Behind the Art

Best known for her evocative self-portraiture and collaborative storytelling through Modor & Dohter, a creative partnership with her daughter, Hoare’s practice explores identity, transformation and the unseen labour of caregiving. Her body itself has become an archive, marked by lived experiences of motherhood, breast cancer survival, and self-expression including tattooing her own skin in sov...

Locust Jones is a contemporary, Australian artist. For over 20 years, Locust's practice has woven layers of stories and images that replicate the frenetic pace at which society consumes everyday news and current affairs, in a variety of mediums. Jones' exhibition,  To Bear Witness   featured large scale vertical drawings cascading through RMOA’s Atrium Gallery. 18 October 2025 - 26 April 2...

Michelle Hamer & Talitha Kennedy are two contemporary Australian artists. Hamer and Kennedy are part of a group exhibition titled Intimacy, on display at RMOA from 28 March - 5 July 2026.

In 2025 Sally Smart transformed RMOA’s Long Gallery, responding to the monumental yet intimate scale of this space through exploration of the legacies of theatre and visual art.

Shari O'Dwyer is an exhibiting Artist in the Cane exhibition. O'Dwyer's work is: It hangs over my head, it lurks in the shadows  2023, hand knotted sisal twine, private collection. Cane is exhibiting at RMOA from 28 February - 21 June 2026

Right of Reply: a response to 'Cane' exhibition at RMOA 28 February 2026 - 21 June 2026. Joella Warkill, Imelda Miller and Jacob McGuire in conversation with Dr Melinda Mann.

The work of Sandra Selig frequently meditates upon space, withmany of her works charting a course between the installation itself, and thematerials in use, which are often found. Here, Selig’s pieces use space totease out the poetic. Using small paper cuttings from extant book pages,sections are removed and singled out, represented as a kind of collage-poem, byway of installation. Specific words a...

My work gives form to personal observations and internalreflections. While walking the streets or tending my garden, I often discoverfragments of broken objects—tools run over, ceramics buried—each once part of apurposeful whole. Sometimes friends share their broken things with me, andthese too may find their way into my practice. These remnants become materialprompts for new works, carrying stori...

Eugene Carchesio has made a career of intimacy, explored throughdifferent media, usually through series. These include delicate papersculptures, small studies of leaves or birds, watercolours exploring colour andgeometry or gridded paper, music staves and collage. The artist’s 2008retrospective at Queensland Art Gallery was fittingly entitled Someone’sUniverse , and featured hundreds of Carchesio’...

Details of the Dispossessed The obsession with lifelike figures can be traced back toantiquity: the ancient Greeks painted their statues, to solid give solidpresence to what were idealized forms. With occasional exceptions, therepresentation of what was not part of a world of heroism, religion or fantasy,was limited to imagery of everyday encounters, such as we see in the Dutchpainting of the seve...

Intimacy is a sensation that I imbue in all my artworks. It startswith the way I create my artworks then it’s the close attention and empathy Iwant people to feel when they see my works. I lovingly craft my sculptures by hand-stitching leather andfleshing out with stuffing and wire. It’s a slow meditative practice that Imake in my home studio, which is my safe place where my imagination is free an...

Adams’ work invites an awareness of the way in which perceptionsof how ‘signs’ operate. You might call his artworks ‘meaning composites’.Understanding that emotion and thoughts are complex and abstracted things, andnot able to be adequately pictured, Adams presents compositions that containmultiple elements and symbols. Much as semaphore or pictograms are systems forexpressing particular concepts,...

This body of work explores intimacy as something accumulated infragments, in repetitions, in layered marks and gestures. Working primarilywith coloured pencil, gouache, and fresco-like plaster surfaces, I’m drawn toprocesses that require slowness and trust: building, erasing, redrawing,responding. Yet there always remains the 'immediacy' of the mark - fast andslow. Sun damage - its palette...

I am primarily a cartoonist—an abstract expressionist cartoonist. I was educated during the New York School's dominance of the art world, and I incorporated many oftheir styles into my drawings, along with those of Picasso and a host of otherartists who had left a lasting impression on me. According to Andre Breton, Iam a surrealist, described as: “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by whic...

This suite of collage works is comprised of diagrammatic imageryexcised from aged and obsolete textbooks, reference works, and instructionmanuals. Disinterred from their utilitarian points of origin, these images arereconfigured into idiosyncratic arrangements informed by the paranormal, theesoteric, and the occult. The works attempt to channel the aesthetics andatmospheres of the somewhat amorpho...

When I search to find words go accompany this artwork, titled Mending , I would say that it is an ongoing pursuit, one that is hardly ever completed.

There is something intrinsically intimate in the act of looking ata painting - we can zoom in and obsess over a detail, then zoom out and witnessit as part of a greater whole. Each mark, colour and gesture has itsfundamental role to play in a larger composition; just as each instrumentparticipates in a symphony. What happens if we remove these individual marks or traces from apainting and present...

My installations investigate how we understand the world throughmaterials. I am interested in the ways matter shapes our perception of objectsand our place within broader systems. My practice considers how humanmateriality is entangled with ecological processes and cosmic origins—remindingus that the elements of our bodies and environments trace back to the samebeginnings. To explore these ideas,...

Language has the power to both connect and divide us, to facilitate understanding and to obscure it. It can be flippant, funny and deeply personal. There are no Words explores the space between what words mean and how language is used—bothindividually and collectively. It comprises 240 hand-stitched ‘flashcards’,each bearing a fragment of black text on a white background. The text wascollected and...

In my work, I make small, densely rendered figurative paintingspopulated with elaborate vegetable and mineral configurations. Awkward anderect, the tree forms are resentful of the way they have been rearranged andsingled out, pruned and reshaped. Mountain folds quiver and react in sharpangles and dark shadows at having been flattened and repurposed. Watery tarnspeer mournfully outwards, and rocks...

The idea of creating an artist's book based on texts from one or more of the Essene Communions (so-called) had percolated inthe back of my mind for over a decade and a half before its realisation. Thoughthe character of the work appears to be relatively homogeneous, overall, thebook pages possess four distinct components: the format, the text, thedecorative elements and the images. What superv...

Norman Lindsay’s vast oeuvre remains a staggering monument to hisbohemian lifestyle. While Lindsay’s work has undergone countless criticaldrubbings for its often-erotic celebration of carnivalesque sensuality, thereremains a strong argument for its reconsideration on technical andsocio-historical grounds. Who else in Lindsay’s generation (or even inAustralian art) has explored with such specificit...

Late in her life my old cat Dusty was made (by me) to live with anaging male border collie called Benji. While I’d had a fantasy that the two ofthem might develop some kind of bond, or if not tolerance, they didn’t. Everyday they engaged in an anxious dance that wore them both out. The problem wastotally intractable because although it was a bad situation, neither of themwas really to blame. The b...

It’s undeniable that dating apps have changed modern datingculture and the collective growing distrust and fatigue singles are feelingtowards the apps is steadily rising. There’s plenty to unpack in how theseplatforms are affecting romantic relationships and redefining our outlook onintimacy. The shift comes as no great surprise considering the greater contextof social changes currently going on....

While Edward Steichen is justifiably remembered as one of thepioneers of fashion photography, and a great innovator of the medium morebroadly, it is the quality and striking composition of his images that findspurchase in our mind. Unlike many photographers, who use the medium to‘capture’ moments of genius, divine accident or punctum, Steichen comes fromthe opposite angle. Each photograph is caref...