Database

Fiona Macdonald is an artist and theorist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her practice embraces a range of mediated processes, installations, and publications, and maintains an allegiance to the possibilities of a critical conceptual practice through collaborative acts of discourse. Her 2008 PhD thesis, in the critical theory of the remake in contemporary practice, is an investigation of contemporary relations to Conceptual Art, through the grammatologies of translation and dissemination. She is a member of the Redrawing Collective who investigate the remediation of existing practices and the productive capacities of dysfunctional collaboration. She is coordinator of the Graduate Theory program in the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at Monash University, and also teaches in the Fine Arts Honours studio program.

Frances (Budden) Phoenix (1950–2017) was a Sydney-born, Adelaide-based artist, known predominantly as a printmaker and craftworker, as well as a leading figure in the development of feminist prints, posters and needlework in Australia. Phoenix was a tenacious and proud contributor to the country's feminist and lesbian art histories. *Kunda* (1975) repurposes a typical doily, a domestic staple at the time, with the artist utilising exaggerated folding and crochet to suggest a vulval icon. She established the Women's Domestic Needlework Group in 1976 alongside Joan Grounds, Bernadette Krone, Kathy Letray, Patricia McDonald, Marie McMahon, Noela Taylor and Loretta Vieceli. The group intended to grow and promote women’s domestic needlework within Australia. Phoenix went on to make further and considerable contributions to both Australian and international feminist art histories: she participated in both Sydney’s and Adelaide’s Women’s Art Movements (WAM); collaborated on Judy Chicago’s landmark feminist artwork *The Dinner Party* (1974–79); and led collective and community-based art initiatives. The artist's works and poster designs are held in various private and public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; South Australian State Archives, Adelaide, among others.

Frances Barrett (b. 1983) is an artist who lives and works in Narrm Melbourne, whose recent work pivots around the modalities of listening and vocality. Barrett's projects take the form of immersive sound installation, live performances and video installation. Such projects include: *Cry* for *The National 4: Australian Art Now*, Carriageworks, 2023; *Meatus*, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2022; and *All Ears: A Listening Party*, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, 2018. In 2019 Barrett was one of the recipients of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship, a unique fellowship for women working across performance and installation. Barrett is one member of the collective Barbara Cleveland (with Diana Baker Smith, Kate Blackmore and Kelly Doley) who have presented projects at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Biennale of Sydney, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and Hayward Gallery. In 2020 Barbara Cleveland presented their first survey exhibition, *Thinking Business*, at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery. Barrett was the Chair of the Curatorial Advisory Board for VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising, an event focused on queer practices presented by Monash University Museum of Art, Samstag Museum of Art and Ace Open. Barrett is currently a Lecturer in Fine Art at Monash Art Design and Architecture.

For more than 20 years Gary Carsley (b. 1957) has been using sub-cultural performance genres like karaoke and ventriloquism as rhetorical models to investigate the complexities and contradictions of coloniality, outside the binary of victim and perpetrator. Carsley works primarily with the garden as a civilisationally plural expression that reformulates concepts of nature and belonging, the secular and the sacred. His decades-long exploration of acculturated landscapes acknowledges that in an Australian context all such images simultaneously visualise possession and dispossession.

Gary Lee (b. 1952) is a Larrakia artist, curator, anthropologist and writer. He has written numerous articles, reports and papers over the past four decades, and his work has likewise been the subject of several articles, interviews and documentaries. In 1997, for example, he was one of six Aboriginal artists featured in the six-part documentary series *Artists Upfront* (SBS TV, directors Desmond Kootji Raymond, Paul Roberts). Strong critical reception of his play *Keep Him My Heart – A Larrakia-Filipino Love Story* (1993) led to an episode on his family’s history in *Australian Story* (ABC TV, 1997) and a subsequent related publication. His 2011 solo exhibition, *gorgeousness* in Auckland was the subject of *Making Men Magnificent*, Asia Downunder, Television New Zealand (2011). As a writer Lee has written on his own practice which has mainly focused on photo-based portraiture and through which he has held over ten solo exhibitions in Darwin, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Auckland, and participated in many group exhibitions including nationally and internationally touring exhibitions. Recent group exhibitions include *QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection*, National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne (2022), while current touring group exhibitions include *Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia*, Art Gallery of Western Australia and National Gallery of Singapore (both 2022). Lee has also written widely on the work of other artists and on Indigenous art per se, including for numerous exhibition catalogues and contemporary art magazines, and for substantive publications including *Aratjara: Art of the First Australians: Contemporary Works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Artists* (1993), Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Wesfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany (for which he was co-editor) and *The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art* (2000), Oxford University Press, South Melbourne. Lee’s art writing also relates to his work as a co-/curator of exhibitions including *Larrakia and other Darwin Families*, Lyons Cottage, Darwin (1994); *Love Magic: Erotics and Politics in Indigenous Art* (1999, part of the Art Gallery of NSW exhibition ‘Perspecta ‘99’); *Dirula: Contemporary Larrakia Art*, 24HR Art, Darwin (2002); and *Billiamook*, Charles Darwin University Gallery (2004). Lee’s work as an anthropologist has involved him in sociocultural research relating to Darwin/NT (including for his play) and pharmocopea-related research, as well as considerable research into Indigenous gay male and transgender issues. His pioneering research into the latter led to publications such as *The National Indigenous Gay and Transgender Project Consultation Report* (1998, Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations, Sydney) and numerous other articles, reports and papers. Lee’s artwork is held in collections at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Museum and Art Gallery of the NT, Darwin; Charles Darwin University; Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, University of Canberra; and Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; as well as in numerous private collections in Australia and overseas. In 2022 Lee was awarded the Work on Paper Award in the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards for his hand-coloured photo-based portrait *Nagi* (2022) of his maternal grandfather Juan (Johnny) Cubillo.

