of Afghan and European descent, is also an artist, educator and writer. In this podcast, the second of four episodes which focus on contemporary curating, Cumpston discusses how for her curating is a mixture of aesthetic, cultural, political and educative roles, at the centre of which lie community, relationships and conversation. “For me I need to have a good understanding of the artists work,” she says. “I need to build a relationship with the artist that I’m working with and I like togive them the opportunity to excel themselves.” Cumpston further talks through her pre-art life, how she eventually found herself at AGSA, the larger aspirations behind curating, and the changes she’s noticed in the arts as an Indigenous curator during the last decade. See more at Art Guide Australia online: www.artguide.com.au Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.

For over 60 years John Wolseley has been visiting, capturing and sharing his experience of landscapes. But what does it mean to create and innovate over six decades? And what can Wolseley teach us about the life-stages of an artist? 

Art Guide Australia’s newest podcast series The Long Run considers this question with artists who have had careers spanning 60 years, each reflecting on their art and lives. 

In this third episode Wolseley, one of Australia’s most well-known landscape painters and printmakers, speaks to us from his home in regional Victoria. Moving to Australia from England in 1976, he’s known for immersing himself in an environment before painting it, capturing landscapes ranging from the mountains in Tasmania, to wetlands and rivers, to the floodplains of Arnhem land. Known as a great storyteller, Wolseley captures worlds that invite engagement with nature and the environment. 

In this episode Wolseley talks about how he came of age when England was coming out of World War II, and his experience of growing up on a farm and later attending boarding school. The artist also talks about studying under prestigious artists, what it takes for a landscape to capture his attention, and how he balances an environmental awareness in his work without being didactic. And finally, Wolseley tells us what having a 60-year practice feels like, and whether he’s optimistic about the future.

If you like this conversation, you can listen to the first episode where avant-garde painter Gareth Sansom talks about chance in making art, and his feelings on mortality and time; and in episode two hear Wendy Stavrianos discuss her experience of being a female landscape painter. 

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, music and engineering by Mino Peric.

John Wolseley is represented Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney and Australian Galleries, Melbourne.

What does it mean to create art between two cultures? What relationships are formed when artists collaborate? What are the links between feminism, contemporary art and disability? These questions, and more, are explored in the second episode of our newest podcast series FEM-aFFINITY, featuring a very honest and intimate conversation with photographer Janelle Low. 

This podcast takes its name from an exhibition with the same title: FEM-aFFINITY is also a collaborative, female-led show that first began in 2019. It features a series of collaborations between seven female artists who practice from Melbourne’s Arts Project Australia, a studio and gallery for artists with an intellectual disability, and seven female contemporary artists.

Low is one of the exhibiting artists in FEM-aFFINITY who collaborated with Arts Project artist Eden Menta, producing a series of vivid and poignant photographs. Low talks about this collaboration—the friendship, humour and life experiences that gave it strength—while also discussing her upbringing and art world experiences, and being the youngest person (and second female) to win the National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2013. 

Low is of Peranakan/Teochew heritage, and both of her parents migrated from Singapore. Low discusses how her work explores a sense of otherness between her cultural heritage and Western upbringing, and she further talks about navigating the art world as a person of colour, and why institutions need to curate diverse exhibitions with genuineness. 

FEM-aFFINITY is a nationally touring exhibition and is currently showing at Melbourne’s Bunjil Place Gallery. Exhibiting artists include; Bronwyn Hack, Cathy Staughton, Dorothy Berry, Eden Menta, Fulli Andrinopoulos, Heather Shimmen, Helga Groves, Jane Trengove, Janelle Low, Jill Orr, Lisa Reid, Prudence Flint, Wendy Dawson and Yvette Coppersmith.

FEM-aFFINITY
Bunjil Place Gallery
30 January—14 March

Riddoch Art Gallery
22 May—4 July

Benalla Art Gallery
6 August—17 October

This series is kindly sponsored by NETS Victoria who are nationally touring FEM-aFFINITY, assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Patrick Telfer. Music by Mino Peric.

