Database

Jacqui Stockdale (b. 1968) lives and works in Naarm, Melbourne, Australia. Having grown up in the rural town of Benalla, Victoria, Stockdale has established herself as an artist of international significance. Her multilayered art practice explores her fascination with the representation of the body, ritual, Australian history and constructed identity. Her work was celebrated through the 2016 exhibition Familija, surveying 15 years of her drawing, painting, collage and photography. Her survey show 'The Offering' was presented by the Tweed Regional Gallery in 2023. Jacqui has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and internationally and has been included in exhibitions such as Beating About the Bush, Art Gallery of Ballarat; 20/20, the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Magic Object, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, AGSA; Theatre of the World, MONA; Alles Masquerade, Museum Rot, Germany; Todays/Tomorrow, Cape Town, South Africa, Living Rooms, curated by Robert Wilson, Louvre Museum, Paris; Outlands, Volta, Switzerland; and Wonderworks, Hong Kong.

James Barth’s (b. 1993) work explores the themes of trans self-representation and embodiment. Trained as an oil painter, her recent work extends beyond the traditional through a layered creative process. Using 3D modelling software, Barth first renders avatars created in her likeness into detailed digital tableaux. Her compositions are then animated into video works and transmuted into oil paintings. To create her paintings, images of the artist’s compositions are silk-screen printed onto aluminium panels using oil paint. The wet paint is then brushed to soften the crisp lines of the synthetic imagery. The resulting works combine the virtual and the painterly. Barth’s unique practice reflects her interests in painting, self-portraiture, and film. Her monochrome works often depict domestic scenes, pairing idealistic imagery rendered in clean lines and shapes with imagined bodies overwhelmed by mess and decay. Mounds of organic materials, such as fruit peels and leftover food, are often left to sweat and decompose in the uncanny worlds of Barth’s avatars, who are imbued with a sense of ennui and listlessness. Barth’s recent solo and dual exhibitions include: *The Placeholder*, Milani Gallery (2021), *ZONWEE: the last known recording of a daydream* in collaboration with Spencer Harvie, Boxcopy (2019), *Screen Tests*, Milani Gallery CARPARK (2019), *Assuming a Surface*, Outerspace (2018) and *Otonaroid*, Woolloongabba Art Gallery (2015). Their work has been featured in a number of group exhibitions including *Embodied Knowledge*, Queensland Art Gallery; *New Woman*, Museum of Brisbane (2019); Melbourne Art Fair; and *Crossexions*, Metro Arts and The Cross Art Projects, Sydney (2016), among others. Barth is currently completing a residency in Metro Arts Visual Arts Pathfinders Program. In 2016 Barth obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) with first class Honours at Griffith University Queensland College of Art (Southbank). Currently, Barth is completing a Doctorate of Visual Arts at the Queensland College of Art.

James Gleeson (1915-2008) was regarded as Australia's foremost surrealist painter, though was also known for his simultaneous career as a prominent poet, critic and writer. Gleeson's interest in the Surrealist movement began after he read Salvador Dali's 1935 book *The Conquest of the Irrational*. Though his work remained invested in the realms of the subconscious and the psychoanalytic, Gleeson's practice shifted in its style and subject matter across his long career. In 1949 during three months abroad in Italy, Gleeson became fascinated by the work of the Renaissance painter Michelangelo, becoming a self-declared "classicist" for a time. Similarly inspired by Michelangelo and their shared identities as homosexual men, Gleeson looked to the nude male form as a symbol of beauty. In later work, he would turn away from a direct depiction of male beauty, eschewing more realist depiction for increasingly abstract and distorted forms as a means of showing the equal presence of ugliness in life. Gleeson also made contributions to Australian art history as a writer, including texts such as 1969's *Masterpieces of Australian Art* and monographs on the work of fellow Australian painter William Dobell (1964) and Robert Klippel (1983). Gleeson met his life partner Frank O'Keefe, a former designer for David Jones, in 1948. The pair lived together in their home studio in Northbridge, NSW (which Gleeson had built in 1952) for nearly sixty years until O'Keefe's death in 2007. The entire Gleeson O'Keefe estate was gifted as a bequest to the Art Gallery of New South Wales upon Gleeson's death in 2008.