Georgia Banks (b. 1988) makes performance art even when you think she doesn't. Her most interesting work won’t happen until after she's dead - she hopes it’s good but will never know. Banks has been banned from Tinder, sued by the estate of Hannah Wilke, and awarded Miss Social Impact in a national beauty pageant. She would like to go viral, break a Guinness World Record, and be in an actual episode of Black Mirror instead of making her own. Georgia's never had a filling nor broken a bone (although she has been crucified) and once was convinced she'd accidentally sliced away a part of her labia during a performance (she hadn’t).

Gerard O'Connor (b. 1963) is an Australian photographer based in Melbourne. He graduated from the Australian Centre for Contemporary Photography in 1992, with a degree in photography majoring in Fine Art. From the mid 1990s onwards he collaborated with his life-long partner and soul mate Marc Wasiak (1971-2021) to produce lavish, large-scale photographs, working across the fields of both art and advertising. Their work was exhibited in Australia, Argentina, China, Japan, Korea and Singapore and is held in a number of prestigious public and private collections including the Fine Art Museum, Buenos Aires; the Australian Embassy in Argentina and the Government House Art Collection, Canberra. In 2011 they were awarded the Jin Hou Niao Zun trophy for best international exhibition at the Pingyao International Photography Festival, China.

Gian Manik (b. 1985) is a Naarm-based artist whose dextrous approach to image-making is characterised by an irreverence for genre and driven by a compulsion to paint. Interested in undermining the colonial properties arming the buttresses of historical painting, Manik ambiguates tradition through the representation of symbolically multivalent and tangential subjects. Informed by a childhood spent voraciously copying reproductions of old master paintings, a subsequent indifference to the polarities of high and low culture has rendered his work resistant to traditional stylistic categorisation. Instead, Manik’s practice can be read as an ongoing investigation into the boundaries of representation which often sprawls into the modalities and enviornments of fashion, music and performance. His compositions interweave both carefully distilled and intensely gestural passages, forming a layered palimpsest that references and registers the quotidian fabric of his social and cultural surroundings. Distinguished by an interminable mix of nostalgia and desire, drama and tragedy, his work reverberates an uncertainty of meaning. Strategies such as repetition and mimicry blur the intended resonance or ‘truth’ attributed to each object, place, scene or character. As a result, Manik’s paintings often function as parafictions, interpolating personal experience within constricted frameworks of historical narrative. Manik received a BFA (Honours) from Curtin University in 2011. After relocating to Naarm/Melbourne, the artist completed a Master of Fine Art (Honours) at Monash University in 2012. Since then, he has exhibited widely across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand in institutional and commercial contexts. He has received institutional commissions by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA, 2022) and the Perth Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA, 2024). Additionally, his work has been featured in significant exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney; Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), Perth and the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), Adelaide. Recently, Manik was a resident artist at Gertrude Studios (2022-2024), previously undertaking residencies at Bundanon, NSW; DESA in Bali, Indonesia and the Australian Ballet in Naarm/Melbourne. His works are included in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Artbank, Lawson Flats and numerous private collections across Australia, New Zealand, North America and Europe.

Gladys Reynell (1881–1956) was one of South Australia's earliest potters and is known for her bold modernist style and her preference for working with native clays. In Adelaide she studied painting with Margaret Rose Preston, who became a close friend. In 1912 they went to Europe, living and studying in Paris and Brittany and enjoying an idyllic life as artists until 1913 when they moved to live and paint in London; they also taught in Ireland. Gladys exhibited with the Old Salon in Paris, with several English groups, and at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Walker Gallery, Liverpool. Reynell's work anticipated that of the influential English studio potter Bernard Leach. She espoused the English Arts and Craft Movement's ideals concerning the handcraft ethic, and the integrity and tradition of early craftsmen. She investigated and emulated the work of Gottlieb Zoerner, an early South Australian potter. Preston and Reynell lived, worked, travelled and exhibited together, and shared an intimate relationship from around 1911 until 1919. Both artists married shortly after their return to Australia, Preston in 1919, Reynell in 1922. Reynell's closeness to Margaret Preston is evident in Reynell's designs; the colour, form and primitivism. Reynell decorated her earthenware teapots, mugs, vases, plates, bowls and jugs, utilizing traditional English slipware and sgraffito techniques to produce abstract patterns, and to illustrate Australian fauna and flora, and local country and farm scenes which reveal her gentleness and warmth. Much of her work was finished with the characteristic rich 'Reynella blue' slip.