Sullivan+Strumpf acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and community.
We pay our respects to the people, cultures and elders past, present and emerging.
Sam Leach, Landscape with relaxing beast, 2025, oil on board, 40 × 30 cm
In an era defined by constant acceleration and digital noise, the pursuit of authenticity and reflection has never been more vital. Through the lens of the artists featured in this issue, we explore moments of stillness amid the momentum. Across diverse practices, both time-honoured and experimental, we see a renewed commitment to sincerity and a search for meaning. In these pages, we invite you to pause, to reconnect with the self and the world around us.
In the galleries, Gemma Smith’s If then else contemplates the space between intentionality and inevitability, furthering the artist's innovative exploration of gesture, process and colour; Sam Leach presents Leisure Herd, a continuation of his pioneering research into AI and machine learning technologies, applied here to non-human animals executed at ease in the artist’s classical technique; In The Silence of the Elemental, Lindy Lee dissolves the boundaries of self and matter, listening for the hidden breath of the universe expressed through rain and fire; Joanna Lamb’s new paintings drift between abstraction and recognition, where the familiar suburban dreamscape becomes a meditation on distance, surface, and longing; Michael Do brings us closer to the poetics, desire lines and imprints of memory in Tim Silver’s take me home; Sam Cranstoun’s To Move Not Under The Stars But Through Them contemplates human awe and technological trespass, drawn across a sky of satellite trails; Marrnyula Munuŋgurr’s Djapu maps the living currents of ancestral memory and the unseen architectures of Yolŋu life, where each line is a river, a net, a connection between land and soul; and Mangala Bai Maravi’s practice reimagines the sacred language of Godna, where each mark becomes a vessel of healing, memory, and ancestry.
We also invite art consultant Georgie Bruce to reflect on her work and the arts landscape for collectors, artists and galleries alike.
As you move through these pages, we hope you find moments of stillness, connection, and inspiration that stay with you long after.
Happy reading,
MY FIRST WEEK AT SULLIVAN+STRUMPF coincided with the gallery’s 20th anniversary, Gregory Hodge’s exhibition was freshly hung, and the stockroom was packed with works ready to be sent to Art Basel Hong Kong. It was the perfect, busy introduction to life at the gallery.
As we move into the colder months, Melbourne welcomes Lindy Lee, whose exploration of the elements continues as she serves as a conduit to nature’s phenomena. The Silence of the Elemental delves into the inextricable relationship between nature’s forces, the world, and the artist herself.
In June, the Sydney gallery presents new works by Tim Silver and Sam Cranstoun. Through fragmented forms, Silver’s take me home engages with the historical body as contemporary relics, emphasising the body as a collection of incomplete or partial perceptions. Downstairs, Cranstoun’s exhibition unveils a new series of paintings drawn from an archive of open-source images, reflecting on individual and collective understandings of the world we inhabit.
The works I’ve selected for this quick curate reflect on the relationship between natural forms and the manmade.
Kirsten Coelho, Employ, 2022, porcelain, matt glaze, iron oxide, saturated iron glaze, 25 × 44 × 23 cm
Marion Abraham, Your boy #1, 2023, oil on board, 50 × 50 cm
Ramesh
Nithiyendran, Mask II, 2025, earthenware and glaze, 52 × 41 × 14 cm
Seth Birchalll, Nocturn View, 2025, oil on canvas, 30 × 36 cm
Sam Cranstoun, Look Out! (series) , 2023, watercolour on paper, 29.7 × 42 cm
Tony Albert, Ashtralia Collage #26, 2016, Photographic print on dibond with hand embellishment, 35 × 35 cm
cast patinated bronze, 30 × 19.5 × 16 cm
Words Sophie Rose
Portrait by Anna Kucera
AT FIRST GLANCE, SMITH’S PAINTINGS SEEM EFFORTLESS:
quick washes of translucent colour that swipe over and through each other in what may appear like spontaneous gestures. In reality, they are formed through methodical accumulations of colour, stratified surfaces that index marks made over many weeks, months and even years. There is an obsessive calculation behind the paintings’ plums, corals, raspberry reds, forest greens and ambers, with careful punctuations of hot pink or acid green. Smith is, of course, a dedicated student of colour. (During a residency at Bundanon, she precisely colour matched the tones of her natural environment, now documented in a small book of colour swatches filled with variations of moss green and eucalyptus grey). Sometimes, these colours rest on the canvas in gradual superimpositions; elsewhere, the paint bundles in defined forms that inch towards each other, like a patchwork hovering into formation.
Each painting is the product of many hours of contemplation, removal, and starting-over. Often Smith will return to a supposedly ‘failed painting months later, rediscovering it with fresh eyes as a kind of found object, offering a new pictorial ground for further layers. This follows a strange experience shared by many artists, wherein a past artwork that was once so closely observed — so loved, hated and fussed over — suddenly reappears as an alien object. The difference is that Smith leans into this unsettling yet liberating moment. Indeed, there are works in this exhibition that were once considered failures; many more did not make the cut and will perhaps catch her attention in the future.
Smith never wants the painting process to become easy. Easy is boring, for both her and for the viewer. Throughout her career, her daily studio practice has come with restrictions. These began in the early 2000s by following thought experiments—drawing a continuous black line across canvas until the marker runs out — then shifted to ‘adaptable’ geometric sculptures made in plywood that could be folded and reconfigured in various combinations. (1) Her later ‘shadow’ paintings follow a game in which she first applies a free-form translucent underpainting, then works over it with flat, opaque colour, creating a top layer of ribbons that almost (but not completely) obfuscates the original gestures. Occasionally, two continuous gestures from the underpainting are made opaque, so that two threads of solid colour tightly coil together on a
single plane. The shadow paintings can also operate in reverse, through a process of blocking out the space between the original looping marks. In both processes, Smith looks carefully at the gestural ground and finds the seeds for new shapes — the edges of gestures, whole brush strokes — which she then crystalises in flat colour.
Her current method begins with a stretched canvas or board resting flat on the floor. Leaning precariously over the blank plane, she pours a pigmentless binder over the surface and then gradually adds in pigmented paint, resisting the urge to step back and observe the picture. She stays close to the painting’s surface so as to not really know what is going on. It’s only when the canvas is fully pigmented that she allows herself to see the resulting composition. This sheer, semi-automatic painting becomes a starting scaffold that Smith then grapples with — building it, tuning it, fixing it — and the process is most satisfying for her when she has to transform a foundation she doesn’t like. The artist recently adapted this process to large scale canvases of four-by-three meters. Here, the dimensions of the artist’s body add another restriction, as the arm can only stretch so far, dictating the radius of interlocking circles of colour. Unlike the smaller works, their scale prohibits her from rotating the canvas to uncover new entry points into the composition.
Gemma Smith, Mirror takes (detail), 2025, acrylic on linen, 180 × 180 cm
EXHIBITION DATES
08 May — 31 May 25
Gemma Smith: If then else Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney
Gemma Smith, Compression dissolve, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 280 × 420 cm. Installation view, The Intelligence of Painting, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2025. Photography by Hamish McIntosh.
Gemma Smith, Plot optics, 2024, acrylic on board, 53 × 45 cm
Above and below: Gemma Smith, Shadow Paintings, 2025, acrylic on canvas, each 280 × 380 cm. Installation view, Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong 2025. Photography by Phillip Huynh.