“Art is this amazing subject,” says Robert Owen. “It comes from different people and it contributes to cultural identity in a way that can question ourselves…"

In this fourth episode of The Long Run, our podcast series talking to artists who’ve had careers spanning 60 years, Owen talks about what it means to create over six decades, and what he feels is the truth of his art: a sense of oneness.

Now based in Melbourne, Owen has led an incredible life of creating, working across painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and public art. While his works are cemented in geometry and abstraction, they quite stunningly bring together a range of references from philosophy, poetry, music, literature, art history, mathematics and science.

In this podcast Owen’s talks through his early practice and his ideas on art. He discusses his love of a certain shade of blue, memories of his childhood in Wagga Wagga, and the uncertainty he felt as a young artist. Owen also mentions the four years he spent on the Greek island of Hydra from 1963, living and working alongside well-known creatives like Leonard Cohen, and his time in Britain in the late 1960s working under constructionist painters.

Finally, Owen tells us about the spiritual elements of abstraction, his reflections on a practice of 60 years, and his current survey show, Blue Over Time at the Heide Museum of Modern Art.

The Long Run is an ongoing podcast series, and you can listen back to previous episodes with Gareth Sansom, Wendy Stavrianos and John Wolseley.

Blue Over Time: Robert Owen—A Survey
Robert Owen
Heide Museum of Modern Art Until 23 May

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

What does it mean to do feminism rather than be a feminist? In the third and final episode of our FEM-aFFINITY podcast, feminist critic and art historian Anne Marsh explains the idea of doing feminism in Australian contemporary art, from the 1970s to now. 

For over four decades Marsh has been researching and writing at the cross-sections of feminism and contemporary art. As a leading academic in this field, she’s currently undertaking an expansive research project titled Doing Feminism which, consisting of events, residencies and a soon-to-published book, looks at women, feminism and art in Australia since 1970.

In a very insightful conversation Marsh discusses feminism in the arts from the 1970s to now, and reflects on how female, marginalised and neurotypical artists can also be activists. Marsh further talks about why artists with a disability have been on the periphery on the art world, and how the Western art canon can be expanded to include the true diversity of 20th and 21st century art making. 

This podcast takes its name from an exhibition with the same title: FEM-aFFINITY is also a collaborative, female-led show that first began in 2019. It features a series of collaborations between seven female artists who practice from Melbourne’s Arts Project Australia, a studio and gallery for artists with an intellectual disability, and seven female contemporary artists.

FEM-aFFINITY is a nationally touring exhibition and will soon show at Riddoch Art Gallery at Mount Gambier in South Australia. Exhibiting artists include: Bronwyn Hack, Cathy Staughton, Dorothy Berry, Eden Menta, Fulli Andrinopoulos, Heather Shimmen, Helga Groves, Jane Trengove, Janelle Low, Jill Orr, Lisa Reid, Prudence Flint, Wendy Dawson and Yvette Coppersmith.

FEM-aFFINITY
Riddoch Art Gallery
22 May—4 July

Benalla Art Gallery
6 August—17 October

This series is kindly sponsored by NETS Victoria who are nationally touring FEM-aFFINITY, assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Patrick Telfer. Music by Mino Peric.

Although Stelarc is just shy of the 60 year mark—The Long Run podcast is centred on speaking with artists who have 60 year careers—his performances and installations, and the centrality of the body in his art, get to very meaningful ideas about life and technology.

Whether placing an artwork in his stomach, actualising a body with a third hand, giving his agency over to performance viewers, and rather famously growing an extra ear on his arm, Stelarc has gone to true extremes. The way he challenges himself through his art sets down a challenge to his viewers.

Through this practice, Stelarc has problematised the limits and capabilities of the human body. As he says, “Walking with six legs on a robot. Being algorithmically actuated by a full body exoskeleton. So, all of these experiences have been about exploring these alternate anatomies.”

Born in Cyprus, Stelarc’s family moved to Australia when he was four years old. He studied art in Melbourne, and soon after lived in Japan for almost two decades in the 70s and 80s. He first became well known for his early suspension performances where he’d hang naked, suspended by hooks into his skin, whether in the gallery or in a public setting.

In investigating the human body, his later performances are often entwined with technology—and have seen him perform nationally and internationally amongst myriad galleries and institutions.

