Artist Profile

Artist Profile is a leading quarterly journal taking its readers into the studios and minds of contemporary artists across Australasia and beyond. Industry professionals engage leading practitioners and emerging talent in conversations about their art, in their own words, while our exclusive photo shoots provide intimate access into artists’ personal and working lives. Readers gain knowledge of artists’ methods, preview works in progress and discover the life experiences that ignite artistic imaginations.

CONTRIBUTORS

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

Can’t be found tracing lost tapestries in the public domain • In Australia, artist Diana Wood Conroy sets the record straight on her lost tapestries made for public buildings in the 1970-1980s.

ADRIANA MĀHANGA LEAR • Adriana Māhanga Lear is a Wollongong-born and based artist of Tongan descent, with ancestral ties to Tu'anuku, Vava'u and Vaipoa, Niuatoputapu. She works across photography, video, sculpture, installation, and sound. She’s also a musician, composer / producer, and researcher.

THE SHAPES OF MEANING RON ROBERTSON-SWANN

CATHERINE MURPHY BORN TO DEPICT • Spring had just arrived in upstate New York and the country roads looked cinematically charming. “Like a movie” I thought for the umpteenth time as we wound north through constant dapple towards Poughkeepsie. Clapboard houses with barns and pickup trucks sat back among spruce trees. It’s odd arriving where you’ve never been and finding it all so familiar.

KINSHIP AND INVENTION YURIYAL BRIDGEMAN • Yuriyal Eric Bridgeman’s recent paintings appear elegantly reduced, pared down to their primary forms. Passages of geometrically arranged planes of bright, flat colour play with a bold and lively opticality for their audience. These compositional elements are often shaped around or interspersed with a dominant motif, evoking a perennial interest in the natural world—plants and animals, the land and the sky—or the occasional contemporary archetype, like the tradie.

EVA ROTHCHILD LIMITS AND LIBERATION • Eva Rothschild’s studio is a world of planning and play, technique and experiment, limits and liberation.

Dylan Sarra Embers of Heritage

Sara Maher and the expression of light • Following a chance encounter with mysterious film negatives on her studio floor, Sarah Maher’s home studio has become an active participant in the development of her work, acting as both inspiration and production tool. For the artist, the negatives “called to be listened to and followed as an offering of unknown generative potential.”

The Untimeliness of Robert Eadie • Robert Eadie was a significant artist during the 1970s and 80s, whose work was regularly included in major exhibitions and museum shows. After a major stroke at fortyseven, he was forced to reconsider his practice, creating an internal world that was more insular and reflective. However, at eighty-two, he returned to the stage, with an impressive survey exhibition of his work, Strange Light at the Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf in Sydney.

Why? —after Bob Flanagan and Sophie Cassar

Up in the air and down on the ground Rosemary Laing, 1958-2024 • Rosemary Laing’s work sits at the nexus of contemporary Australian identity. Contested land and custodianship of place inform her epic and disturbing images and objects. Highly constructed and performed, her imaginary terrains strive to reconcile elements of beauty and wonder with our impulse to destroy and disregard the natural world.

30 Years of Arthouse • While a lot of things have changed since the initial idea for Arthouse emerged in a terrace house in Paddington, Sydney, in 1993, what hasn’t changed is director Ali Yeldham’s desire to create an inclusive and welcoming...