Michael Cook introduces us to his dream-journey

Michael Cook’s photographs have become well known for a whimsical and unique interplay of surrealism and political potency. The ‘Broken Dreams’ series 2010 was one of the Queensland Indigenous photographer’s most important breakthrough works, produced in the first year of his artistic practice. Coming from a commercial background, Cook had long entertained moving into art photography and had been incubating many…

The beauty of Lola Greeno’s necklaces

Despite the ravages of colonisation, Palawa people have made necklaces of lustrous strings of pearlescent shells collected from the cool waters surrounding Lutruwita (Tasmania) and its islands in a cultural practice extending back thousands of years. Though for most of us a shell necklace captivates with its beauty and mystique, for the makers it is…

Flamboyance that was distinctly modern

Though not a painting of a named sitter, George Washington Lambert’s Portrait group (The mother) 1907 (illustrated) nevertheless belongs to that category of art — Edwardian salon portraiture — which flourished in England in the first decade of the twentieth century. These were works especially characterised by flamboyance and bravura, where old master techniques were combined with…

Some kind of island paradise

Australia has roughly 8000 islands within its maritime borders. While many are sites of difficult histories, they also maintain their unique identities through song, stories, dance and visual art, often in environments characterised by isolation and significant external influences. Here is an overview of the Indigenous Australian artists and projects from Tasmania, Arnhem Land, the…

Jonathan Jones ‘untitled (giran)’ is a murmuration of winged sculptures

‘Murun’ — a Wiradjuri word meaning breath or life — and the English word ‘murmur’ — a low recurring sound, or soft voices — are two words born far from each other, one long of this land, one newly spoken here. They converge in this project by artist Jonathan Jones, the most recent in a…

Minute beauty celebrated

Over a career spanning almost forty years, eX de Medici has followed a range of artistic paths, while consistently critiquing the social and political systems that govern our lives. Having begun her career in the 1980s in painting, photomedia, performance and installation, de Medici worked for a decade as a tattooist after completing an apprenticeship…