The artistic partnership of Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley was established in 1985 and engages with legacies of modernism that include a wide range of references from psychoanalysis to film, as well as minimal, conceptual and pop art. Burchill (b.1955) was born in Narrm/Melbourne and McCamley (b.1957) was Born in Meanjin/Brisbane. Both began making Super-8 shorts and photographic work together in the early 1980s. Their work is born out of a post-modern context, their opaque referentiality intertwines filmic and art-historical references. Rooted in feminist, Lesbian, and political art practices, their work frequently incorporates texts from Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, Valerie Solanas, and Simone Weil. Burchill and McCamley have exhibited widely around Australia since they began making together in the 1980s, having shown at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; among many others. They have been included in recent major group exhibitions such as *Unfinished Business*, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2017) and *Tarrawarra Biennial: Endless Circulation*, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Healesville (2016).

Janet Agnes Cumbrae Stewart (1883-1960) was a successful Australian painter born in Brighton, Victoria. Most well-known for her female nudes, she was considered one of the leading pastel artists of her generation. Originally trained at the Melbourne National Gallery School under the tutelage of Frederick McCubbin and Bernard Hall, Stewart participated in the First Exhibition of Women's Work in Melbourne in 1907. She left Australia for London in 1922, holding her first solo exhibition at Walkers Gallery in London in 1924, where her work *A Young Woman Seated on the Bed* was acquired for the Royal Collection, possibly at the request of Queen Mary. In the 1920s and 30s she travelled extensively, exhibiting in France, Britain and Italy while continuing to present solo shows in Melbourne, Brisbane, South Australia and Sydney. She returned to Australia with her "companion" Miss Argemore Farrington Bellairs ("Billy") on board the Dutch ship Meliskerk from Antwerp in 1937. According to Peter Di Sciasco, Billy was a "distinctive and enterprising woman of independent means who dressed in masculine attire". The pair lived together in South Yarra and at a property in Hurstbridge until Cumbrae Stewart's death in 1960. Her work is held in numerous collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Bendigo Regional Gallery, the Royal Collection London and the Museo del Novocento in Milan. Despite her achievements during her lifetime, her work has been sparsely exhibited in Australia.

Jane Trengove (b. 1953) is a disabled artist living and working in Narrm/Melbourne on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung First Peoples. Trengove’s visual art practice is multi-disciplinary and she has extensive skills in the coordination/curation of visual arts, project development, production, and arts administration. Trengove’s work often contests the relevance of contemporary art in wider social/political debates, such as gender, sexuality, race, and disability. Trengove engages ideas of perception and the primacy of sight, with an interest in the way cultural meanings are affected by the way we ‘see’, and how representation can be used to interrogate these meanings. She has exhibited widely, including locally, interstate and overseas and is currently represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. To support her visual arts career Trengove has been employed across a range of professional platforms, and has worked closely with government, arts industry, and community organizations to increase the participation of Deaf and disabled people in cultural life of Australia. Recent projects include: *Other Body Knowledge: Contending with the mythic norm*, KINGS Artist Run Space, Melbourne (2022, artist/co-curator with Katie Ryan); *S/He*, Australian Catholic University Gallery, Melbourne (2022, collaboration with Susan Long for Midsumma Melbourne); *XXX: Celebrating 30 Years of Sutton Gallery*, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (2022); *Ceci n’est pas*, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (2019); and *Fem-A-Finity* NETS touring show (2019–22, curated by Catherine Bell). Other projects related to LGBTQI+ include: *Microfiction*, Performance Space, Sydney (2002, a collaboration with Susan Long for Flaming Muses, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras); *SLIT!*, Gertrude Contemporary (2000, a collaboration with Susan Long for Midsumma Melbourne); *Sex Fluffies*, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (1997, for *Juice*, curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras); and *Tender Buttons*, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (1993, curated by Juliana Engberg for the *E-sensual Fragments* series).

