Database

C. Moore Hardy (b. 1955) is an Australian artist known for her extensive photographic documentation of the Sydney queer community since the late 1970s. Hardy's work has encompassed both freelance and commercial photography, featuring candid portraiture of community events, most notably the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and in particular minority groups within the LGBTQI+ community. She successfully ran Starfish Studio Photography Studio/Gallery in Clovelly, NSW for 15 years. Her portraiture of Mardi Gras and minority groups within the LGBTQI+ community have created an archival legacy which speaks to the changing generational understandings and attitudes of and towards the Sydney queer community. Recently exhibited in NAS Gallery’s *Museum of Love and Protest* 2018, exhibition, Hardy spoke to the importance of photographic timing, having a visual language, a social conscience, community, feminism and art. Hardy completed a Printmaking and Photography Higher Art Certificate at the National Art School in 1989, and has also studied at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Technology Sydney, and Randwick TAFE.

Callum McGrath (b.1995) is an artist and researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne. McGrath’s desire to make and research stems from an interest in rearticulating and challenging dominant models and institutionalised aesthetics of historiography and archiving. McGrath’s research engages with underrepresented and undocumented aspects of queer history, by reimagining these pasts via an idiosyncratic and unconventional approach to image-based forms. McGrath’s practice rearticulates institutionalised aesthetics of historiography, memorials, and archiving. Among his recent exhibitions include; *The Party*, UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2023); *Embodied Knowledge*, Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2022); *The Weatherman*, Metro Arts, Brisbane (2021); *The Gay Agenda*, The Walls, Gold Coast (2021); *To Resound, Unbound*, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2021); and *Deviations*, Brisbane Art and Design Festival (2021). In 2022 McGrath curated a cinema program titled *In Queer Time* at the Australian Cinémathèque at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. McGrath is also a founding contributor to KINK, a collective researching a history of queer Australian art. McGrath is currently a PhD candidate at Monash Art Design and Architecture, Monash University.

Carole Wilson (b. 1960) is an Australian artist living and working in Ballarat, Victoria where she is Associate Professor in Visual Arts, Institute of Education, Arts and Community and Higher Degrees by Research Coordinator in the Graduate Research School at Federation University Australia. Carole has extensive supervision and examination experience of practice led research higher degrees in the visual arts. Her undergraduate study was at both the Canberra School of Art and Philip Institute of Technology, now RMIT, Melbourne and she completed a PhD at the University of Ballarat in 2001. Her original training was in printmaking and she was a founding member of Jillposters, feminist poster group, in 1983 and worked at Another Planet Posters, Melbourne. Carole has held regular solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions nationally and internationally. For the past twenty years she has utilised discarded and salvaged materials such as floral carpets, maps and atlases to create works which engage with aspects of botany, garden history, travel and historical ornament. In recent years she has undertaken residencies in Italy, the US, Malaysia and the Netherlands which have all had a significant impact on her work. She is represented in many public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum, State Library of Victoria and a number of regional and university galleries. Her posters are in museum collections in Finland, the Czech Republic, Russia and Poland.

Dr Christian Thompson AO (b. 1978) is an Australian-born contemporary artist whose work explores notions of identity, cultural hybridity and history. Formally trained as a sculptor, Thompson’s multidisciplinary practice engages mediums such as photography, video, sculpture, performance and sound. His work focuses on the exploration of identity, sexuality, gender, race and memory. In his live performances and conceptual portraits he inhabits a range of personas achieved through handcrafted costumes, carefully orchestrated poses and backdrops. In 2010 Thompson made history when he became the first Aboriginal Australian to be admitted into the University of Oxford in its 900-year history. He is currently a research affiliate at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Thompson holds a Doctorate of Philosophy (Fine Art), Trinity College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, Master of Theatre, Amsterdam School of Arts, Das Arts, The Netherlands, Masters of Fine Art (Sculpture) RMIT University and Honours (Sculpture) RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. His works are held in major international and national collections. In 2018 he was awarded an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to the visual arts as a sculptor, photographer, video and performance artist, and as a role model for young Indigenous artists. Thompson has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, having been included in exhibitions such as *Australia* at the Royal Academy for the Arts, London; *We Bury Our Own*, The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, Valencian Institute of Modern Art, Valencia, Spain; *The Other and Me*, The Sharjah Museum, United Arab Emirates; *Hijacked III*, QUOD Gallery, Derby, United Kingdom; *Shadow life*, Bangkok Art and Cultural centre, Bangkok, Thailand; and *The beauty of Distance/Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age*, 17th Biennale of Sydney. A major survey exhibition of Thompson’s work, *Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy* toured nationally from 2017 to 2019.

