Artist Profile

Artist Profile is a fresh, imaginative magazine recording the personalities of leading artists and rising art stars that fill the visual arts and inspire a new generation of art lover. The magazine features intimate studio portraits, artists' working environments, leading opinion writers, previews of major public gallery exhibitions, feature articles on international artists and events, book reviews and more.

Artist Profile

EDITOR’S NOTE • Artist Profile acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we work.

Where for Art Though — Searching for Arts Excellence in Australia’s 2023 Cultural Policy • Revive: Australia’s Cultural Policy for the next five years 2023 builds on the Gillard Government’s Creative Australia: National Cultural Policy 2013 and Keating’s Creative Nation: Commonwealth Cultural Policy 1994, shifting arts policy further from the prime ideals of arts excellence and its focus on support for professional artists and arts institutions articulated by Gough Whitlam.

FOR REAL • You know when someone asks, “are you for real?” and you say, “yes” but what you really mean is, “I think so?” and in that moment you realise you actually have no idea how to reply because the question they've really asked confronts an even bigger question: what even is real, and you simply don't know? Ask Sara Birns.

Michael Schlitz • Michael Schlitz’s upcoming exhibition of woodblock prints, Folkscape, draws its name from the stories and landscapes that inspire the artist, featuring dream-like and highly patterned images where the line between figure and landscape is indistinct. The Tasmanian printmaker’s work is subversively humorous and occasionally dark, but always working in harmony with the material.

BRENT HARRIS THE DARK FIELD • Brent Harris meets me in the narrow, cobbled, Collingwood laneway known as Glasshouse Road. I am about to spend two hours criss-crossing artistic boundaries from the early Renaissance to the flawed, eccentric geniuses of Franz West, and Martin Kippenberger. Underneath this lies not just the darkness, and light of Colin McCahon, but personal family trauma worked through over the decades in series-specific painterly projects.

SLOW MOVEMENTS • Lyndal Jones creates multi-layered artworks that focus on social context and empowerment. Her long-term projects are deeply reflective and evolve over multiple iterations. Her practice has consistently responded to the urgent issues of the day by connecting individual subjectivity to systemic, political, and cultural concerns: feminism, climate change, and place.

A Potted History of Renee So • Renee So doesn’t so much speak truth to power as outsmart it. Recent works shown at the De La Warr Pavilion, the Henry Moore Institute, and Cample Line are drawn together into her current survey exhibition, forming an intricate and idiosyncratic field of signs, symbols, and subversions.

TREVOR VICKERS • I consider all my life I’m an abstract painter … a painterly painter.

IT’S PERSONAL • “I think in my practice I mainly work with atmosphere,” John Meade tells me when I visit his Melbourne studio.

MICHELLE CAWTHORN • Two years ago, Sydney artist Michelle Cawthorn hit a debilitating brick wall. For the first time in decades she had no desire to make art and no desire to teach it, talk about it or live with it. Artist’s block had crippled her. Today, as she prepares for her fourteenth solo-show Cawthorn’s work reveals a grounded strength, her unique visual language a testament to persistence and focused talent.

The stories we tell ourselves • Erin Mison is a textile artist influenced by her academic work in psychology. With tufting gun in hand, Mison makes work that encourages reflection on the stories and myths that shape our lives, rewriting details in her...