In the artist’s words, things become stuck when she is too ‘bossy’ over the painting. Loosening her authorial grip allows unexpected accidents to shape the work. Smith is often discussed in terms of late-modernist precedents, particularly Australian minimalists John Nixon and Robert Hunter. (2) Yet, while the final form of her works might resemble a modernist lineage, her process echoes another art history. Smith joins a long line of artists who played games with and against themselves. Most obviously, her semi-automatic play with the underpainting harks back to the automatic writing and drawing processes of the Surrealists, in which the artist attempts to suppress the compositional impulse as much as possible, allowing a subconscious flow of images onto the canvas or the page. Or we might think back to Georges Perec, the French novelist of the Oulipo Group who worked under highly restricted writing techniques, such as authoring A Void (1969), a novel entirely without the letter ‘e’ (a feat in any European language, but particularly French). Robert Rauschenberg’s famous Erased De Kooning (1953) — which is exactly as it sounds, a rubbed-out graphite drawing by the older nonobjective artist Willem de Kooning — is not so different from Smith’s self-obliterations in the tangle and shadow paintings. Interestingly, many of Smith’s personal influences are literary. Writers writing about writing is a genre of particular fondness. In her studio, sits a well-loved copy of Lydia Davis’ Essays One, where among other things the American short story writer describes her practice of jotting down just one sentence, immediately as it comes to mind, and then reworking it many times over. (3) For Davis, the joy of writing is the pleasure of revision and repair, of sharpening one’s thoughts by improving their written form. Smith also collects George Saunders’ various writings and lectures. She sent me one of her favoured Saunders quotes in preparation for this essay: ‘Dear Story. I want to serve you. I don’t want to overpower you. I will accept whatever you tell me you want to do.’ (4) Or, as Smith might say, ‘I don’t want to get too bossy’. For both Saunders and Smith, art begins in the moment just before the artist is aware of what they are trying to do, before the burden of rational articulation gets in the way. This manifests in that uncertain stage when Smith adds the first stains of pigment onto the canvas or the revelatory point when a ‘failure’ suddenly gains potential.
What does the viewer see of these studio tactics? The answer may well be, not much. However, each person who stands in front of Smith’s paintings enters another, mental game of unpicking its fine layers and tracing the wide brushstrokes that melt into one another. The viewer also confronts how colour works on the eye, the shifts and wobbles that different colour combinations make to our depth perception. Slowly, they may learn to read Smith’s layers of careful revision, working back into the painting’s past.
1. Gemma Smith, conversation with the author, 32 October 2024
2. Julie Ewington, ‘Painting, Pleasure, Perversity’, in Gemma Smith: Found Ground (Formit: 2018), 6
3. Lydia Davis, ‘Revising One Sentence’, in Essays One (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 169 — 176
4. George Saunders, quoted in artist’s notes
... Each person who stands in front of Smith’s paintings enters another mental game of unpicking its fine layers and tracing the wide brushstrokes that melt into one another.
Gemma Smith, Figuring, 2025, acrylic on linen, 180 × 180 cm
Gemma Smith, Days, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 280 × 380 cm
SAM LEACH INVITES US INTO new ways of seeing with his exhibition Leisure Herd at Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney. His work, situated at the intersections of art history, science, and philosophy, challenges traditional perspectives and encourages viewers to engage with new ideas of observation and perception.
While he shuns being the AI darling of the art world, his works ask us not only to think about the gaze but also prompts us to reflect on the broader implications of AI and technology on our visual experiences.
Text by Mardi Nowak
Photography by Phillip Huynh
Sam Leach's latest exhibition invites us to reconsider how we look at and think about art in the context of our AI-driven world. The inclusion of farm animals like cows and pigs, alongside his signature beautiful birds, creates a dialogue about observation and perception. It challenges us to question who is looking at whom and how our roles as art viewers are changing. The concept of the gaze is evolving with the influence of AI; blurring the lines between human and machine it encourages discussions about authorship and how we experience art. In this new series, Leach also seems to nod to animal welfare, presenting farm animal subjects in elevated settings. As these subjects gaze out from the canvas, Leach prompts us to recall historical paintings of noble cows and horses, while simultaneously bringing his subjects into the contemporary world. He stages his models in settings that are reminiscent of cutting-edge architecture or a luxury shopping experience with their plumped cushions and stepped platforms directing our gaze purely onto them like an expensive handbag.
The title Leisure Herd carries a playful, tongue-in-cheek tone that may be cleverly critiquing the art world. It suggests to me images of art collectors and art fairgoers, much like a herd of animals, moving from one exhibition to another, driven by the allure of art. The title also adds a layer of irony, as it juxtaposes the leisurely, often passive act of art viewing with the active and hardworking farm animal subjects.
Leisure Herd not only explores the concept of the gaze but also gets us to think about the broader implications of AI on our perception and appreciation of art. While some will think the future of art is grim in an increasingly digital world, I would suggest that it is now when we need to experience art in person more than ever.
In the new world of AI, our ways of looking and thinking are constantly being reshaped. AI-generated images and content flood our screens, often leading to a more superficial engagement with visuals. We might skim over details, such as an extra finger in an AI-generated image, without fully registering the error.
This constant exposure can dull our senses, making it harder to be surprised or delighted by new visual experiences. However, art offers a sanctuary from this relentless visual bombardment. It invites us to slow down and engage in what can be thought of as ‘Leisure Looking.’ This deliberate and mindful observation allows us to appreciate the nuances and intricacies of a work, retraining our brains to find joy and awe in the details.
While his work grapples with all of the conundrums AI and technology offers, he also provides us with beauty, delight and a wonderful sense of curiosity. A studio visit with Leach recently had me gasp out loud at the intensity of colour in the pink cushions that a series of pigs were lounging on along with the beautiful bright coloured wings of the birds stacked like a totem. This reaction would not have been as physical or intense if viewed on a screen. The connection between myself as the viewer and the gaze of the animals portrayed in the painting, becomes something else, something unexplainable and mystical.
In the studio Leach and I joke about him being known as ‘The AI artist/painter’ but it is his skill at rendering these beautiful images that provides viewers with something that they can’t get anywhere else — that
good old art magic. While Leach and I joke about how to ‘automise’ the process of art making, we also contemplate what life may be like in this new world of efficiencies and machine-made errors. We agree that there is something that machines can’t do. Something that is so intrinsic to the art-making process and why Leach’s paintings are so in demand — the notion of skill and the hand made. While Leach may look to AI to assist with ideation and image making, it is the interpretation and handling of paint on canvas that is what makes these works so alluring.
There is a sense of joy from Leach’s own version of ‘leisure looking’ as he contemplates the world and translates images onto the canvas. His works reminds us of the importance of human creativity and the unique perspectives that artists bring to their work. There is something incredibly special about moments of awe and their impact on our physical and emotional wellbeing. “Experiencing awe produces a multitude of positive effects. It makes us calmer, kinder, more creative… It reins in the ego and makes us feel more connected to the earth and to other creatures”. (1) Leach brings us a sense of awe and curiosity with thislatest exhibition. His intriguingcompositions, sense of colour and skill with paint are a few of the reasons why viewers love his work. Seeing his paintings in person evokes a sense of awe that a screen can never replicate. In these moments, we are reminded that art is not just to be understood but to be felt — an experience that invites us to take part in the Leisure Herd.
2023
Mardi Nowak has been a curator for over 25 years and is currently the Head of Visual Arts at RACV, overseeing their art collection and exhibitions.
1. Ebon Harrell, The Power of Everyday Awe, Harvard Business Review Jan/Feb
Sam Leach, Landscape with plane, 2025, oil on board, 40 × 30 cm
Sam Leach, Finches with robotic arm, 2025, oil on board, 40 × 30 cm
Sam Leach in his studio.