Stelarc is incredibly interesting to speak with, and we talk about his suspension performances and some more recent technology-based performances. We also discuss what Stelarc means when he says the human body is obsolete, as well as questions of agency and death, and the ways in which Stelarc has used his body in his art for almost 60 years.

His work is showing for RMIT Gallery’s FutureU exhibition, which is currently closed due to lockdown restrictions.

Future U
RMIT Gallery
29 July – 23 October

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“I was sort of staggered,” says writer Jennifer Higgie. “Why hadn’t I ever been taught about these women? Why weren’t they included in mainstream art histories?” Higgie is talking about the marginalisation of women in art history—and it’s something she speaks to in our latest podcast episode.

Art Abroad looks at artists and creatives who moved from Australia to London, and while Jennifer Higgie studied fine art in Canberra and Melbourne, she moved to London in the 1997 when she was in her late twenties. Starting as a painter, she soon turned to writing in London, eventually holding a two-decade editorial role at Frieze arts magazine from the late 1990s until 2021.

A few years ago, she began posting about historical women artists on Instagram, which gained a mass following, and led to the Bow Down podcast on women artists. Last year she published the brilliant book The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women's Self-Portraits, which looks at women in art history from the 1500s onwards, focussing on women artists who at some point painted a self-portrait. Higgie shows what it took for these women to create, and how individual their creations are.

In our podcast interview, Higgie talks about her earlier life as an artist, her move to London and her time at Frieze. She also chats about the nature of arts criticism, the experience of editing a renowned arts magazine, and why women have been outcasted from mainstream art history.

The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women's Self-Portraits is published by Simon and Schuster and Hachette Australia, available here.

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

“I was thinking about meditation as being a way of creating calm and openness so that more constructive conversation can happen,” says Katie West in the second episode of Notions of Care.

In our latest podcast, West talks about dyeing textiles, creating spaces of meditation, and facing experiences of racism—all in a conversation centred on care and creating, linking with the NETS Victoria touring exhibition, Notions of Care at Ararat Gallery TAMA.

The show features five artists and groups to consider care in art making, through materials, how we relate to one another, and as an approach to the world.

West is a Yindjibarndi Western Australian artist, based in Noongar Ballardong country in Western Australia. She exhibits incredibly moving installations, which often feature dyed textiles and native plants which are sewn and woven.

In 2016 as part of Next Wave Festival she exhibited the work Decolonist, which looks at how meditation can be a way to decolonise the self. And she later extended on this for a stunning installation at TarraWarra Museum of Art, giving audiences a space to meditate and contemplate.

Now, her work in Notions of Care could be described as a tea installation, and she talks through this work and how it came about. We also talk about what the concept of care means to her, how she came to meditating and bringing this into the gallery space, and the process of walking, gathering, and dyeing the materials for her textiles.

West also talks about the experiences of racism she has faced, and her words of encouragement to other people who have had similar experiences.

You can listen back to the first episode of Notions of Care with Kate Tucker.

Notions Of Care
Ararat Gallery TAMA
Until 26 February 2023

A kind thank you to our sponsors for this series. The show Notions of Care is a Bus Projects exhibition touring with NETS Victoria, which is curated by Kathryne Genevieve Honey and Nina Mulhall. This project is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and received assistance from NETS Victoria’s Exhibition Development Fund 2020, supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

You can subscribe to the Art Guide podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and don’t forget to rate the show as it helps people find us.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.

Even though Chinese-Australian artist Lindy Lee has changed and refined her art practice over time, there are certain themes that continually pervade her work; her Chinese heritage, questions of identity and being, spiritual practices, zen buddhism, gesturing towards the cosmos, and the emotions of pain, grief and hope.

Lindy discusses these ideas, focusing on the question that she poses to herself and others: “Where is your freedom?”

See more at Art Guide Australia online: https://tinyurl.com/y5qm5852

Ricky Maynard isn’t solely interested in creating great pieces of art; he aims for what he calls “great pieces of evidence.” Since the 1980s the photographer’s practice has focused on the history, trauma and struggle of Indigenous people, capturing significant historical sites, landscapes and community figures.

