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

CONTRIBUTORS

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

A stay of execution?

GEORGIA LUCY A BEAUTIFUL MESS • Georgia Lucy embraces an aesthetics of risk in her life. In 2023 she took up Australian Football League (AFL) for the inaugural season of the Dodges Ferry Lady Sharks, making the grand final but breaking her collarbone and three ribs along the way, and finished the year with her solo exhibition at Contemporary Art Tasmania.

Ann Thomson ABSTRACT PAINTER

TELLY TUITA GREAT EXPECTATIONS • Telly Tuita’s artistic practice enmeshes the slipperiness of memory with rich pop cultural materiality. His colourful mixed media artworks act as biographical assemblages, layered with personal experiences of early life in Tonga and the western world in which he now exists.

NADINE CHRISTENSEN IN PURSUIT OF THE LESS-FAILED PAINTING • I’ve just arrived at Nadine Christensen’s twocar garage garden studio in the Melbourne suburb of Reservoir. Once inside, she pulls the roller-door shut to keep out the neighbour’s two dogs. They’ve been barking loudly, and trying to gain entry. I make a lame joke about Quentin Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs, but suspect she’s heard variations on this before. Most of her work is currently occupying both floors of Buxton Contemporary, a huge space to fill. Christensen and curator Samantha Comte have worked hand-in-glove to bring this significant exhibition together. Titled Around it’s accompanied by a superb catalogue that includes a curator’s essay, and others by Rosemary Forde, Jennifer Higgie, and a poem about her work practices by Masato Takasaka and Errol John Kidd, commissioned in 2009 by Uplands Gallery.

Henry Jock Walker • Inspired by surf and sea, Henry Jock Walker brings the materials and hues of the ocean into his exuberant paintings, performances, and sculptures created from neoprene wetsuits and other recycled materials. Continuously collaborating, experimenting, and working with artists and community, Walker’s vibrant approach to life and work is infectious and compelling.

DANAE STRATOU MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE • Deep listening to the land is central to Danae Stratou’s artistic practice. She listens beyond seeing, listening to that which is unspoken. Listening and feeling for signs that connect her intimately with the environment, to understand what resonates beneath her feet, as if communing with the land. It is this deep listening which connects her most recent land-based work Water Traces-making the invisible visible, 2023, to her first major collaborative work Desert Breath, 1997.

Chris Dyson a no theory vibe • With a practice spanning decades, Chris Dyson has remained something of an outsider to the Australian art scene. Refusing to conform to the dominant artistic modes of contemporary art, Dyson has instead been driven by a deep necessity, or urge to explore artmaking as a kind of state or “place you go to.” His works across painting, drawing, and sculpture combine figuration and abstraction to produce a surreal and unsettling vernacular style that belies categorisation.

LEAH FRASER THE SUBCONSCIOUS • Sandalwood incense burns low and slow as painter and ceramist Leah Fraser and I sit on the floor of the attic studio in her Bronte, NSW, home. Splatters of paint and empty tubes adorn the walls and floors, the space brimming...