Sam Leach's
Sam Leach, Landscape with meteor strike, 2024, oil on board, 40 × 30 cm
The Silence of the Elemental Lindy Lee
Interviewed by Amber Wright at Lindy’s studio in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, Bundjalung Country.
Portrait by Amber Wright
Artwork photography by Aaron Anderson
Lindy Lee, Below the Earth, 2024, mirror polished stainless steel, 80 × 20 cm
AW: Your solo exhibition with Sullivan + Strumpf this year is titled The Silence of the Elemental. When I first reflected on this, a quote from Clarice Lispector came to mind: "The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.” Could you tell me more about this silence you are speaking of?
LL: One of my first shows was called The Silence of Painters. Silence is an important quality, but it’s not what many people think. I remember a colleague of mine asking, “What are you talking about? How can painting be silent?” His work was loud, bombastic, all about everything. There’s certainly art like that, where it’s all noise.
But let me go back to something personal. When I went to China to try calligraphy — which I failed miserably, and I’m proud of that, as it was important to fail, to understand that it wasn’t my tradition — however, my first teacher showed me two kinds of strokes: the bad stroke, which is all over the place, and the good stroke, which is always itself, even when it’s splattered. The good stroke is silent — it doesn’t need to say anything. It just is. That’s Zen.
In Zen meditation, one strives for the clarity of just this moment. My favourite meditation here is listening to birds. If you can hear that bird call with absolute clarity — without your mind jumping in to question whether it’s a crow or a pigeon — that’s silence. We’re habitually in the second order of experience, the verbal one. We’ve already judged or categorised things before truly experiencing them. This silence isn’t a vacuum — it’s the silence in our hearts and minds that allows us to receive the world as it is, without predetermining it. And in that, there’s freedom from suffering and unhappiness. For me, it’s a state where my spirit becomes vast and one with everything. In that split second, all the pores of my being open up, and a different kind of creativity flows from that.
With The Silence of the Elemental, I’ve been working with the elements for the last decade, and it’s becoming stronger. I wanted to name it this because I’m really trying to listen to the vast history each element brings, and how each has contributed to making us who we are.
AW: There are several of your large fire and rain drawings in this show. The paper is perforated with fire and covered in ink, then placed out in the rain. It seems to me that in some way you are putting yourself at the same level as the process and letting the process exist by itself, how do you see this?
LL: Okay, ostensibly, my name is Lindy Lee, artist. But if we really unpack that, I’m just a conduit for the workings of the universe. I know that sounds grand, but I’m just a conduit. I’m of a particular temperament, one that needs to understand the nature of existence in a certain way — and my way happens to be through a sense of connection with all other life.
It’s also a wonderful thing to give up all the tenses of authority and just say, “The rain did it.” And she did. Sure, I may burn holes and stuff, but ultimately, I can’t tell you the tonality of what will happen after so much rain falls on that paper. And that’s what I love. I love the fact that I can’t control it. I’ve relinquished control to a greater authority than me — I don’t mean to God, but to the forces of existence.
With these rain drawings and fire events in the work, I’m acknowledging something much greater than our little egos. We humans love making stories — don’t get me wrong, I love a good story. But the connection I’m speaking of is so much more profound than anything you can conjure in your own head. I know that nothing that I am can exist, except that everything else exists simultaneously. And that’s what this work is about — the acknowledgment that all must come together for this moment called Amber, or Lindy, or my pup Mabel, or even that plant to come into being. That interconnectedness is the sacred thing of the universe. And it’s the thing we can’t escape, even though we carve it up and try to call it different religions, gods, or spiritual practices. But honestly, those containers only tell about 4% of the story. I’m the girl who loves the dark mystery of actually not knowing, of not being able to fathom how incredible this whole thing is. Because it’s a miracle, really. And I prefer it that way.
AW: Acknowledging interconnection in an intergenerational sense, you’ve invited two younger artists to exhibit with you alongside your solo show. What inspired this?
LL: A couple of years ago in London, I saw Yinka Shonibare’s solo show where he invited emerging African-British artists to exhibit alongside him. It was such a great idea, and Joanna Strumpf and I thought, why not do the same? Since I’ve spent nearly my entire career teaching younger artists, it felt natural. Recently I’d been mentoring Angie Pai and Jingwei Bu so I invited them. They’re both Asian Australians — Jingwei is from mainland China, and Angie
is from Taiwan. We share a cultural sensitivity and a connection through Buddhism and Taoism. They are deeply immersed in their spiritual and cultural practices, or familial contexts, which adds another layer to the shared sensibility between us.
AW: Édourard Glissant, a great theoriser of relation, says “Teach, in other words: learn with.” Last year, during the unveiling of Ouroboros, your major public artwork at the National Gallery of Australia, you said that after more than 40 years of practice, you felt you had finally finished your apprenticeship and were ready to begin. What is it that you have learnt?
LL: (laughs) I have to laugh at myself. When I was 19, I thought by 23 I’d have everything figured out. Well, I was wrong. But that’s the gift of life — the privilege to be conscious and reflect on it. As humans, we all internalise our experiences, but as artists, we let that alchemical thing happen. We let what’s deeply personal have an interaction in our heart, our gut, and transform it into something that speaks to the human experience.
When I said, “Now I’m ready to start,” after all those years, it wasn’t just about learning skills. Or not just the technical ones — it’s about learning the skill of listening to the questions in your heart, the ones that truly drive your life as an artist. Those are the questions that matter. If you don’t listen to them, if you don’t address them, you have no meaning to your life. That’s how important these questions are to an artist.
It really, really hurt me to be honest — life, you know, it hurts sometimes. It causes wounds and problems, and we have to address them. That’s part of the process. The artist’s job is really a special one because we’re constantly engaging with the world through our own experiences, but it takes a long time to learn how to listen to what your life is telling you and understand how your life fits into the greater expanse of what existence is also. We’re tiny little ants in the face of all this hugeness, but even our tininess means something. The privilege of being an artist is that it’s your job to review your existence, review what life is. And you can only do that through encountering life over time.
After more than 40 years of fairly diligently not knowing what I’m doing, in the best way possible, I’ve finally come
to realise there’s an enormous amount I wish to say about the value of being human. It takes a long time to gather those questions and lean into them, to address them with as much openness and heart as you can.
AW: That makes me think — there’s something about living with questions that seems to be shared by all artists. Where do you think artists come from?
LL: I’m sure you know Rilke’s response to the young poet in Letters to a Young Poet. He says, “Learn to love the question.” It’s not about the answer; we have to love the question. I remember reading that when I was a young artist and thinking, “Yeah, way to go.”
As for your question, where do artists come from? — It comes from the moment when your heart is broken. And I’m not talking about romance — it’s that moment when you’re a child and you realise you’re different and you long to be the same, but you also want to be different. That’s the human dilemma. But for an artist, that tearing—that’s the gift. In my case, it was race. I realised my Chinese face didn’t belong in a very white school. Everyone goes through some version of this, whether it’s about race, sexuality, a so-called disability, or something else. Your difference becomes both your weak spot and your point of strength, depending on how you look at it.
Being an artist is about receiving that wound and being willing to look at it. At first, you do it because you have to, but eventually, you realise it’s a wound that the whole world carries with you. And it’s a wondrous thing to be able to share that wound through art, to make healing possible — whether by suturing it, soothing it, or simply allowing it to be seen. In doing so, we share something deeply human: our pains and our sorrows. Art is the vehicle to interrogate that hurt — the hurt that doesn’t make sense.