Maynard’s practice is marked by the ongoing intent to tell the story of Aboriginal people beyond a colonial gaze. He discusses how this underpins his work, beginning with how he became interested in documentary photography, while also considering his photos as a catalyst for future racial justice.

See more at Art Guide Australia online: https://artguide.com.au/ricky-maynard-art-as-evidence

For Simone Slee the perfect sculpture is the sculpture that ‘fails’. These failures come in many guises; sometimes her works are left to the fallibility of humans, cucumbers and rocks. At other times Slee’s sculptures fail by toppling over, as weight and gravity eventually exert their influence. At the heart of these failures is an ongoing interest in the nature and the parameters of sculpture.

In our conversation Slee talks about the nature of sculpture, as well as questions of failure, help and vulnerability.

See more at Art Guide Australia online: https://artguide.com.au/podcast-simone-slee-on-sculpture-vulnerability-and-failure

The work of artist Fayen d’Evie is motivated by, as she says, “an interest and curiosity about how we encounter the world, about how we understand it, about how we talk about it, about how we remember it..." With her practice spanning writing, publishing, sound, performance and touch-based works, d’Evie explores questions of materiality, embodiment, knowledge and translation.

d'Evie discusses these themes, shedding light on the overarching threads that characterise her practice.

See more at Art Guide Australia online: https://artguide.com.au/podcast-fayen-devie-on-encountering-curiosity

An empty black speech bubble, borrowed from Roy Lichtenstein, hangs above the heads of gallery goers. An androgynous figure visits an exhibition in outer space. A few well-known artists meet disastrous endings. These are just some of the scenes we encounter across Arlo Mountford’s work, which centres on questions of time, history, the Western art canon and the concept of the ‘new’. In this episode Arlo talks through his sense of time and history, and what being 'out of time' might mean.

Arlo Mountford is a Melbourne-based artist who works across video, animation, sculpture, installation and drawing.

See more at Art Guide Australia online: https://artguide.com.au/podcast-arlo-mountford-and-being-out-of-time

The punch lines found in Kenny Pittock’s work are almost endless. An illustration of a double power point becomes the ‘power couple’, while a drawing of a giant foot carries the tagline ‘good things are a foot’. Pittock’s work is relatable and commands us to look at the minutiae of every life. In this conversation Pittock talks about the organic use of humour in his work, how he didn't attend an art gallery until senior school, and his well-loved ceramic book sculptures.

Kenny Pittock is a Melbourne-based artist who works primarily in drawing and ceramics.

See more at Art Guide Australia online: https://artguide.com.au/podcast-the-humours-of-kenny-pittock

When artist Caitlin Franzmann discusses the larger ideals behind her art practice, she mentions the ambition of “invoking what is bigger than ourselves.”

The artist looks at the fluid links between spirituality, ritual practices, and contemporary art. In this interview she discusses these ideas, and explains how the two sensibilities of slowness and intimacy infuse her work, at both a personal and collective level.

Caitlin Franzmann is a prominent Brisbane-based interdisciplinary artist who works with sound, installation, performance and visuals.

See more at Art Guide Australia online: https://artguide.com.au/podcast-caitlin-franzmann-on-listening-and-slowness

What is our relationship to nature and each other? Well-known for her hybrid creatures that shift between the beautiful and the grotesque, in this conversation Patricia Piccinini discusses questions of empathy, genetics and realism, and how we understand the concept of nature. The artist also discusses her exhibition at QAGOMA, 'Curious Affection'.

See more at Art Guide Australia online: https://artguide.com.au/podcast-patricia-piccininis-curious-affection

In this first series of Five on Five we're asking five painters to speak about a painting that has influenced, inspired or resonated with them. In this episode Kate Beynon reflects on 'The Creation of the Birds' (1958) by Spanish artist Remedios Varo.

Beynon is captivated by Varo’s hybrid owl-woman and her spiritual presence, which in turn inspired Beynon’s blue shaman, a guardian figure that appears throughout Beynon’s work.

To view the painting as you listen along, head to Art Guide online: https://artguide.com.au/five-on-five-kate-beynon-on-remedios-varos-the-creation-of-the-birds.

