Women don’t make sculpture; unquote 1999-
Small town boy 2004-2011-
Hot gothic 2020-
I can smell death from here 2024,
Hot gothic 2020-
February 2026 I didn’t expect to live this long is my solo show for Queer Contemporary at the National Art School. Many thanks to the National Art School Queer Contemporary Working Group, Senior Curator Katrina Cashman, Curator Lucy Latella, Todd Fuller for his thoughtful essay, and John Martin Oldfield and Sam Chan for engineering and install assistance.
“This exhibition presents a body of work that documents personal experiences within the complex histories of this site and the broader Darlinghurst area, epicentre of Australian queer history. Its title is a reflection on the artist’s formative years living and studying in Sydney, shaped by a generation lost to the AIDS crisis. A fragment of a sculpture from her graduating exhibition at NAS in the 1990s sits in dialogue with recent installations and work on paper, to offer a personal and political queering of time, space, materiality, and ideas. Her use of discarded and synthesised materials subverts historically dominant gendering of sculpture, labour, language, violence and car culture, weaving together formative creative and lived experiences and the experimental unmaking-as-making that characterises her work. Balanced and suspended in the gallery, these works become actions of resilience and defiance. I didn’t expect to live this long blurs fiction and reality, inviting us into a space that is both threatening and strangely intimate, and itself deeply queer.”
Lucy Latella, Curator
January 2026 Everybody loves a dead gay artist, a treatise on the 90s and remembrance of gay artists who died of HIV/AIDS, was my contribution to Death by Powerpoint for Sydney Festival 2026. A privilege to embark on this collaborative residency with Life Rites and Queer PowerPoint, with artists Christine Pan, Andrew Frost and Imbi, developed by Victoria Spence and Harriet Gillies, Thom Smyth and Xanthe Dobbie.
February-July 2025
Double portrait (JJ/RR) 2025
FRONTSPACE/BACKSPACE
National Art School Campus
An experimental dialogic homage to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg riffed on the visual languages of both artists and extrapolated elements of their early individual work alongside the interplay of their mutual influence. It draws out the often elided but ever present queerness and intimacy of their early practices and relationship. The work also extends the slippages between 2D and 3D processes in my own practice.
February 2025 Curator Queer Contemporary: Chaosophy at the National Art School Building 25 Project Space.
Queer Contemporary: Chaosophy brings together three generations of queer artists (including recent National Art School graduates) who make and break language across the intersections of art, activism, poetry and performance. Through their individual aesthetics and distinct voices, together the artists disrupt histories, conventional silences and cultural forms.
Many thanks to the artists: Kika Kereru Baker, Daniel Browning, Sam Chan, Blake Griffiths, Frankie L.A, nikita lelu, r e a, Victoria Spence, Jake Starr, Ali Tahayori, Magic Young and Justine Youssef and special guests Tania Bowra and the Swamp Daisies.
Thanks to the NAS Gallery team Katrina Cashman, Lucy Latella and Ashton Biddulph, to Head Librarian Lea Simpson, Print Lab star Amanda Woollard, the queer contemporary working group and Luke Thurgate.
Extra special thanks to Nadeena Dixon for wonderful Welcome to Country. And to r e a for the special edition of GARI (language) 2024-25 which claims such a profound place on this site of carceral and colonial violence and asks us to think deeply about Country, language and the body.
This body of text-based drawing references the language used to describe queerness – both insult and reclamation – and how it changes over time. This vernacular, often stereotypical, superficial, camp and gendered, was my first encounter with how to name what must not be named. When I was young, androgynous, and searching for community, the first terms I came across were largely for effeminate gay men – mary and nancyboy. Some terms pass into common usage and others disappear. I am interested in those expressions of queerness that are repeatedly made invisible.
This work also reflects on the queerness of historical pop and pop artists, particularly the text work of Jasper Johns, as well as using visual devices that come to stand in for queerness: such as reversal or inversion, mirroring, and the double.
February 2024 Lead Curator Qtopia Sydney (former) Darlinghurst Police Station, 301 Forbes Street Darlinghurst, Sydney. The largest queer museum in the world! My thanks to the curatorial team whose dedication, diligence, research, vision, thoughtfulness, and creativity have made this a complex, beautiful, and multilayered work of history and culture: Bertie Blackman, Andrew Burrell, Laura Castagnini, Samuel Chan, Aunty Nadeena Dixon, Bren Donnellan, Todd Fuller, Ben Graetz, Steven Ross, George Savoulis, Jeremy Smith, Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Amber Vincent, Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria, and Yiorgos Zafiriou.
Two pair; there is no away 2022 plaster and mild steel shortlisted for the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize September 27 – November 5 2023 at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf.
Lavender Menace 2022, included in the Dobell Drawing Prize 2023, March 31 – June 10 National Art School Gallery; touring regional galleries until July 2025.
February 17 – March 18 Curator, WARD 17 SOUTH for Qtopia Sydney, National Art School Forbes and Burton Streets Darlinghurst
This exhibition evokes the Ward 17 South of the 1980s and 1990s. It is shaped by the lived experience of those who remember the first days and years of the AIDS crisis, and how the community mobilised in the life and death circumstances of HIV. In this solemn space you will hear the voices of long-term survivors, doctors and nurses, advocates and activists. It includes interviews, and images of day-to-day life and special occasions on the Ward, alongside objects from the St Vincent’s Hospital Collection.
February 13 – March 3 Curator, A thousand beautiful things Clifford Chance Arcus Pride Program 2023, with work by Ali Tahayori, Armando Chant, Justine Youssef, Christine Dean, Blake Griffiths, Nadia Odlum, Neil Jenkins and Kurt Banks.
February 2022 I am very pleased to be curating the next Queer Contemporaries exhibition at the National Art School: I want a future that lives up to my past.
Curated to coincide with the 2022 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, this exhibition brings together a range of distinct LGBTQI voices from within the NAS community, including teaching staff and alumni. It presents works in dialogue about the nature of contemporary art and politics and possible personal, local and global futures through queer visual languages and points of view. I want a future that lives up to my pastjuxtaposes artists and works to make visible queer aesthetics that are not tied to obvious representations of identity and sexuality, but are materially grounded in the ways LGBTQI lived experience and creative practice demands a range of navigations and interventions in mainstream cultural forms and interpretations. Against the global backdrop of the climate crisis, our second pandemic, and the last decade’s conservative backlash against the human rights of those of us who live in the margins, the works included offer subtle and complex articulations of ideas, images and forms that bridge difficult pasts and possible futures.
This exhibition is part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival 2022.
February 2022 My next exhibition Small town boy will be held February 24 – March 7 2022 at Gaffa Gallery, Sydney.
Small town boy is a personal reflection on 80s and 90s popular and queer culture, and what it has to say to us as we go through our second pandemic. The exhibition is the culmination of a five-year body of temporary and site specific artworks that responded to place and cultural history, and incorporates reflections on architecture and the body, including Oxford Street and the Wall. The work takes the history, scale and visual elements of location to create new narratives, make visible secret histories and generate alternative meanings. Through large-scale drawings and moving image projections it takes intimate details from the built environment, and its cultural meanings for our communities, and sets it to the echo of Bronski Beat.
This exhibition is part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival 2022.
LizBradshaw 