EXHIBITION DATES
15 May — 14 Jun 25
Lindy Lee: The Silence of the Elemental Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne
Lindy Lee, Depths of Quintessence, 2024, Chinese ink, fire and rain on archival paper, 200 × 140 cm
Lindy Lee, Veil of Transience, 2025, fire, steel, 148 cm diameter
AW: The wound as the site of artistic potential, leads me to the technique of perforation that recurs in your work, including most of the works in this show. There is something that happens when the perforations become so dense that almost nothing is left. It seems like you're honing the articulation of nothing or emptiness in order to allow the articulation of everything. Does this resonate with you?
LL: Yes, the perforations are an absolute expression of this Zen Buddhist idea — form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. By emptiness, I don’t mean a void, not a hollowness. A better way to describe it is impermanence. Things shift from moment to moment. Though we might feel as if substantially we’re the same person we were two hours ago, we’re not. And we’re certainly not substantially the same person we were ten or twenty or fifty years ago.
So emptiness is really about impermanence — about change. I love the idea of imbuing a solid object with a sense of impermanence and change and evanescence. Take my work Life of Stars, for example. I love that it sways between solidity and stardust, shifting from something solid to something disintegrating. That, to me, is the poetry of life: one form changes, disintegrates, in order to transform into something else.
Even my own transformation, from a 15-year-old Lindy Lee to who I am now in my 70s, I don't know what that is except that’s impermanence. It’s emptiness. And the forms that are within emptiness are arising if that makes sense — that’s what fascinates me.
I love the contradiction of using formal shapes, like ovoids, and making them feel like they’re dissolving. To me, that captures the essence of how our lives change, evolve, and are luminous in every moment.
AW: How has the art world received the changes in your practice over the years, particularly the evolution from working with identity towards a more spiritual, cosmological expression?
LL: Yeah, it’s always interesting when an artist changes tack, but honestly, I don’t think I’ve changed tack as such. I’ve just followed what’s been necessary. People are funny. There was a time when I was doing a lot of photocopy work, and someone would always ask, “Why doesn’t she do something else?” Well, I can’t. There’s a trajectory, a question I’m following, and it’s through the materiality that I find the question, let alone crystallise the meaning of it. People want you to change, but they also want you to stay the same. You can never win.
So my advice to young artists is, you’re never going to win the battle of whether or not to go this way or that according to your public. The only battle worth fighting is listening to your heart, to what it needs addressed.
Every time I made a transition in my work, it was because a deeper existential question had arisen. I’ve done the earlier work, and now the next question is here. You can only get to that by working through your hands, body, heart and mind—bringing all of them together. When you do that, the deepest questions are allowed to arise, and the miracle is that it always goes deeper than you thought.
Lindy Lee, Well, Up and Out (detail), 2017, flung bronze, 120 cm diamater
looked over, overlooked
Words Barbara Bolt
The paintings of Joanna Lamb
Photography by Nicholas White
I arrive at Joanna Lamb’s studio on a hot Perth summer’s day. ‘Are you OK?’ yells the next-door neighbour as I get out of the car and orientate myself. ‘Yeah, I’m good. I’m just going to see Jo.’ … ‘Ah OK,’ he replies, pure WA style. Here I pause and take in Jo’s place. It is one of her paintings — a house nestled behind a high brick fence, peaked salmon tiled roof peeping out from leafy foliage, fronted by a double garage with a car in the driveway. I am now at home in one of Jo’s paintings.
If you are familiar with Joanna Lamb’s oeuvre, the paintings in this exhibition may at first feel familiar. Urban paintings of the house next door — painted in a cool flat hard-edged manner that we have come to know and appreciate. However, as one sits with them, a sense of the unfamiliar begins to creep in. What is it about these artworks that brings forth a different sensibility from her previous exhibitions? What is this strangeness that I am feeling here and now?
In these paintings we are on the outside looking in, not seeming to be able to find an open gate, an open window or a door ajar to allow us entry. Tall walls become impenetrable planes that we slide along, gates are shut and locked, windows are shuttered or dark and foreboding and even the flowering plants and trees, which give us coolness and delight, hold us at bay.
While we may be standing in front of a painting of a house and garden, we are in a psychological space, a space of Joanna’s making — a meditation on her experience of the contemporary world and its superficiality. It is the psychic space of unhomeliness, of the uncanny.(1) She speaks too of the reception of her artworks in a gallery context — of viewers doing a quick tour of the gallery and leaving without stopping to look: looked over, overlooked. Joanna’s concern is that in our contemporary world all is surface: a façade. We no longer know how to engage. The question raised by these works is: “How do we get beyond that?” Her answer is to slow down. These are slow paintings.
Joanna Lamb was an early adopter of technology using the computer as a tool to create large works in the 1990’s. The “flatness” of the screen the flattening out of the picture plane have become central to the aesthetic of her work, but she maintains that, for her, the computer remains a tool, not an end-in-itself. The works themselves are handmade, and her aim is to disrupt the gloss of the mass of imagery that is constantly in our face and on our devices. Scroll culture!
It's bringing back the skill … reversing that whole mass of imagery so that you see and actually think very long and slowly about an image and how it's put together and, how you are actually making it and spending time … probably as a revolt against … everything fast.(2)
There is something cryptic in Joanna’s words. Who is the “you” that is spending time looking at and making the image, and who has the skill to do so? Roland Barthes’ essay, Death of the Author (1967), tells us that the meaning of a work derives from the reader’s/viewer’s interpretation, rather than the author’s/artist’s intention.(3) In contemporary visual culture we scroll and “read” images instantly, but what is “it” that we are we able to see, let alone experience? This is a house. No! This is “not” a house (Ceci n’est pas un maison), just as Magritte’s painting of a pipe (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), in The Treason of Images (1928-9), is not a pipe! (4)
Joanna Lamb, 7 July 2024, 11:48am in Pink, 2024, acrylic on board, 61 × 46 cm
Joanna Lamb, 4 October 2024, 1:15pm, 2025, acrylic on board, 91 × 122 cm
Joanna Lamb, 21 June 2024, 12:06pm, 2025, acrylic on superfine polyester, 153.5 × 110 cm
It is a very easy thing to “read” a figurative painting for content, but to experience a Joanna Lamb painting requires time and some effort. Her paintings both are, and they are not figurative paintings. Joanna comments that she delights in this duality, the fact that the paintings are first and foremost a combination of abstract shapes, colours and tones, out of which emerges something we recognize as a house and garden. This allows for multiplicity of meaning and a/effects. Thus, a “wall” is not just a wall, but also an abstract shape interacting with other abstract shapes and operating as a psychological barrier. The shower of light and deep pinks of the vincas bring joy as they spray across the canvas, framing the plane of purple-grey that we may read as a “wall”. These are the abstract forces in figuration. The multiplicity of an image in Joanna Lamb’s paintings is both its pleasure and its disturbance, something that may be felt but that is often overlooked and can never just be taken in at a glance.
That leaves us with a question: What do paintings want?
