Art Almanac May 2025

In our next round of what’s happening in the visual arts across Australia, we’ve highlighted a few artists and their work, starting with Janenne Eaton, our cover artist, who explores environmental, historical, and political concerns and the impact of a globalised, digital ecology on contemporary culture, and on nature. The 24th Dobell Drawing Prize finalists, whose works demonstrate current trends and boundary-pushing approaches to the medium – from coloured pencil, charcoal, chalk and watercolour to clay, human hair, aluminium, LED, and video; themes include domesticity and social dynamics, environmental care, and impacts of climate change and colonisation. And Wiradyuri artist Amala Groom, whose latest video performance work “draws on the alchemical belief that existence is a union between spirit and matter, with the human body as the crucible in which…

Hervey Bay Regional Gallery Until 11 May 2025 Queensland Emma Thorp: The In Between is an exploration of the challenges of motherhood as an artist, tackling the complicated desire to carve out time for oneself and art “in between” life’s responsibilities. Emma Thorp’s practice humorously takes on these daily interactions and mundane tasks and makes them her artistic subject matter, fusing her work as an artist and mother. Through her signature illustrative style and knack for visual storytelling, Thorp openly shares her experiences, carving out an identity as an artist mother while juggling the priorities of life. “. . . I very much enjoy the idea of playing with and then drawing the washing instead of packing it all way as the ultimate act of defiance,” confesses the artist.…

Potter Museum of Art Running 30 May to 23 November, 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is the reopening exhibition of Potter Museum of Art – the University of Melbourne’s flagship art museum. Celebrating the beauty and brilliance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art while also confronting the dark heart of Australia’s colonial history, the enduring significance of Indigenous cultural and design traditions, agency and knowledge is revealed through the curation of over 450 works. Included in the exhibition are rarely seen works of art and cultural objects from the university’s collections alongside 193 important loans from seventy-seven public and private lenders. Also on show are six new commissions by leading contemporary Indigenous artists Sandra Aitken, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Julie Gough, Brett Leavy, Betty Muffler and Maringka Burton,…

The Lodge “Every gesture is intentional.” Wiradyuri artist Amala Groom presents her video work, The Lodge, 2024, at Canberra Contemporary, the third artwork in the series Raised by Wolves. Wearing a wedding dress, the artist weaves and unravels a red rope along Anzac Parade at Canberra’s Parliamentary Triangle on Ngunnawal Country. It brings together her roles as an artist and activist – from her years organising protests at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy to her role as the youngest Director of The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples – for an emotionally charged performance. We speak to Groom ahead of the opening. What can we expect visually from The Lodge? Visually, The Lodge is lush and surreal – a single-channel 6K work where presence and absence blur. Through in-camera trickery and…

“. . . a focus on technique, innovation and expanded approaches . . .” “Whether drawing is central to or just one aspect of these artists’ practice, many in the exhibition share similar affiliations with drawing, describing the process as meditative, a way to reflect on personal experience and social discourse, a method for dedicated observation, or an attempt to harness the atmosphere of a moment,” curator Lucy Latella tells me about the Dobell Drawing Prize exhibition. Celebrating its twenty-fourth edition, the biennial exhibition showcases the work of fiftysix finalists selected from 965 nationwide entries. With a focus on technique, innovation and expanded approaches, the exhibition is presented at the National Art School Gallery in partnership with the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation. Devoted to the enduring importance of drawing…

A photograph in the Streeton Collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales shows a shirtless Arthur Streeton in his early twenties perched on a rock “painting a little rotter,” as he called the preliminary sketches that led to his glorious blue/gold Impressionist canvases capturing Sydney’s Harbour. Just such a little rotter is now on show in the Mosman Art Gallery’s Sydney from Mosman exhibition thanks to the sharp eyes of art dealer Brenda Colahan, who knew of Mosman’s splendid Balnaves Collection of sixteen Australian Impressionist and early twentieth century artworks significant to Mosman – including a Streeton – that the late Neil Balnaves AO had donated to the Gallery. Could this “rapid and heartfelt pencil-and-watercolour sketch of Sydney Harbour from Mosman,” as curator Lucie Reeves-Smith describes it, be…