WRITING

Three posters advertising Brett Whiteley: Inside the Studio hang on the façade of Logan Art Gallery. Appearing in the middle is a photograph of the artist himself, sitting in his studio. Reproductions of his paintings flank either side.

Each year, QCA’s oversized undergraduate exhibition sprawls across its South Bank campus requiring sturdy walking shoes, determination, and—more often than not—a second visit.

Jodie L Kipps is an interdisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. She works across sculpture, installation and textiles, prioritising iterative handmade processes to make symbolically and sensorially rich artworks.

Wish You Were Here transforms the quiet and contemplative white cube into a glowing, moving, soundtracked landscape. Entering its space is an invitation to move through a world of psychedelia: to be bathed in dynamic neon, buoyed by its beat, and caught within its projections. In this uncanny dreamscape mash, schools of surreal eye-fish swim above land.

Whimsy is not a word I typically associate with electronics. I don’t easily tie it to Saturdays at Bunnings, tinkering, retrieving assorted pieces of wood from under the house that might come in handy one day, masculinity, and hard yakka.

There are so many pleasures in visiting international galleries. Sometimes the pleasure is in the experience of seeing a long-known work in the flesh; other times it’s the discovery of something new.

Carolyn McCosker’s landscape paintings are deeply attuned to the colours and patterns of nature.

The artist's work is rooted in her early experiences of growing up on a remote farming property in north-western NSW.

Jessica Nothdurft works in a variety of media, including oil, ink and metal, to produce evocative documentations of her life experiences.  

Standing in the cavernous, antiquated, industrial space of White Bay Power Station, curators Cosmin Costinaş and Inti Guerrero introduced an extraordinary vision for Ten Thousand Suns, this years’ iteration of the expansive and long-running Biennale of Sydney.

Susan Lincoln employs shimmering light-emitting materials and a strikingly-restrained colour palette to create immersive art experiences. In some works lead crystals, reflective beads and strings of light hang in generous loops like chandeliers.

In Helle Cook’s works, delicate and translucent voids of colour fill the canvas. Greens shift into turquoise and again into blue. Lines trace permeable boundaries creating spaces both known and unfamiliar. I imagine myself within them, within their caves, cool and serene.

Every major city has its art schools. And every art school within a city has its point of difference. What sets QUT’s apart is its very small cohort and open studio methodology. Both prioritise, and enable, close conversations between staff and students, driven by ideas rather than a predetermined art form.