(5) The work of art is to take us on a journey, through the play of planes and light and colour into a space of sensation and thought. There are two small paintings that Joanna points to as a starting point for the development and trajectory of this body of work. They are unusual at once because both are images of a puffed-up nesting pigeon. Joanna Lamb’s urbanscapes very rarely include life of the animal variety and so they create a sense of curiosity. The point of view of the viewer is from inside looking out. The two paintings are identical in their subject matter, composition and dimensions, but the use of colour creates a very different experience, sensation and meaning. One is a study in hues of pinks and chromatic violet greys and, with its warm pinks and violets, presses in on us creating a close, intimate and almost claustrophobic space. Joanna has titled this painting ‘7 July 2024, 11.48 am in Pink’. The other, ‘7 July 2024, 11.48 am with Landscape’, painted in muted earth browns and greys, opens
out onto a garden creating an openness and a sense of deep space. Two paintings: One creating a space of intimacy and one creating a space of breath, openness and possibility. With this modest but touching gesture Joanna acknowledges that ‘while there is always superficiality, that doesn’t mean you can’t love life and find beauty in life.’
Spending the day with Joanna Lamb’s paintings is a privilege and a joy. They offer us the opportunity to daydream and wonder, as our eyes wander across the surfaces, jump across planes of colour, stopping here and there to take satisfaction in the exquisite juxtapositions of colour and plane that make a heart sing … and then, gasp at the audacious conceits that disrupt the illusion of “reality,” so as to tease our eyes and disturb our psyches. Need we be told that THIS is NOT a house, a pigeon, a garden or a fence but rather a joyful and audacious play with the visual language that just happens to sometimes give the illusion of the house across the road. This is the pleasure of these paintings. They are paintings of the mind and the body, or rather the mind-body, to be puzzled over and to be enjoyed but never overlooked.
1. Sigmund Freud talks of the “uncanny” as the sense of unhomeliness (unheimlich), that unsettling feeling that arises when one experiences something familiar yet alien.
See Freud’s essay ‘The “Uncanny”’ https://web.mit.edu/ allanmc/www/freud1.pdf, (1919), accessed 19th March 2025.
2. Interview with Joanne Lamb, 26th February 2025.
3. Barthes, Roland, 1967, ‘Death of the Author’, translated Richard Howe. See https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky /Barthes.pdf, accessed 14 March 2025.
4. See Foucault, Michel, 1983, This is Not a Pipe, Berkely: University of California Press.
5. See Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005, What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Joanna Lamb, 29 June 2024, 1:32am, 2024, acrylic on superfine polyester, 91 × 122 cm
Joanna Lamb, 4 December 2024, 9:47am, 2025, acrylic on superfine polyester, 122 × 91 cm
Joanna Lamb, 2 May 2024. 5:02pm, 2024, acrylic on superfine polyester, 156 × 180 cm
by
gemma
photographed
bec martin
The body — its traces, its absences, its permanencies. These pages echo Tim Silver’s art: his practice of preserving loss, his exploration of queer desire and the rawness of memory.
Text by Micheal Do
Tim Silver, Untitled (whistle in the reeds), 2025, cast concrete (portland cement, mable dust, pigment), stainless steel armiture, 107 × 60 × 60 cm. Photography by Mark Pokorny
A ray of light cut across his face. His cheeks sallow, pained. The joy that was once there had evaporated, leaving behind his whiskers—short, black, uneven.
He lowered his eyes, “I’m sorry.”
His gaze fell further, tracing the ridges of his palms. “I can’t meet you where you are. I just don’t… feel the same.”
The words I needed wouldn’t come.
We all hurt.
bI’ve always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being.
My life hasn’t been a simple chronology. It’s cluttered with things I’ve chosen to forget, moments of turning away.
Spat on, beaten, ostracised, abandoned.
I grew up with the sense that society had already determined my story. It dictated who I would love, what I could desire, and how I was to exist. Without examples, testimonies of queerness to guide me, I buried my desires deep.
Mistaking silence as survival, I carried unnamed feelings. Sometimes, a flush of something surfaced, lingering, but it would always fade, slipping out of reach.
But we are not made to live like this.
My body knew. My joints throbbed, my back tight, my shoulders knotted. I could never relax.
I’ve often wondered if any god, worth her salt, might show up? In all her flesh and blood, would she appear in the midst of my aching life?
b
He sat beside me, our knees gently touching.
“Gimme your hands,” he said, pulling them towards him, turning them over. He traced my palm with his index finger, studying it.
“Hmmm, calloused,” he murmured.
I looked down at them—rough and worn, nothing like his.
He always moved his hands with such intention. They carried a strength, a seduction. With his silky pointed fingers, it seemed as if he could control and revive the world around us.
Even now, his hands still appear in my dreams.
Fingers, all night long.
bThat evening, the sky split open. And in its crack, something I could not name.
I had just poured the wet, velvety batter into the cake tin. The kitchen thick with the magnificent black dampness of chocolate. Outside, the sharp, autumn chill rushed past the window, whistling a reminder that it was there.
Fifteen minutes to myself before anyone arrives. I thought. Great. I studied the wild arrangement of tulips, orange crowns melting into another, a fluid cascade. You did good.
Then, the buzzer.
“Hey! Sorry, we’re early,” an off-screen voice called out. “The Uber got every green light. Let us up. It’s cold.”
He lingered behind, a shadow in the hallway.
Smiling. Pausing. Looking around.
“Oh! Let me introduce you two! You’ve not met, right?”
I wasn’t sure what stirred in me.
I stumbled through the evening, my mind furred with confusion, my body strangely relaxed. I focused on this foreign feeling —its intensity— like a raindrop breaking into a flood.
The guests eventually left, the house finally emptied.
Who was this man?
His presence lingered.
After the theatre, he held me tight in the full moonlight. He kissed my cheek. A silent promise that he’d hold me forever. The smell of his skin, how our bodies dove-tailed.
This memory as vivid as the day he left.
EXHIBITION DATES
05 Jun - 28 Jun 25
Tim Silver: take me home
Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney
We had collapsed into each other’s lives.
Everything before: routines, obligations, the selves we once knew. Now faded, and refashioned around our mutual fascination with one another. Everything after: spent tending to our newly discovered common ground.
In our private stolen space, we cooked we read we watched we listened rigatoni, orecchiette, tagliatelle Baldwin, Hollinghurst, Yanagihara Euphoria, Heartstopper, Drag Race Sivan, Ocean, Gaga.
But this love did not make me gentle. Nor did it make me kind. I grew cruel, jealous.
He was not mine to lay claim. He was someone else’s boyfriend.
b
“Who were you, before we met?”
I thought for a moment, “well, I’ve been passing time. Waiting for lightning to strike.”
The words left my mouth as if they were fact.
As I spoke them, their truth was rendered palpable. Sudden, heavy. Like falling stone.
The busyness, the possessions: it hadn’t been enough.
He had replaced the emptiness within. “Where are you?” he asked, “This mind of yours...”
“When can I see you next?” I replied. Or maybe I only thought I did.
Tim Silver, Untitled (left for tomorrow), 2024, bronze, 76 × 21 × 25 cm. Photography by Aaron Anderson
Desire does not arrive neatly. Experience taught me this. Mystifying, overwhelming, rupturing — it rolls over everything and everyone.
The rest played out how one might expect.
That is to say, we were happy. Until we weren’t.
I learned the meaning of several verbs. And one noun. to wait to want to touch to listen to pull away to lie to break to hope to break (again) Loss.
“This is what it means to be alive,” my therapist told me. But verbs in real life do not take on predetermined shapes. They have no fixed order.
Sometimes it is right to wait, want, touch, listen, lie, hope. Other times, it is wrong. Their sequence is everything.
But life is not neat. It refuses neatness. Verbs, their sequence, right, wrong — none of it prepares you.
Not for loss.
I suppose, this is what it means to be alive.
