‘Lake Baker’ evokes the surface of the salt lake

A captivating work by Pitjantjatjara law man and artist Timo Hogan — Lake Baker 2021 (illustrated) — unfolds the ancient religion within the Pukunkura (Lake Baker) landscape, for which he is cultural caretaker, and the narratives of the beings that shaped it. DELVE DEEPER: North by North-West: Indigenous Australian art Based at Spinifex Arts Project…

Go back in time and explore Queensland through photography

The surname should be familiar, taking its name from Richard Daintree (1832-78), the Daintree Rainforest near Mossman — north of the regional city of Cairns — is part of the largest continuous area of tropical rainforest in Australia and the oldest surviving tropical rainforest in the world. A number of features in North Queensland have…

William Bustard: Australian camouflage artist

Queensland artist William Bustard (1894–1973) is well known as an artist, illustrator and stained-glass window designer whose artworks are held in Australian public collections, including QAGOMA (Brisbane townscape 1928 illustrated is on display in the Australian Art Collection, Queensland Art Gallery). Born in England in 1894, Bustard and his wife Lily migrated to Queensland in…

Goldfield brooches: Uniquely Australian

A selection of an intriguing group of brooches are on display in the Australian Art Collection, Queensland Art Gallery — made by unknown jewellers, they were produced in the Australian goldfields, circa 1880–1915 and are a peculiarly Australian innovation. These elegant pieces in uniquely Australian designs which are made from gold, small nuggets of native gold,…

Strike a pose: Exploring the self-portrait

‘Strike a pose’ presents artworks made in the first decades of the twentieth century where artists assume the posture of the Grand Manner or ‘swagger’ portrait, exemplified by George Lambert’s The artist and his wife. These paintings are juxtaposed against Yasumasa Morimura’s modern-day parody Doublonnage (Marcel) which riffs on art history and the photographs of Marcel Duchamp, disrupting…

Hard-edge abstraction: Testing the boundaries of painting & sculpture

Margaret Worth’s Untitled 1968 (currently on display in the Australian Art Collection, Queensland Art Gallery) is a striking example of hard-edge abstraction by one of Australia’s outstanding abstract artists. This rare modular structure tests the boundaries of painting and sculpture in a melding of colour and form. In the mid to late 1960s, Margaret Worth…