un Projects is based on the unceded sovereign land and waters of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation; we pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.
un Projects

Tag: painting

Marguerite Carson

Language Machine

Paint pours through a system. Run of the mill white emulsion runs through pipes into canvas, fills canvas, pours out, through a series of neatly cut holes, runs down, is caught, fed into pump, fed into pipes, into canvas, through and round. Natasha Kidd’s Flow and Return (2006) is a cyclical loop of white paint […]

Emily Morel and Amy May Stuart

A History of the Lang Family

Late last year I went up to Bendigo for the launch of Chunxiao Qu’s poetry book at the La Trobe Art Institute. My partner and I decided to stay overnight because we had heard about a huge population of bats that live in a park there and we also wanted to check out a few […]

Rebecca Suares-Jury

Many hands made light work

In October 2022, I found myself in India working alongside Gumbaynggirr artist and friend, Aretha Brown. Aretha was commissioned by the Australian High Commission in New Delhi, to create a 122 metre mural, running along the chancery’s perimeter. Hailing from the Gumbaynggirr peoples and language group, the mural’s title, Girrwaawa, translates to ‘come together.’ A […]

Mia Boe

The Nostalgia
of Mother and Child

I am a descendent of the Butchulla people of K’gari. I’m a daughter of a Burmese man who left his birth country as a refugee at the age of five. My mother didn’t grow up on Country, she didn’t know she was Aboriginal until she was a teenager – my grandmother was worried she’d have […]

Yusi Zang

Bird Poo on Car Window

Yusi Zang is a Beijing born multi- disciplinary artist living and working in Melbourne. Her practice entails the scrutiny of the quotidian and mundane, and strives for a degree of realism, mimicking or extracting the real which the objects derive from. She reconciles the concepts of boredom and the sublime, and revolts against the commonplaces […]

Yusi Zang

Crumpet, 2019, oil on canvas

Yusi Zang is a Beijing born multi- disciplinary artist living and working in Melbourne. Her practice entails the scrutiny of the quotidian and mundane, and strives for a degree of realism, mimicking or extracting the real which theobjects derive from. She reconciles the concepts of boredom and the sublime, and revolts against the commonplaces of […]

Kenzee Patterson

Exhausted Painting: Phthalo Green, Indian Yellow, Brilliant Red, Ultramarine

Kenzee Patterson is a settler-colonial descendant whose art practice combines material experimentation with historical research, autobiography and language, motivated by the imperative to confront the ecological and socio-cultural repercussions of resource extraction and material displacement.

Kenzee Patterson

Exhausted Painting: Brown Brazil, Magenta, Violet, Ultramarine, Sapphire Blue

Kenzee Patterson is a settler-colonial descendant whose art practice combines material experimentation with historical research, autobiography and language, motivated by the imperative to confront the ecological and socio-cultural repercussions of resource extraction and material displacement.

Kenzee Patterson

Exhausted Painting: Brilliant Red, Ultramarine, Phthalo Green

Kenzee Patterson is a settler-colonial descendant whose art practice combines material experimentation with historical research, autobiography and language, motivated by the imperative to confront the ecological and socio-cultural repercussions of resource extraction and material displacement.

Lucreccia Quintanilla

Night

Lucreccia Quintanilla is an artist, writer, DJ and researcher gratefully living and working on the unceded lands of the Boon Wurrung and Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) peoples of the Kulin Nation. Her practice is both an individual and collaborative one which manifests into outcomes within galleries and also as events and performances outside of that context. Her […]

Annabel Blue

Tom Polo: exit strategy

In a time of perpetual unknowns, the idea of an exit point — someplace beyond this moment — is guiding our present. In his current exhibition exit strategy held at STATION gallery, Tom Polo explores themes of arrival and departure, and the strategy one might physically, emotionally and psychologically undertake before they are to happen. […]

Jo Pugh

Soft Trees Break The Fall: Felix Atkinson

a body of assumptions a mind coerced into trusting your prescribed narrative has me flattening concealing trying to be loud though pillowy lips and building blocks reverse my progress it is these marks from which resurrection trembles Over the course of their emerging career, Felix Atkinson’s artistic practice has worked towards resisting dominant frameworks of […]