Jarrod van der Ryken's multidisciplinary practice spans the mediums of photography, video, and sculpture, often resulting in immersive video installation. His work probes themes of identity and representation, juxtaposing the realities of solitary artistic endeavour with the socially interconnected landscape. Within this framework, van der Ryken navigates the tensions between permanence and ephemerality, tradition and innovation, drawing from personal experiences to prompt reflection on broader societal constructs. Embracing the complexities of lived experience, his practice challenges viewers to confront their own preconceptions while contemplating the interplay of personal history and cultural context within contemporary art discourse. Van der Ryken completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) at the Queensland University of Technology and has presented solo exhibitions at CARPARK, Wreckers Upstairs, Outer Space, Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space, and Metro Arts in Brisbane, Firstdraft and Galerie Pompom in Sydney, and Screenspace in Melbourne.

Jazz Money is a Wiradjuri poet and artist whose practice is centred around poetics to produce works that encompass installation, digital, performance, film and print. Their writing has been widely published nationally and internationally, and performed on stages around the world. Jazz’s practice is interested in understanding how legacy and story manifest within and around us, focussing on not only hardship but also the joy, love and strength that we inherit. Jazz’s first poetry collection, the best-selling how to make a basket (UQP, 2021) was the 2020 winner of the David Unaipon Award. Their second collection mark the dawn will be released in 2024 with UQP. Jazz’s first feature film is WINHANGANHA (2023), commissioned by the National Film and Sound Archive.

Jeffrey Smart AO (1921–2013) was born in Adelaide, though spent most of his working life abroad in Italy, leaving Australia for Rome in 1963. Smart passed away at home in Arezzo, Tuscany in 2013. During his long and significant career, Smart established himself as a popular and critically regarded artist in Australia. Despite his success being focused particularly within his country of birth, Smart connected with international styles and approaches, looking to the work of the French painter Paul Cézanne, Italian painter Piero della Francesca and northern Renaissance artist Rogier van der Weyden as points of inspiration. In 1948, Smart travelled to Paris to study under the French cubist Fernand Léger at the Académie Montmartre. Smart was acclaimed especially for his urban and industrial landscapes which sustained a distinctive, highly-finished style that generate an uncanny sense of reality. Within Smart's urban scenes, human figures are frequently divided by the architecture of city space, suggesting a quality of alienation from modern living, perhaps relevant to the artist's sexuality and sense of dislocation from Australian culture. The late artist's paintings are held in major public and private collections in Australia and also overseas including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Jenna Lee (b. 1992) is a queer Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater woman with mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian ancestry. Using art to explore and celebrate her many overlapping identities, Lee works across sculpture, installation, and body adornment. She also works with moving images, photography and projection in the digital medium. With a practice focused on materiality and ancestral material culture, Lee works with notions of the archive, histories of colonial collecting, and settler-colonial books and texts. Lee ritualistically analyses, deconstructs and reconstructs source material, language and books, transforming them into new forms of cultural beauty and pride, and presenting a tangibly translated book. She is the recipient of the Wandjuk Marika 3D Memorial Award at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA); the Australia Council’s Dreaming Award; and, the Libris Artist Book Prize. She has been a finalist in national awards, including the prestigious John Fries Award for emerging and early career artists, the Footscray Art Prize, the National Works on Paper Prize, and the KWM Contemporary First Nations Art Award. Lee has exhibited in several national and international museums and galleries, including the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford UK, the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), the Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory, QUT Art Gallery, and Griffith University Art Gallery. Formally trained as a graphic designer, Lee has a Bachelor of Visual Communication Design and a Postgraduate Certificate in Museum Studies.

Jeremy Eaton (b.1990) is an artist and writer who works in arts publishing. Over the last six years Eaton has been concerned with exploring various underrepresented homosocial histories to develop print, sculptural, drawing and text-based artworks. Engaging with cinema, literature, art history and social history, Eaton maps potential subtexts that pervade repeated gestures, correlative material use across design and art, and the queer contexts that underpin these relationships. Eaton has presented solo exhibitions at LON Gallery, Bundoora Homestead, BUS Projects and West Space and has been included in group exhibitions at LaTrobe art Institute, Incinerator Gallery, Sutton Projects, Platform Arts, Fiona Sydney Myer Gallery, Sarah Scout Presents, Dominik Mersch Gallery and CAVES.

