Art Guide Australia Podcast

“And I definitely think that’s what landscape is for me, it is a questioning about living and life and what we do in places and what we leave behind,” says Polly Stanton in our latest podcast, talking about how her art practice looks at the entwined relationship between culture and nature. Stanton is part of the exhibition that gives this podcast it’s title, Notions of Care. The exhibition brings together five artists and groups to consider care in art making, through materials, how we...

“I was thinking about meditation as being a way of creating calm and openness so that more constructive conversation can happen,” says Katie West in the second episode of Notions of Care. In our latest podcast, West talks about dyeing textiles, creating spaces of meditation, and facing experiences of racism—all in a conversation centred on care and creating, linking with the NETS Victoria touring exhibition, Notions of Care at Ararat Gallery TAMA. The show features five artists and groups to...

“I’m doing that something humans do: I’m trying to explain this time to myself by making something from it and about it,” says artist Kate Tucker. “I’m trying to make myself something that I need to live now.” Tucker is our first guest for a new podcast mini-series on art, creating and care, linking with the NETS Victoria touring exhibition Notions Of Care. The show brings together five artists and groups to consider care in art making, whether through materials, how we relate to one...

“Then we’ll get real systemic change,” says Eugenia Lim when talking about making structural changes in the art world that reflect genuine diversity, “but I think we’re still just the tip of the iceberg. It’s still quite surface, but it’s good to be even pushing and talking about these things I think.” At a moment where politics and individuals feel increasingly divided, Lim creates videos, film and installations that look beyond divisiveness, capitalism and exploitation, to forefront the...

“I think it is also about the fact that, in terms of power structures, artists want to—as much as they can—remove mechanisms that hinder their capacity for creative freedom,” says David Cross in the second episode of our latest podcast, Conflated. Conflated looks at ideas of inflation and conflation, linking with a touring exhibition also titled, Conflated. Whether metaphorical or material, the show explores how ideas of inflation and deflation can be taken in creative, environmental, and...

“I was sort of staggered,” says writer Jennifer Higgie. “Why hadn’t I ever been taught about these women? Why weren’t they included in mainstream art histories?” Higgie is talking about the marginalisation of women in art history—and it’s something she speaks to in our latest podcast episode. Art Abroad looks at artists and creatives who moved from Australia to London, and while Jennifer Higgie studied fine art in Canberra and Melbourne, she moved to London in the 1997 when she was in her...

“It’s really about looking at images and putting them together, and looking at how they behave,” says David Noonan in our latest podcast series Artists Abroad, talking with artists who’ve moved to London and what the move has meant for their practice—while also chatting about the art itself. Ballarat-born, Noonan has lived and worked in London since 2005. He’s acclaimed and internationally exhibited for his stunning black-and-white works created from both figurative and abstract found images...

“I decided that art essentially is a communication, so my basis of my work is conceptual,” says artist Bonita Ely, a pioneer in environmental art in Australia, in our latest episode of The Long Run, a podcast talking with artists who have 60-year practices. Known for her sculpture, installations and performance art, Ely’s work is considered ground breaking, particularly through her feminist and environmentally driven works. She’s an often-cited influence for many environmental artists, and...

“Well, what I’d always noticed is the way men always had to be the drivers, right? And this was kind of a symbol of how they behaved in real life, in marriages and relationships, in business world, in politics, everywhere. They were always having to be the drivers.” So says Maragaret Dodd in the ninth episode of The Long Run, a podcast dedicated to talking with artists who have been practicing for 60 years. Many people first discover Dodd’s practice through her brilliant ceramic holden cars...

“If you can get through the conventional way of relating, then often you find that there are these meeting points of understanding,” says Vivienne Binns in our latest episode of The Long Run series featuring conversations with artists who have 60-year practices. A pioneer in feminist and community driven art, Binns has been at the forefront of critically engaged, feminist art from the 1960s onward. While painting is her central practice, she has also worked across printmaking, performance,...

Although Stelarc is just shy of the 60 year mark—The Long Run podcast is centred on speaking with artists who have 60 year careers—his performances and installations, and the centrality of the body in his art, get to very meaningful ideas about life and technology. Whether placing an artwork in his stomach, actualising a body with a third hand, giving his agency over to performance viewers, and rather famously growing an extra ear on his arm, Stelarc has gone to true extremes. The way he...

“Black and white photography has always been my…I suppose it’s just kind of my life,” says Mervyn Bishop on his 60-year photography practice. Bishop is a Murri man and is Australia’s first Aboriginal photojournalist and documentary photographer. In the early 1960s, when he was just 17, he began a four-year cadetship with The Sydney Morning Herald. Later in the 1970s Bishop took a government position as a photographer for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. It was during this time he took...

“I guess that is the thread, that I am very open to influences that come into my life, you know, and I respond to them,” says Suzanne Archer in The Long Run, Art Guide’s latest podcast series featuring interviews with artists who have 60-year practices. Based just outside of Sydney in the bushy suburb of Wedderburn, Archer has long-created layered and dense drawings and paintings, alongside sculpture and installations. With a practice always slightly edging on the mysterious, Archer’s work...

“Art is this amazing subject,” says Robert Owen. “It comes from different people and it contributes to cultural identity in a way that can question ourselves…" In this fourth episode of The Long Run, our podcast series talking to artists who’ve had careers spanning 60 years, Owen talks about what it means to create over six decades, and what he feels is the truth of his art: a sense of oneness. Now based in Melbourne, Owen has led an incredible life of creating, working across painting,...

What does it mean to do feminism rather than be a feminist? In the third and final episode of our FEM-aFFINITY podcast, feminist critic and art historian Anne Marsh explains the idea of doing feminism in Australian contemporary art, from the 1970s to now. For over four decades Marsh has been researching and writing at the cross-sections of feminism and contemporary art. As a leading academic in this field, she’s currently undertaking an expansive research project titled Doing Feminism which,...

What does it mean to create art between two cultures? What relationships are formed when artists collaborate? What are the links between feminism, contemporary art and disability? These questions, and more, are explored in the second episode of our newest podcast series FEM-aFFINITY, featuring a very honest and intimate conversation with photographer Janelle Low. This podcast takes its name from an exhibition with the same title: FEM-aFFINITY is also a collaborative, female-led show that...

What are the links between feminism, contemporary art and disability? FEM-aFFINITY, a new three-part podcast series, delves into this question by focussing on an exhibition of the same title. First exhibited in 2019, FEM-aFFINITY is a collaborative, female-led show. It features a series of collaborations between seven female artists who practice from Melbourne’s Arts Project Australia, a studio and gallery for artists with an intellectual disability, and seven female contemporary artists....

For over 60 years John Wolseley has been visiting, capturing and sharing his experience of landscapes. But what does it mean to create and innovate over six decades? And what can Wolseley teach us about the life-stages of an artist? Art Guide Australia’s newest podcast series The Long Run considers this question with artists who have had careers spanning 60 years, each reflecting on their art and lives. In this third episode Wolseley, one of Australia’s most well-known landscape painters and...

What does it mean to create and innovate over six decades? Art Guide Australia’s newest podcast series The Long Run considers this question with three artists who have had careers spanning sixty years, each reflecting on their art and lives. What can they teach us about the life-stages of an artist? In the second episode we speak with landscape painter Wendy Stavrianos. Working from regional Victoria, Stavrianos is known for her densely layered landscape paintings and use of line in...

The Long Run #1: Gareth Sansom on painting, chance and mortality by Art Guide Australia