Henry Law

Martin George: Box Of Stamps

By virtue of the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric. Thus the grid operates from the work of art outward, compelling our acknowledgement of a world beyond the frame. — Rosalind Krauss, 1979. Box of Stamps, a new solo […]

Anna Dunnill

House / Work / House (hang in there)

Two poles protrude from the first-floor windows of Sarah Scout Presents. A long thin pennant flag hangs from each: HOUSE and WORK, their appliquéd letters read. The words are turned inwards to face each other like a double-page spread. Or two bodies in conversation. From outside these flags blend into the signage of Collins Street: […]

Serena Bentley

Gertrude Abercrombie

Artist: Gertrude Abercrombie Curator: Karma Gallery with Dan Nadel There was a particular passage in Roald Dahl’s The Witches that haunted me as a child. A young girl was placed under a spell by a malevolent witch and became trapped in an oil painting hanging in her home. Each day she’d appear in a different […]

Genevieve Trail

The Animal Collaborator

Apparently a dog saved Robert Nixon’s political career, transforming him from swindling politician to sympathetic family man with a single strategically-timed intervention. This was in September 1952 and Nixon had just been accused of receiving illegal campaign contributions by his running mate, the Republican nominee Dwight Eisenhower.[^1] In a nationally broadcast television appearance Nixon pleaded […]

Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser

Colour blinded, 2007, installation view (including Shane Pickett and Destiny Deacon), Culture Warriors at the National Gallery of Australia. Courtesy of the artists and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery; Walkover, 2004, wool carpet, 161 x 240 cms. Courtesy the artists and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery; Installation, 2011, carpet, mixed media figures, chairs and video (Destiny Deacon and Michael […]

Carmen Ansaldo

Pepai Jangala Carroll

In April 2017, accompanied by a small convoy of artists and arts workers, Pintupi man Pepai Jangala Carroll embarked on a unique and momentous return to country. He travelled over 800 kilometres from his home in Pukatja (Ernabella, South Australia) to the birthplace of his father, Henry Paripata Tjampitjinpa. The journey’s two major destinations of […]

Abbra Kotlarczyk

MY MOTHER’S LABOUR: Darcey Bella Arnold

**An ellipsis is a figure of return that isn’t symmetrical*** ‘“To live elliptically” is to ask a question rather than formulate an answer; a “shrug” is a rhetorical response to a non-rhetorical question of the body – an embodied letting go of future promises in favor of life in the durative present’.[^1] — Darren Byler […]

Kate Leah Rendell

An unsettled Settler response to Open Cut

Settlers Miners Same Thing – Jacky Green Although I know Aboriginal sovereignty as always present, embedded within country, I find my strongest encounters with specific sovereignties of place often occur in unexpected moments – like a bolt of remembering – chanced upon in the presence of a scar tree or a reference found deep within […]

Zara Sigglekow

Bad jibes: camp, humour, and taste in the art of Matthew Harris

Motifs in Matthew Harris’s lurid works include flowers, copulating pigs, and a gravestone inscribed with a gold sad face. Born in 1991 and raised in Wangaratta, Matthew’s artistic output to date has included video, tapestry, sculpture and painting. He works within a gay camp parlance. Artifice, riffs, cuteness, violence and comic eroticism come together in […]

Ivan Ruhle and Tom Melick

Writing for the kitchen

A painting must always contend with space and, because of this, it can also liberate and expand space. Sometimes with maximum effort and sometimes with almost no effort at all. A tile is a unit, a component of a whole. A whole is complete, subject to a parameter, an outline that demarcates where the whole […]

Sarah Goffman

Sixty-seven Women Artists (of more than two hundred who I know) 2015

watercolour on paper

Daniel Mudie Cunningham

Mental Olympics: in between breaths with Wart

A body lies hiding beneath a thick sheet of black plastic, the kind used by firemen to extinguish fire. Giving way to movement and form, the plastic becomes a percussive skin used to thrash out sound. A release of manic energy. Finding quiet in the rage. ‘I used that a lot to go into that […]