Jesse Symon (b.1978), a transmasculine multidisciplinary artist, has pushed boundaries to explore diverse identities and human experience since the late 1990s. Their work challenges traditional art spaces and champions marginalized voices. Their sculptural series titled "Transformers" is a prime example. These mixed-media sculptures invite interaction, questioning ideas of permanence and identity through the incorporation of evocative materials. Plaster casts of hot water bottles provided a sense of comfort, while hearts symbolized the complexities of the mind. Lungs, strings, and the delicate balance of these elements alluded to the fragility of life and the tension between bodily needs and societal expectations. Inspired by figures like Del Lagrace Volcano, Jesse has researched lived experiences of trans communities, creating a visual archive of their stories. Despite a traditional fine arts background (Victorian College of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from RMIT, where they made painting, sound, video installations and large photographic works), Jesse continuously faced resistance from established galleries. This led them to alternative spaces that aligned with their social advocacy. Jesse curates exhibitions for other marginalized artists, prioritizing authenticity over mainstream acceptance (Transmen Translated 2007, Transmasculinities 2010, Moments of Being 2015, Brighton Pride 2018). Most recently their work, large oil paintings, has resurfaced forgotten or erased aspects of queer history, meticulously reconstructing and crafting new narratives. Artwork that challenges rising oppression and transphobia resulting from increased awareness and visibility.

Jessica Rankin (b. 1971) lives and works in New York. She had a two person exhibition with her then partner artist Julie Mehretu, who she originally met in a gay bar in the year 2000, entitled *Earthfold* at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Belgium in 2016. Selected solo exhibitions include SCAD, Atlanta; PS1 Contemporary Arts Center, New York; and Franklin Artworks, Minneapolis. She is featured in public collections such as Saatchi Gallery, London and Touchstones, Rochdale, UK. "Being queer", she has said, "you are constantly inventing everything."

Jillposters was a feminist poster group formed in Melbourne in 1983. It was a loose and informal configuration of women, only some of whom identified as artists. Posters, and later postcards, were printed in a variety of places including the University of Melbourne Student Union printmaking room and Philip Institute of Technology printmaking studio at the Bundoora campus. Additionally, occasional printing was done in sheds and individual artist’s studios. Initially the posters were printed primarily for street paste up, although a portion were usually reserved for sale and exhibition in bookshops and galleries throughout Australia and New Zealand. Whilst initially self funded by the members, income was later generated through sales which went back into production costs. Final posters and postcards were produced around 1988 by which time the group had largely disbanded. Members at various times included: Carole Wilson, Deej Fabyc, Julia Church, Julie Shiels, Lesley Baxter, Julie Higginbotham, Zana Dare, Barb Miles, Lin Tobias, Maggie Fooke, Kath Walters, Ally Black, Catriona Holyoake, Chaz, Kate Reeves, Julia Tobin, Karen, Linda Rhodes and Linda Brassel.

Jim Anderson (b. 1937) is an artist, editor and novelist. Born in England, his family moved to Australia when he was one year old. He spent his childhood on farms in the Orange and Cowra districts and then travelled to Sydney, where he studied law. After graduating from the University of Sydney he went to London where he joined Richard Neville and Felix Dennis as a co-editor of *Oz* magazine in 1969. In 1971, the three were jailed for publishing ‘obscene material’ – convictions that were quashed six months later. After *Oz* folded in 1973, Anderson travelled in Africa and the USA, eventually settling in Bolinas in northern California. His first novel, *Billarooby*, was published in 1988 and reissued in 2016. Since returning to Australia in 1993, Anderson has continued his career as a writer and photographer within the gay community. In 2011 Tin Sheds Gallery mounted a retrospective of his work called *Lampoon: An Art Historical Trajectory 1970 – 2017*, which featured magazine covers, posters, photographs and satirical collages. The show subsequently toured to Maitland Regional Art Gallery.

Jo Darbyshire is a West Australian painter and social history curator. In 2003, while undertaking a Master of Creative Arts in Cultural Heritage at Curtin University, she worked as artist-in-residence at the WA Museum to create a groundbreaking exhibition 'The Gay Museum: the history of lesbian and gay history in Western Australia'. The exhibition questioned the prevailing hetero-normative paradigm in museum collections and the assumption that ‘everything was straight until proven otherwise’. She uses strategies from the visual arts such as juxtaposition, found objects, text as a visual tool, together with rigorous research skills, poetry, humour, and a touch of courage to investigate the idea of the ‘absence of evidence’ in museum and art galleries.