Hong Kong-born Melbourne-based artist Kate Beynon recently completed her PhD in Fine Art at MADA: Monash University, has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally, and is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Production credits: Produced by Tiarney Miekus. Music and audio engineering by Mino Peric.

In this first series of Five on Five we're asking five painters to speak about a painting that has influenced, inspired or resonated with them. In this episode Peter Waples-Crowe reflects upon 'Bad Moon Rising' (1989) by David Wojnarowicz.

In particular, Waples-Crowe is captured by Wojnarowicz’s symbolism, his aids’ activism and the queer politics underlying his imagery. To view the painting as you listen along, head to Art Guide online: https://artguide.com.au/five-on-five-peter-waples-crowe-on-david-wojnarowiczs-bad-moon-rising.

Peter Waples-Crowe is a Ngarigo visual and performance-based artist living in Melbourne. Waples-Crowe creates bold colourful work that discusses the representation of Aboriginal people in popular culture, often referencing the dingo as an analogy for Indigenous peoples.

Production credits: Produced by Tiarney Miekus. Music and audio engineering by Mino Peric.

In this first series of Five on Five we're asking five painters to speak about a painting that has influenced, inspired or resonated with them. In this episode Kylie Banyard reflects on Breast-feeding (2015) by American artist Dana Schutz.

In particular, Banyard is captivated by the image's “yuck yum” qualities and its depiction of the maternal experience of breastfeeding.

To view the painting as you listen along, head to Art Guide online: https://artguide.com.au/five-on-five-kylie-banyard-on-dana-schutzs-breastfeeding.

Kylie Banyard is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates alternate models for living and learning. Her artistic practice is grounded in painting and intersects with photography, video, sculpture and immersive architectural spaces.

Production credits: Produced by Tiarney Miekus. Music and audio engineering by Mino Peric.

In this first series of Five on Five we're asking five painters to speak about a painting that has influenced, inspired or resonated with them. In this episode Huseyin Sami reflects upon 'Suite Segond' (1980) by French artist Bernard Frize.

In particular, Sami is intrigued by Frize’s lifelong dedication to painting and how the artist has continuously worked through the problems of painting.

To view the painting as you listen along, head to Art Guide online: https://artguide.com.au/five-on-five-huseyin-sami-and-bernard-frizes-suite-segond.

Huseyin Sami is a Sydney-based artist whose multi-disciplinary practice engages with painting, sculpture and installation to explore aspects of time, action and process.

Production credits: Produced by Tiarney Miekus. Music and audio engineering by Mino Peric.

In this first series of Five on Five we're asking five painters to speak about a painting that has influenced, inspired or resonated with them. In this episode Prudence Flint reflects on 'Virgin and Child' (1455-60) by Dieric Bouts, discussing how she’s drawn toward the maternal and erotic nature of the painting, alongside its nostalgic resonance.

To view the painting as you listen along, head to Art Guide online: https://artguide.com.au/five-on-five-prudence-flint-on-dieric-bouts-virgin-and-child.

Prudence Flint is a Melbourne-based painter. She is a finalist in this year's Archibald Portrait Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and will have a solo show at Bett Gallery in Hobart from 16 November - 7 December 2018.

Production credits: Produced by Tiarney Miekus. Music and audio engineering by Mino Peric.

“I think the challenge with all of the disparate references is not that it’s difficult for all of them to come together. I think that the challenge is not to make the photograph too derivative of one reference, because then I’m just recreating something that already exists."

Georgina Cue’s large-scale, staged photographs bring together many disparate references ranging from film noir, German Expressionism, femme fatales, graffiti, classical Greek aesthetics and contemporary sportswear. In this podcast Cue unpacks the stories, associations and symbolism behind the imagery, as well as her current show 'Scenes' at Neon Parc.

See more at Art Guide online: www.artguide.com.au/podcasts

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus and engineered by Mino Peric.

Glenn Iseger-Pilkington likes to joke that he’s an “arts handyman”. Yet the phrase does have merit: he’s an artist and writer and has held various curatorial roles at the South Australian Museum, Western Australian Museum and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Nowadays, he’s the lead consultant at Gee Consultancy, where he works with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and arts workers.