Tim Silver, Untitled (undertow), 2025, soap, 20 × 69 × 52 cm. Photography by Mark Pokorny
Tim Silver, Untitled (Splitting) #5, 2025, cast cement, marble dust and pigment, 39 × 25 × 24.5 cm. Photography by Aaron Anderson
I took his hands, tracing the softness of his pointed fingers.
"What are you doing?" he asked, his voice careful, soft.
“I’ve always loved your hands…” My gaze moved upwards, catching his eyes. I swallowed, “You know, we’d be happy.”
“Huh?” A pause.
I took the ring off my right index finger and slipped it onto his left hand. “What do you think?”
He hesitated, frowning slightly. “How about forever?”
I searched his face, finding something I didn’t recognise.
He exhaled, slow. “You know,” he said, his voice faraway. His eyes fell further, tracing the ridges of his palms.
“I thought you might do this. But. I’m not ready to let go of my relationship.”
His voice cracked, but only slightly, “I’m sorry. But I can’t meet you where you are. I just don’t… feel the same.”
The words I needed wouldn’t come. Only silence, suspended, thickening, swelling.
It was impossible to move. We just sat there.
He took the ring off.
These are made for him. Imaginings. Cast from our specific history, every emotion.
Lasting in our minds, in these works.
Imagined, forever.
handwritten by John Keats’ on his copy of Paradise Lost:
‘we imagine after it’
SAM CRANSTOUN
To Move Not Under The Stars But Through Them
Words Luke Létourneau
Photography Aaron Anderson
“a distinct line of lights, star sized and star intensity...” These are the words Sam Cranstoun jotted into his Notes app, still sleepy in a 4am haze, after checking the sky before heading out on an early kayaking trip. But as Sam’s focus tightened, he identified something inorganic about their precision. His Notes entry continues: “… travelling slowly, sometimes further spaced out, appearing at the same point and disappearing at the same point. South to North” These were not stars,they were satellites. More specifically, these twelve-or-so dots of light floating above the horizon line were satellites from Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation.
It is no surprise to me that Sam has held onto this memory as the inspiration for his new painting, titled ‘A Distinct Line of Lights, Star Sized and Star Intensity. South to North.’ It was completed in early 2025 and was the first painting he showed me when I visited his studio in February, ahead of his debut solo exhibition To Move Not Under The Stars But Through Them, at Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney.
After the realization that it wasn’t stars he was gazing upon but a Starlink constellation, Sam did what he often does: he trawled open-source image banks for an equivalent photograph to form the composition for a new painting. Every painting in this exhibition traces its origins back to such an image bank, with sourced imagery that spans skies, plants, mosaics, and other curiosities. Photographs often end up in these banks after direct uploads from their creators wishing to contribute to the community resource. The photos Sam chooses often seem like they were taken by hobbyists, not famous photographers, capturing simple moments in time. In this way, Sam’s practice has been recognized as contributing to the genre of post-internet art. His practice acknowledges that we live in a time oversaturated with data and images, and so he creates space for us to slow down and really look, actually see what is right in front of us.
A thematic preoccupation of Sam’s practice has been tracing the emergence of the United States as the dominate economic, military, and cultural superpower in the postWWII era, which is particularly epitomized by the Space Race. That was, undeniably, a period full of iconic images. However, the Space Race surely isn’t over, but it is harder to say what iconic images we have of this current moment.
Starlink is an internet service provider that has become renowned, and reviled, for launching thousands of small satellites into low Earth orbit. The large quantity of satellites is necessary to deliver high-speed internet to remote regions underserved by traditional internet infrastructure. However, a consequence of this functional necessity of creating constellations in low Earth orbit includes significant environmental impacts related to the frequency of launches and an increase of space debris.
Sam reminds me “the stargazing community hate them because of the light pollution” which limits all of our ability to see the stars and constellations of our galaxy.
“Unfortunately, there isn’t a stargazing lobby!”
These satellites, and their associated debris, also interfere with ground and space based telescopes, which, ironically, can limit future exploration of the space for all of us. While A Distinct Line of Lights… features a restrained composition — a series of satellites represented by dots of white slashing through the night sky — the moment it represents is anything but restrained. Sam often presents us with images that seem innocuous, or intimately human, and then like the twist of a knife he lets us open our eyes to consider how that moment represents large sweeping arcs of history. It is in this way that A Distinct Line of Lights…
Sam Cranstoun, Nocturne (Iron Dome), 2025, oil on linen, 66 × 45.5 cm
EXHIBITION DATES
05 Jun – 28 Jun 25
Sam Cranstoun: To Move Not Under The Stars But Through Them Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney
Sam Cranstoun, A Brief Glimpse of Space Junk, 2025, oil on linen, 45.4 × 66 cm
Sam Cranstoun, A Distinct Line of Lights, Star Sized and Star Intensity. South to North, 2025, oil on linen, 121.5 × 152.5 cm
demonstrates my favourite stream of Sam practice: it is an image that captures pervasive power. There are no people in this work, but Musk’s new world order looms large.
A Distinct Line of Lights… has strong resonances to Sam’s earlier series Look Out! which has been ongoing since 2021, but is not included in this exhibition. Look Out! includes watercolour paintings and sculptural recreations of various iconic observation towers. The observation towers are presented as pristine architectural forms removed of their functional details. The series ranges from the sinister to the curious, and feature police riot control stations, air traffic control towers, and birdwatching huts. Like A Distinct Line of Lights… these structures are absent of the figure in control, but nonetheless imply that we are in the presence of a subjugating force.
I relish the unease works like A Distinct Line of Lights… and Look Out! set in me, but what makes a Sam Cranstoun exhibition so compelling is his ability to balance these tensions with beauty. This beauty is evident in his technical skill — his colours are often slightly heightened, his lines both precise and gestural — but it also emerges in the subject matter. While To Move Not Under The Stars But Through Them features a number of works concerned with suspicious-looking skies,I am just as taken by the more grounded works, specifically his painting Tithonia Diversifolia.
Tithonia Diversifolia features a large yellow flower in full bloom. The flower is a Tithonia Diversifolia, which is sometimes known as Mexican sunflower or Japanese sunflower, depending where in the world you are. In his studio that day, Sam reminisced about the magic of seeing the flower bloom for two weeks of the year near his previous home in Brisbane. Sam admits, while technically it is an invasive weed which can overwhelm the native biodiversity it quickly inhabits, its bloom fills an area with gorgeous colour. Sam is also quick to point out, that in certain situations the plant can also act as a fertiliser enriching soils. The plant is dynamic and is valued differently from different perspectives.
I love how Tithonia Diversifolia reflects one of Sam’s approaches. Much like A Distinct Line of Lights… and Look Out!, Tithonia Diversifolia is absent of the human figure but is still tethered to one. While the first two works are reflections of pervasive power, Tithonia Diversifolia is something entirely more humble, and brings our attention back to the photographer uploading their snap to the image bank. Afterall, who hasn’t taken a quick snap of a plant that brings a little joy, wanting to remember and contain a moment of that vibrancy?
This is the power of Sam’s process of utilising pre-existing images, he honours the human desire to connect with and understand the world around us. The open-source images he draws upon do not explain the intention of the photographer, but nonetheless they unmistakably evoke a human urge to hold onto a fleeting point in time.
Sam’s Notes App entry recording his 4am confrontation with the Starlink constellation speaks to his ability to let a serendipitous moment encapsulate a history of human action. His work is a powerful reminder of that very impulse: when your eyes are drawn to a moment, pause. In a world flooded with data and images, it is worth looking deeper, because there are always new truths that are waiting to be revealed right in front of us.