Christine Dean (b. 1963) is an artist, educator and writer who has been exhibiting since 1988. From the early 1990s she has exhibited in many LGBTQI+ exhibitions including *Juice*, Art Gallery of New South Wales (1997); *The Oscar Wilde Reading Group*, Raw Nerve Gallery (1998); *Bent Western*, Blacktown Arts Centre (2008); *From Straight to Gay and Back Again*, Alaska Projects (2015); *Can’t Touch This*, Verge Gallery (2017); *40 Years of Queer Art*, Comber Street Studios (2018); *The Party*, UNSW Galleries; and *Braving Time*, NAS Gallery (both 2023). In 1986 Christine completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney majoring in Fine Arts, a Diploma in Secondary Art Education from Sydney Teachers College in 1989, a Graduate Diploma in Painting, Sydney College of the Arts in 1990, a Masters of Fine Arts, University of NSW in 2003 and a PhD from the University of NSW in 2010. In 2000 she was awarded a Pollock-Krasner fellowship and in 2001 undertook a residency at the 18th Street Arts Centre, Los Angeles, as part of an Australia Council research grant. The focus of Dean’s art practice has been developing a relationship between abstraction and text. Much of the text included is both poetic and political. The painting *Drag Queen* (2015) belongs to a series produced while living in Kings Cross. The text included is a quote from an interview conducted by Roberta Perkins that was published in her 1983 book *The Drag Queen Scene* and the shimmering colours and design of the painting visualise the decor of nightclubs from the era.

Clifford Last (b.1918-1991) was a sculptor known for his deftly crafted forms. Last was born in Hampshire, England and left school at sixteen, instead undertaking an apprenticeship at his father’s shop-fitting workshop where he learned basic woodworking skills. While studying sculpture in London, Last would visit exhibitions of Modern sculpture and had a particular affinity for works by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Last arrived in Melbourne in 1947 and enrolled for further study at the Royal Melbourne Technical College. His first solo exhibition in 1948 was held at Georges Gallery in Collins Street where he showed small-scale wood and stone carvings inspired by Hepworth and Moore. Last would go on to receive wide acclaim for his sculptures, in 1989 the National Gallery of Victoria staged a sprawling retrospective of his work. In the television series *Housewife, 49* (2006) which is based on the diary entries of Last’s mother Nella Last, it is suggested throughout that Last was homosexual.

Courtney Coombs makes art, writes, and facilitates to make sense of the world and their place in it. They are heavily influenced by situations and captivated by the relational. Employing queer-centric, anti-spectacular methodologies, they privilege periods of observing, thinking, feeling, learning, and unlearning as much as realising a final form, which often involves reimagining everyday encounters. Driven by concepts and seduced by the potential of uncertainty and ambiguity, their minimally presented liaisons include objects, installations, 2-dimensional works, moving images and sound, discourse, dialogue, and community building. Coombs imbues these subjective and gestural propositions with a hopeful criticality concerned with disrupting dominant narratives about worth and value and prompting different ways of seeing, understanding and being. Coombs is currently based between Norway and Australia. They have exhibited throughout Australia and internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Recent solo exhibitions include: *Diamonds in the sky*, Schmick Contemporary, Sydney (with Jordan Azcune) (2021), *I can't sleep when I'm anxious*, CARPARK Milani Gallery, Brisbane (2020), *The time of light*, Metro Arts, Brisbane (2020); and *Field of Vision*, IMA Belltower, Brisbane (2019). Coombs has been the recipient of several awards, including the Australia Council for the Arts Resilience: Adapt Grant (2020), Australia Council for the Arts Development Grant (2018, 2017, 2016), Arts Queensland Queensland Arts Showcase Program Grant (2016), Australia Council for the Arts Arts Projects Grant (2016), Arts Queensland Individuals Fund Grant (2020, 2015), Australia Council for the Arts Early Career New Work Grant (2013). They have attended national and international residency programs and was recently awarded the Australia Council for the Arts Helsinki International Artist Programme Residency (2020). Their work is held in public and private collections.

Daniel Mudie Cunningham (b. 1975) is an artist, curator, writer and lecturer who lives and works on Gadigal Country. With a career spanning three decades, his practice draws upon and remixes the image streams of art history, queer politics, pop culture, performance and music through video, photography and performance. In 2023, his work was the subject of the survey exhibition *Are You There?* curated by James Gatt at Wollongong Art Gallery. A comprehensive monograph will follow in 2024 with texts by Gatt, Judy Annear, Gary Carsley, José Da Silva, Helen Grace, Ann Finegan, Carrie Miller and Fiona Kelly McGregor. As curator and writer, his work has consistently engaged with queer performative art practices. Most recently as curator, he was guest co-artistic director of Liveworks for Performance Space (2023) and is the curator of Cementa (2024). He has written widely on contemporary Australian art and culture, and teaches at the National Art School.