In this podcast Glenn, a Yamatji Nyoongar man from Western Australia with Dutch and Scottish migrant history, talks about his curatorial and consultancy roles, discussing how he sees himself less as a voice of authority and more as a conduit. He also talks about the experience of judging the 2018 National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards and, finally, tells us what changes he’s noticed in the arts in Australia over the last 15 years — both for better and worse.

See more at Art Guide online: https://artguide.com.au/podcast-glenn-iseger-pilkington-on-being-a-conduit.

This podcast has been produced in partnership with the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in recognition of the annual National Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Art Awards.

Produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric.

When Luke Scholes talks about being a curator, he turns toward the origins of his role: he discusses how curating means to be ‘a carer of things’. For Scholes, this largely involves caring for art collections, through his role as Curator of Aboriginal Art at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT).

In this podcast Scholes unpacks his curatorial work, revealing how his position falls across three broad areas: facilitating the annual National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Awards, curating exhibitions, and maintaining and developing MAGNT’s Aboriginal art collection. It’s this third responsibility that Scholes particularly delves into. “It’s not just about acquiring more examples, it’s about acquiring the right examples,” he explains. “What a curator should seek to do is develop a really strong and historical record of art movements.”

This podcast has been produced in partnership with the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in recognition of the annual National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.

See more at Art Guide online: https://artguide.com.au/podcast-luke-scholes-on-curating-caring-and-collaborating

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered Mino Peric.

Since embarking on a creative path only a mere 15 years ago, Yolŋu artist Gunybi Ganambarr has been continuously praised for his weaving of Indigenous forms and traditional stories with a contemporary sensibility. He has been called a “revolutionary”, “genius” and “an innovator”, and has accumulated many accolades, including the 2018 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA).

But as Ganambarr explains in the podcast conversation, visual art was not the first form he gravitated towards. His foremost creative experience started as a didgeridoo player, which allowed him to travel nationally and internationally. Prior to becoming an artist, Ganambarr also spent 12 years as a builder, and he credits this experience with familiarising himself with the tools and materials that would later find their way into his creative practice.

Gunybi discusses his 'pre-art' life, the experience of winning the 2018 NATSIAA, and the advice he has for younger artists.

See more at Art Guide online: https://artguide.com.au/podcast-gunybi-ganambarr-on-creating-building-and-etching.

This podcast has been produced in partnership with the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in recognition of the annual Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.

The Interview with Gunybi Ganambarr was produced and hosted by Tiarney Miekus. Episode mix by Mino Peric and soundtrack by Jessie Warren.

The contexts that Fiona Abicare has worked within are plentiful: the Golden Age of Hollywood, the shabby chic aesthetic and objects of mass culture, just to name a few. Working with locations such as window shop fronts and gallery settings, the Melbourne-based artist’s work explores the cultural and personal associations and histories we have with various sites, objects and historical periods; creating works that blend art, design, architecture, film and fashion.

As Fiona explains in the podcast, she works at the junction between contemporary art and interiors, always creating directly in relation to a certain site or context. “The site dictates the approach, [which] dictates the medium, the subject and the starting point,” she says. “I’m not a studio-based artist that goes to the studio every day and does continuous making. I do projects.”

Fiona discusses how she explore various historical periods and aesthetic styles, the familial and personal resonance in her work, the experience of working as a technician for other well-known artists, and the current cultural climate in the Australian arts.

See more at Art Guide online: https://artguide.com.au/podcast-fiona-abicare-on-the-adventures-of-mediums.

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Soundtrack by Jesse Warren.

Colour is simultaneously the most apparent and most complex part of Gemma Smith’s practice. The artist, who has a penchant for abstraction, creates paintings that capture dialogues and interactions between colours. Smith doesn’t paint with colour; she persuades colour.

In this podcast she discusses her explorations into colour and form, her process in the studio, her penchant towards abstraction, and what she has learnt about painting from almost two decades of explorations into colour, space and form.

See more at Art Guide online: https://artguide.com.au/podcast-gemma-smith-on-the-persuasion-of-colour

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.