Marrnyula Munuŋgurr: nets, lines and networked relations
By Dr Maia Nuku
Dr. Maia Nuku is the Curator for Oceanic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Photography Mark Pokorny and Buku Larrnggay Mulka Centre
The shadow outline of a bold graphic shark emerges from the layered lines of a bark painting. This is Mäna, the ancestral shark of Djapu clan narratives, an anchor point of knowledge and storytelling central to the cultural histories of Waṉḏawuy, spiritual home of the Djapu clan. In ancestral times, Mäna was harpooned in Buckingham Bay, forcing him inland where he carved waterways as he thrashed southward. After breaking through hunters' nets, he reached Waṉḏawuy, where his body transformed into the landscape — his teeth becoming trees along the riverbank, his liver a waterhole. By bringing saltwater inland, Mäna imbued the Waṉḏawuy River with spiritual power. When Djapu people die, Mäna's thrashing releases their souls back to these sacred waters.
Marrnyula Munuŋgurr, Dhawurr, 2025, bark painting, 98 × 52 cm
These narratives and more are expressed in artworks by Yolŋu artists. While the designs are grounded in grid-like structures and sacred patterns (miny'tji), they allow for expansive variations in storytelling. Motifs of nets and fish traps carry multiple meanings: the ripple of water, the interplay of light and shade, or the physical landscape seen from above. In Marrnyula Munuŋgurr's meticulous hand, these paintings access knowledge — not in a finite way, but through the release of power at appropriate moments. For Yolŋu, painting is revelatory and meditative. The act of applying pigment across a surface is a creative remaking that draws forth new ideas.
Born July 5, 1964, in Yirrkala, Marrnyula Munuŋgurr is a Djapu woman of the Dhuwa moiety. Her artistic lineage is strong — her father Djutjadjutja (1935-99) was son of Woŋgu Munuŋgurr (c. 1880-1959), an eminent Djapu statesman and prolific artist who produced 86 crayon drawings during anthropologist Ronald Berndt's research in Yirrkala (1946-7). These drawings stand as "tangible title deeds" articulating clan responsibilities and relationships to country. Marrnyula's father established the homeland settlement at Waṉḏawuy, where her grandfather made dry season camps and crafted ganybu (scoop nets) for catching "catfish and freshwater mussels, freshwater crayfish and... long-neck turtle." (1) Here they set fish traps, observed seasonal changes, and prepared for fishing in coastal estates.
Djutjadjutja established a productive family painting unit for two decades. Marrnyula is his eldest daughter with his second wife Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, who became a renowned artist herself. Along with her younger sisters, Marrnyula assisted her father with sacred Djapu paintings, absorbing techniques and stories. The grid, net, and fish trap templates of Djapu designs became instilled through years of collaborative work.
Art coordinator Andrew Blake notes how this family unit revitalized Yolŋu art. In 1994, Djutjadjutja completed a bark painting exceeding two meters — far larger than previous works — sparking renewed interest in large-scale bark painting. Each family member developed distinctive styles; Noŋgirrŋa's sections were wild and fluid, while Marrnyula's were more meticulous. Marrnyula also developed a distinctive narrative style documenting "hunting trips, group fishing expeditions, or driving through the bush." (2) This fresh approach led to her selection in 1993 by the Northern Territory Department of Health to produce an AIDS-awareness bark painting, If you love me, love me safely.
Marrnyula began working at the Yirrkala Art Centre in the 1980s and produced the second-ever print when the Yirrkala Print Space opened in 1996. She collaborated with Basil Hall, managing the Printshop while mastering various techniques: screen prints, linocuts, Japanese woodblocks, collagraphs, and soft ground etchings. As a young woman, she skillfully facilitated access for senior community members to this new medium. Printmaking opened new avenues for Marrnyula, and opportunities to make contributions to education and social issues. Her ability to draw local specificity into broader narratives of community life became important. As Henry Skerritt notes: "I don't think you can consider Marrnyula’s printmaking and painting as separate; the two practices are really entwined."(3) Her success across both domains reflects the trust and respect she commands in the community.
Tim Ingold reflects that inscription marks the passage of time. When Yolŋu artists revisit maḏayinbuy miny'tji (sacred clan designs), they reinvest them with meaning rather than reinventing them. Djapu artists gain understanding by watching family members paint and discuss these designs. As Blake points out: "Four generations from
Marrnyula Munuŋgurr, Bol'ŋu, 2024, painting on board, 180 × 122 cm
Woŋgu onwards have illustrated the fish trap consistently... But they don't become artists by studiously copying." (4) Each develops their own style by repeatedly layering lines — wiripu, the same but different — creating a lineage connecting generations.
Marrnyula's later paintings shimmer with predominately white clay pigments (gapaṉ), reserved for the most sacred miny'tji. This innovation was encouraged by Blake and negotiated within the family. The white creates aesthetic impact and has become her signature. Howard Morphy notes: "White is integral to crosshatching... and it is vital in the final stage of painting to outline the figures and geometric forms with a thin white line." (5) The layering of white gives unique texture, creating fields of time caught in space — not empty, but active and dynamic. The distinction between inside/outside remains integral to Yolŋu art. Like footsteps leaving ancestral imprints on the landscape, Marrnyula's bark paintings manifest invisible connections that populate our lives. In recent years, Marrnyula has experimented with scale and configuration. Her installation Ganybu at Gertrude Contemporary (2015) featured "puzzle work paintings" — small bark sections arranged in dynamic compositions. While others scaled up, she returned to small barks, explaining: "The small bark [paintings] I create, that's the good, healthy water at Waṉḏawuy... the white clay design, that's water, the clear water. And the black design in the middle, that is the muddy water, produced by the shark [thrashing about]." (6) As her brother Wäka Munuŋgurr summarizes: "We have these paintings. We have them on the body all the time, but they are still hidden. They [balanda] look at us, but they don't see the paintings inside. They only see them on our bodies when we come out ceremony." (7)
1. Cara Pinchbeck (ed.) with essays by Andrew Blake, Howard Morphy and John Stanton, Yirrkala Drawings. Exh. Cat. (2013), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, p. 124.
2. Ibid. p. 39.
3. Skerritt, recorded interview, July 202.
4. Andrew Blake in Cara Pinchbeck (ed.) with essays by Andrew Blake, Howard Morphy and John Stanton, Yirrkala Drawings. Exh. Cat. (2013), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, p. 37.
5. Howard Morphy in Cara Pinchbeck (ed.) with essays by Andrew Blake, Howard Morphy and John Stanton, Yirrkala Drawings. Exh. Cat. (2013), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, p. 29
6. Munungurr in Wukun Wanambi, Kade McDonald and Henry Skerritt (eds.), Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Bark Painting, p.304.
7. Wäka Munungurr in Preface to Cara Pinchbeck (ed.) with essays by Andrew Blake, Howard Morphy and John Stanton, Yirrkala Drawings. Exh. Cat. (2013), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, p. 13.
Marrnyula Munuŋgurr, Djapu (w. black square), 2024, bark painting, 138 × 71 cm
Marrnyula Munuŋgurr, Djapu Miny'tji, 2024, painting on board, 122 × 122 cm
Mangala Bai Maravi, a devoted artist of the Baiga tribe in Lalpur, Madhya Pradesh, has woven her life’s purpose into the sacred ink of Godna—the ancient tattoo art of her people.
