When you began photographing you were travelling through places like Iran and Pakistan. What was it about those landscapes that appealed to you? The first thing was that I enjoyed the time and the space. I started becoming fascinated with little moti

Michael Armitage is one of today’s most acclaimed young English artists. Born in Nairobi in 1984, he attended boarding school in England, and went on to an impeccable art education at the Slade School of Art and the Royal Academy. Yet the longer he s

The announcement of ‘The National’ in 2017 was greeted with both elation and skepticism, considering its ambitions as a national survey of contemporary Australian art. In 2019, the second iteration of ‘The National’ is presented with a level of nuanc

Let’s start from the beginning. When did you realise that being an artist was the career for you? I was always drawing as a child, and when I was in high school I focused mainly on art in Years Eleven and Twelve. I didn’t think much about what a care

The river, and daylight, beckoned as I descended to the Potter Galleries from Federation Square to see the Heysens’ show. If ever an artist deserves natural light for an exhibition it is Hans Heysen; I found the idea of the outside intruding constant

Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist Laetitia Olivier-Gargano works from a childhood fascination with the vegetable and animal kingdoms. She negotiates complex matrices of affect, mines theory from the uncanny to the posthuman, yet always works f

Djon Mundine: What inspired you at art school? Teena McCarthy: After being a hairdresser/makeup artist in fashion, film and television, it was great to finally get the education I’d always wanted, to follow my path, to write and continue the next cha

McLean Edwards said to writer Saskia Beudel, as they spoke in his studio, ‘We should be fearsome, us artists and writers. People should tremble when we enter the room.’ Few painters can claim to be an inspiration to their generation as Edwards can. T

How do you describe your artistic practice to strangers? When people ask, I always tell them that I’m a house painter – because I’m inevitably covered in paint. It’s trickier when someone probes a little further. I’m a painter-sculptor. I’m the son

It was in the mild, northern winter of 1981 that I first met Debra Porch at San Diego State University. I’d arrived in January to teach the spring semester in the enamel studio of the university’s art department. Debra had completed her Master of Art

Michael Candy’s studio is only a short drive from the unapologetic hedonism of the Gold Coast’s pleasure strip of surf and sunshine. However, it could be another world. An unremarkable warehouse, it sits in a street of such warehouses, smash repair s

The art of Simon Fieldhouse celebrates structure and form through representations of buildings, monuments and cityscapes rooted in both historical and cultural significance. His appreciation for detail and design has recently extended to the explorat

When Robert Hughes delivered his jeremaiad, Art and Money, in 1984, it seemed as if the earth would surely open up and swallow the greedy dealers, the opportunistic artists, the vulgar, nouveau riche collectors who had wrought such pestilence upon th

Natural disasters and war have always threatened human existence. When these crises occur, the loss of human life is the greatest of all the tragic consequences. It is, however, not the only tragedy. The loss of cultural heritage, tangible history, a

We meet in McLean Edwards’ studio in Chippendale. I catch the lift to the top floor of a large warehouse building, now converted to expensive apartments. He tells me it used to be full of artists but he is the last one remaining. Off a silent, grey-c

Stefan Dunlop’s artworks enigmatically turn the elements of visual design on their head. Compositions of collage fragment and tend toward abstraction. Illusionistic space collides with the flat surface of the canvas. Figures and objects appear to pro

As we walk into the up-cycled meatworks where Richard Goodwin lives, the first impression is of a cabinet of curiosities splayed horizontal. On one table stands an intricate balsa wood model for a newly commissioned house, its elliptical roofs nestle

When I arrive at Geoff Dyer’s Hobart studio to discuss his upcoming exhibition of portraits at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), there’s not a single portrait in sight. Instead, amongst the mountains of bent paint tubes, there are dozens o

Nyapanyapa Yunupingu (born c.1945) has been compared with Aboriginal artists Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910-1996) and Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori (c.1924-2015). Given a late start as a painter, her work appears to move seamlessly between wha

Frost gives his paintings a kind of autonomy; they want to be or become things that are partially obscure to him. For instance, he says of one of the first that he brings forward, ‘It’s a funny painting that one. It’s almost a bit darker than it want

How do you start a work? I interact with an object in a physical, curious way, much like little children do. Children don’t have any preconceived ideas about what the object is expected to be, does or means, they just play with it. So that’s my start

The pioneering modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe reflected on New Mexico at the end of her painting career, ‘As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly. It’s something that’s in the

Based in Dunedin, New Zealand painter Kushana Bush has long drawn aesthetic influence from disparate times and cultures. Her rich visual vocabulary is dense with references to the artists whose work is, for her, worthy of worship. Bush has been paint

After an initial period as a cadet newspaper photojournalist, Everton studied photography at RMIT where she realised she was a maker rather than a documenter. Based in Melbourne, many of her series have been created in domestic spaces, some semi-dere

McCarthy is an Italian/Barkindji woman who is a descendant of The Stolen Generations. Her work documents her family’s displacement and Aboriginal Australians’ loss of culture and their ‘hidden’ history. In Richard Flanagan’s 1994, award-winning novel