Artist Profile

Artist Profile is a leading quarterly journal taking its readers into the studios and minds of contemporary artists across Australasia and beyond. Industry professionals engage leading practitioners and emerging talent in conversations about their art, in their own words, while our exclusive photo shoots provide intimate access into artists’ personal and working lives. Readers gain knowledge of artists’ methods, preview works in progress and discover the life experiences that ignite artistic imaginations.

CONTRIBUTORS

Editor’s Note • Artist Profile acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we work.

Does the demand for accountability really account for art? • The question as to whether an artwork can be disentangled from its creator is not new but has attained new urgency amidst the recent renewal of emphasis on accountability and social justice. As evidenced by the attempted “cancellation” of Khaled Sabsabi, moral panics can prove dangerous to politically committed artists.

Monica Rani Rudhar In the Mix • Monica Rani Rudhar makes bold, colourful sculptural wall works inspired by her personal collection of costume jewellery. Through these oversized pieces, fashioned from glazed terracotta, Rudhar explores themes of identity, family and the experience of growing up with mixed Romanian and Indian heritage.

LISA REIHANA Living Futures from Ancestral Pasts • Lisa Reihana’s Auckland-based practice has evolved over almost four decades where she has experimented, adapted and embraced digital technologies to awaken Indigenous memories. When we meet, she is deep in editing mode, our conversation a momentary pause from the intense focus of digital worldmaking. Reihana’s practice takes time and folds time, enabling the ātua to walk again, unbound, to guide us through luminous worlds shaped by ceremony, resistance and collective dreaming.

The Illuminations of Tamara Henderson • Tamara Henderson is a Canadian artist known for her installation projects incorporating film, painting and sculpture. Recent exhibitions include Slug in the Mug at Artspace, Sydney, 2024, Green in the Grooves, Camden Art Centre, London, 2023, and Of Seasons End at Tate Modern in 2020. Now in Canberra, where she works with the Canberra Glassworks, her most recent exhibition, Spider with the Glass Legs, is currently showing at the Warrnambool Art Gallery.

Ana Pollak Streaming the volumes of nature • Dyarubbin winds through this book, a serpentine, shining, more-than-human presence. It has its own history, but also reveals the human worlds it shaped: the way it nourished, terrified, inspired and bewitched the peoples who lived on its banks. —Grace Karskens, People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia, 2021

James Geurts A dérive around the planet • Artist James Geurts is an adventurist and psychogeographer who has worked on major projects in Nova Scotia, London, Palestine, Israel, Taiwan and closer to home on the Mornington Peninsula, and in the Simpson Desert. Peter Hill meets with the artist in his new Melbourne studio where they discuss art, travel, neo-trompe l’oeil and an artwork that grew from four locations on the equator.

Mason Kimber The Skin of the Painting • Mason Kimber’s newest paintings mark the artist’s furthest explorations yet into what he describes as “spatiality in painting.” Ahead of his first institutional solo exhibition, Kimber reflects upon a half-decade of work that draws together informal currents of materiality, haptic visuality, place and memory.

The Acts of Katy B. Plummer • A sense of reckoning reverberates through Katy B. Plummer’s practice as she moves from strength to strength, continuing to navigate the complexity of female identity, motherhood and creative matrilineage, viewed as a series of acts presented as theatrical...