Mangala Bai Maravi, Baiga Godna, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 75 × 41 cm
Mangala Bai Maravi, Baiga Godna, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 73 × 53 cm
FOR GENERATIONS, BAIGA WOMEN have carried their stories on their skin, receiving their first marks at the age of nine. The forehead is adorned first, followed by arms, legs, back, and chest, each design an echo of their ancestry, a whisper of their spirit. Inspired by nature’s rhythm — the sun, the mountains, the rippling fish, the golden grains — these tattoos are more than mere ornamentation; they map the journey of a woman’s life, marking the thresholds of puberty, adulthood, and marriage. They are believed to heal, to protect, and to accompany the soul into eternity.
As a child, Mangala watched her mother, Shanti Bai Maravi, a celebrated artist in the community, etch these living symbols onto the women of their village, and with each stroke, she was deeply inspired by the tradition. By the age of seven, her hands had already learned the craft, tracing inked pathways before her siblings could. Travelling alongside her mother, she carried not only the art but also its evolution — translating these sacred patterns onto paper and canvas, a step that had never been done before. Where once Godna was passed down through memory and touch, Mangala’s artistry now preserves it in a form that endures beyond the skin.
Yet, the threads of this heritage are fraying. Modernity casts a shadow of doubt over the younger generation, who hesitate to bear the ink of their ancestors, fearing judgment and loss of acceptance. But Mangala stands undeterred, a guardian of tradition, determined to rekindle pride in her people. By capturing the essence of Baiga tattoos beyond the body, she breathes new life into a fading legacy.
Through her hands, Godna speaks — not just as an art, but as a chronicle of resilience, a sacred ritual, a bridge between past and present. With unwavering devotion, Mangala ensures that the heartbeat of her people’s heritage does not fade but continues to pulse through time, inked into history for generations to come.
Mangala was invited to undertake a residency at the Unversity of Sydney and in 2024 was commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain to present new works for the Biennale. It was exhibited at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney and White Bay Power Station.
Words Mariia Zhuchenko
Photography Mark Pokorny
Captions for title page:
LHS: Mangala Bai Maravi, Baiga Godna, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 87 × 40 cm
RHS: Mangala Bai Maravi, Baiga Godna, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 73 × 53 cm
Born 1988 in Dindori Madhya Pradesh, India Lives and works in Madhya Pradesh
THE LAST WORD
Georgie Bruce
Interview by Claire Summers
Portrait by Shannon McGrath
Left: Tony Albert, Preston (Australian Aborigines) , 2024, acrylic and vintage, appropriated fabric on canvas, 103 × 103cm; and right: Tony Albert, Preston (Children), 2024, acrylic and vintage appropriated, fabric on canvas, 103 × 103cm. Placed with private client by GB Art Advisory.
Georgie Bruce is a visual art consultant, arts manager, and curator with over 20 years of experience, specialising in the Australasian region. Having lived and worked in South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and now Melbourne, Georgie brings a global perspective to her art advisory services. Recognised as one of the leading art consultants in the region, Georgie's expertise spans both contemporary and Indigenous art.
Photography by Shannon McGrath
Your role as an art consultant places you in a position both practical and intimate: you make qualified recommendations about the artworks that people live alongside, in both professional and personal settings. What element of such a role is most important to you?
The most important element of being an art consultant is understanding and honouring the personal connection between individuals and the art they bring into their environment. Art has the power to inspire, comfort, challenge and express identity, and my role is to help clients discover pieces that resonate deeply with them, whether in a professional or personal setting. This requires a balance of my expertise and intuition, so I have to consider aesthetic principles, art market knowledge, investment potenial and the emotional impact a piece will have with my client. Ultimately, my goal is to curate meaningful collections that enhance the client's environment, reflecting their personality or brand, bringing engagement and enriching their daily experience.
What does the next generation of art collectors look like to you? What is most important to them?
I see the next generation of art collectors being globally connected, socially conscious, and digitally savvy. They are drawn to diverse mediums, including digital art and immersive experiences, and prioritise works that align with their values —championing sustainability, diversity, and social change. With unprecedented access to information, they are highly informed, research-driven, and deeply engaged
with artists and communities, they are shaping a more inclusive and globally interconnected art market. For them, an artist’s message is just as important as aesthetics or market value, driving a more thoughtful, dynamic art world with a strong emphasis on emerging talent.
Given your career history working across the Asia Pacific region, how do you view Australian contemporary art in this region?
Having lived and worked in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Singapore, I have witnessed a significant shift in how collectors engage with the Asia-Pacific art market. In the past, many were primarily Australiacentric, but today, they are increasingly confident in exploring beyond their local art scene. Access to international art fairs, digital platforms, and a wealth of online resources has empowered collectors with the exposure and knowledge to make informed and confident decisions. Additionally, galleries with international locations play a crucial role in this evolution, offering collectors multiple entry points into new, previously not explored markets and exposing them to a more diverse range of artists and opportunities. Collectors now recognise that by aligning with galleries who have international representation, their artists are positioned within a broader art ecosystem, strengthening both their profiles and collectibility across regions. This not only enhances the cultural and financial value of the artists but also deepens the collector’s engagement with a more dynamic and global art world.
Alex Seton, In Praise of Impulsiveness, 2021, Wombeyan marble, 134 × 43 × 41 cm. Placed with
When building a collection, whether you work on it in its early stages or develop it when it is more established, what piece of advice do you feel is most important to impart to the collectors you work with?
I believe when building a meaningful and impactful collection, people should challenge themselves to look beyond their comfort zone. While there is often an immediate visual appeal or emotional connection with an artwork, it’s equally important to explore the conceptual layers that create the piece. Delving into the artist's intentions, their creative process, and the themes they explore can reveal a deeper connection — one that may not have been immediately obvious upon first glance. This deeper understanding not only enhances the appreciation of the work but also ensures that the piece aligns with your personal values and tastes, enriching your engagement and elevating its significance within your collection, both intellectually and emotionally.
Can you name an artwork or artist whose work recently moved you to pause, that truly captured you?
That’s like asking you to choose between your children — you just can't! My love for art spans to so many artists and movements. However, having lived in Asia, we’re fortunate to have built a collection that reflects our time abroad, blending contemporary Australian and Asian works. Each piece tells a story, capturing not only our personal journey but also the dynamic cultural exchange between these two regions. One artist who always sparks conversation is Tsang Kin Wah. His work masterfully weaves text into decorative patterns, creating wallpaper compositions that initially appear as elegant French toile. However a closer look reveals something unexpected, beneath the beauty of the floral motifs lies a layer of profane, confrontational text, merging the artist’s own words with those of others. This striking contrast between aesthetic refinement and raw expression forces viewers to confront the tension between appearance and meaning. It’s |a challenging exploration of beauty and subversion, and no matter how many times I see his work, it never fails to challenge and engage.
Alex Seton
31 Jul 23 Aug 25
Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney
Naminapu Maymuru-White 25 Sep 01 Nov 25
Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney
Barayuwa Munuŋgurr 25 Sep 18 Oct 25
Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney
Spring 1883 14 Aug 17 Aug 25
The Windsor Hotel, Naarm/Melbourne
Sydney Contemporary 11 Sept 14 Sept 25
Carriageworks, Gadigal/Sydney
Michael Lindeman 30 Oct 22 Nov 25
Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne
Tim Silver with Untitled (whistle in the reeds), 2025, in his studio. Photography by Mark Pokorny.
Tony Albert, Brothers (The Prodigal Son) 3 2020, coloured glass, lead, photographic decal, steel, stone, 180 x 60 cm, courtesy the artist
