Ron Mueck’s ‘In bed’: Is she anxious or quietly reflective?

Ron Mueck’s In bed depicts a middle-aged woman who has been carefully composed so that the position of her body and facial expression suggest a range of possible emotional states. Is she anxious or quietly reflective? While the viewer may at first be taken aback by the monumental scale of the work, this is ultimately…

Noon-nom: a sense of nestling

In her installation Noon-nom 2016 Pinaree Sanpitak brings the bodily form together with the spiritual. While the artist’s practice has always evoked the human body, it was not until her son was born that she began focusing on the breast as a sacred and nurturing form. The similarities between the shape of a woman’s breast…

Everyday materials transformed into a large-scale sculpture

In Future Remnant, Australian artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro transform everyday materials into an extraordinary, large-scale sculpture. In a deliberately absurd juxtaposition, a large dinosaur skeleton, meticulously constructed, climbs over makeshift Ikea storage furniture — the ubiquitous kind that appears in many households and magically reappears on the street whenever the city council collects…

Judy Watson introduces ‘tow row’

Judy Watson’s work is deeply connected to concealed histories, the significance of objects and the power of memory and loss. In tow row, Watson has responded to a site close to the Brisbane River by referencing woven nets used by Aboriginal people of the area, acknowledging the traditional owners of the site and their everyday fishing activities…

Beyond the experience of listening: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s musical installation

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s installations combine the technical with the aesthetic and sensorial; the artist refers to them as functioning like a ‘dispositif’ rather than an installation. The term, loosely translated as device or structure, foregrounds the potential to engage viewers in both the operational and aesthetic components of a work. From here to ear (v. 13)…