David McDiarmid (1952–1995) was a leading gay activist and artist who worked in Melbourne, Sydney and New York. As an early gay liberation activist, he wrote for and illustrated the *Sydney Gay Liberation* newsletter and *Gay Liberation Papers*. His first gallery exhibition in Sydney in 1976 focused on gay male identity and sexual liberation themes. McDiarmid’s creative output encompasses art, design, craft, fashion and music. It also sits at the intersection of activism, art, and community art, with gay rights and identity politics being the primary focus in his contemporary art and graphic design. He moved to New York in 1979 where he lived and worked until 1987. Reflecting on his own work in 1992 he said: “I wanted to express myself and I wanted to respond to what was going on and I wanted to reach a gay male audience. I wanted to express very complex emotions and I didn’t know how to do it . . . I was in a bit of a dilemma. I thought, well, how can I get across these complex messages. I didn’t think it was simply a matter of saying gay is good.” McDiarmid designed posters for Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Pride and Leather parties, safe sex and World AIDS Day campaigns and he was artistic director of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. He was diagnosed HIV positive in New York 1986 and from his return to Australia in 1987 his work was concerned with HIV/AIDS experience and politics. His famed *Safe Sex* and *Safe Injecting* posters of 1992 designed for the AIDS Council of NSW were an international sensation after they were shown at the 1993 international AIDS conference in Berlin. The *Rainbow Aphorisms*, a series of digital works created between 1993 until shortly before McDiarmid's death of AIDS-related conditions in 1995, is a key example of his political savvy and wit, combining gay and queer activism with tongue-in-cheek statements, pointed truths, and messages of hope. His work has been widely collected by institutions and in 2017–18 his *Rainbow Aphorisms* featured throughout the London Underground transport network as part of the ongoing *Art on the Underground* program, a presentation initiated by London's Studio Voltaire and the David McDiarmid estate. In 2014, McDiarmid was the subject of the major survey exhibition *David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me* at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. His work continues to be shown internationally.

David Rosetzky (b. 1970) is a Melbourne based artist and educator with an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to art making. Often working with practitioners from the fields of theatre, dance, and film – he creates videos, installations and photographic works in which identity is intimately observed. With an extensive exhibition history both in Australia and overseas, Rosetzky has presented his work in over 30 solo exhibitions and 60 group exhibitions. His *Portrait of Cate Blanchett*, 2008, was exhibited in The Third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video at the International Centre for Photography in New York. In 2005 he was awarded the Anne Landa Award for the Moving Image. Rosetzky’s recent projects include *Air to Atmosphere*, 2023, commissioned by Castlemaine Art Gallery, *Being Ourselves*, 2020, presented at the Museum of Australian Photography, Melbourne, commissioned as part of *Portrait of Monash: the ties that bind*, and *Composite Acts*, 2019, commissioned by Channels International Biennial of Video Art, Melbourne. In 2014 the Centre for Contemporary Photography curated the survey exhibition *True Self: David Rosetzky Selected works*, which toured nationally. Rosetzky’s works are held in numerous collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. David has a PhD in Visual Art from Monash University and currently teaches in the Master of Photography program at RMIT University.

Deborah Kelly (b. 1962) is an artist of mixed settler ancestry who works across disciplinary and geographical boundaries to produce artworks which encompass collage, installation, event and performance. Her projects often start outside of art institutions, and some of them stay there. Posters for social movements, printable window protest signs and a billboard that ended up in the Mardi Gras parade. A choreographed dance as a momentary monument to the Tiananmen Square protests, disseminated on YouTube and performed in cities around the world. Kelly’s projects across media are concerned with lineages of representation, politics and history, and practices of collectivity from the epic to intimate. Some of Kelly’s projects that originate as political practices are picked up by art institutions, and others are devised directly for, with, or against them. *Beware of the God* (2005) was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) and deployed across Sydney as postcards, PSAs and projections onto clouds. *No Human Being Is Illegal* (2014–19), 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), unfolded through hundreds of group collage sessions and is now in the collection of the Wellcome Trust, UK. Kelly has exhibited extensively around Australia, and in the biennales of Singapore, Sydney, Thessaloniki, TarraWarra, Cementa, and Venice. Recent solo exhibitions include *The Gods of Tiny Things*, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (2021); *Life in the Ruins*, Fabian & Claude Walter Galerie, Zurich (2018); and *Venus Envy*, Kvindemuseet, Denmark (2017). In December 2019 she won first prize in the Fotogenia Festival, Mexico City and was International Artist in Residence, Wellcome Trust, London. Her multidisciplinary religious work *CREATION* was included in *The National 4: New Australian Art*, MCA (2021) and continues to build intention and congregation.