Combining the rigours of geometry with soft organic forms, John Meade (b. 1956) works in an intuitive way to materialise his ideas, creating tightly orchestrated pieces that explore the metaphysical, the surreal and the erotic. Meade’s use of colour, material, and surface, culminate in eccentric and immaculate sculptures that claim space with a formidable presence. Born in Ballarat, the Naarm/Melbourne-based sculptor is one of Australia’s leading artists and has held regular exhibitions with galleries and museums since 1995. Selected solo exhibitions include: *Sign Language*, RMIT Project Space, Melbourne (2021); *Something for Everyone*, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (2019); *Set Pieces*, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (2016); *Autumn 2014*, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (2014); *Objects to Live By: The Art of John Meade*, Latrobe Valley Regional Gallery and touring nationally (2010–11); *Show Business*, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (2009); *Incident in the Museum 2: John Meade*, Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne (2005); *Dreamer*, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne (2004); *Objects and Protestations*, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (2003); *Propulsion*, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne and Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney, (both 2001). Selected group exhibitions include: *LAZAR!*, Haydens Gallery, Melbourne (2022); *Who’s Afraid of Public Space?*, ACCA, Melbourne (2022); *Connecting the World through Sculpture: In the Air*, MUMA, Melbourne (2021); *…(illegible)…*, MADA Gallery, Melbourne (2019); *Brent Harris/John Meade*, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2018); *TarraWarra Biennial: From Will to Form*, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville (2018); *Benglis 73/74*, Neon Parc in association with Sutton Project Space and TCB, Melbourne (2014); *The Gathering ll: A Survey of Australian Sculpture*, Wangaratta Art Gallery, Wangaratta, 2014; *Sleep on the Left Side*, Gallery Seven Art, New Delhi (2012); *ShContemporary 08*, Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, China (2008); *Before The Body – Matter*, MUMA, Melbourne (2006); *Adventures with Form in Space*, AGNSW, Sydney (2006); *21st Century Modern: Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art*, Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), Adelaide (2006). Meade has completed numerous public sculptural commissions including: *Asterisk Kolam* (2020), ARM Architecture/MUMA, for the Monash Chancellery, Clayton; *Love Flower* (2019), Southern Way McClelland 2018 Commission, Melbourne; *Everyday Devotional* (2016), Sunland, Abian commission, Brisbane; *Riverside Corolla* (2011), DEXUS Southgate commission, Melbourne; *Progeny* (2006), Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; *Aqualung* (2006), Victoria Harbour, Melbourne; and *Mean Yellow* (2000), Arts Centre for the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Meade received his PhD in Fine Art from Monash University, Melbourne in 2017. He was a recipient of the Samstag Scholarship (UniSA), through which he completed a Master of Studio Art at New York University in 2004. He is currently an Honorary (Fellow) in Art, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), University of Melbourne. Artist residencies include the VCA/Art+Australia Phasmid Studio Residency in Berlin in 2019, and the India Asialink residency in 1998. Meade’s work is held in public and private collections throughout Australia. He is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne.

John Richard Passmore (1904-1984) was born in Redfern, Sydney, and trained at Julian Ashton's School before moving to London: "Passmore arrives in England in 1933, having left his wife of five years and three-year-old child behind. According to the curator of his 1984 retrospective, Barry Pearce, it was an unhappy relationship from the beginning. In London, he stayed in the Bayswater flat of William Dobell, an old friend from art school in Sydney, where each morning they would model for each other. Indeed, Passmore is said to be the model for Dobell’s 'Boy Bathing' (1939) as well as for 'Boy Washing' (c.1933). The twenty-eight-year old Passmore then almost immediately finds work as a commercial artist for Lintas, the advertising arm of Unilever, where he soon became “close friends” with the English painter Keith Vaughan, who is eight years his junior, and befriends the queer New Zealand painter, illustrator and muralist Felix Kelly. For Pearce, “Vaughan idolised Passmore and, to a certain extent, Passmore reciprocated his attention”. Passmore is “remembered by colleagues at Lintas as being snappily dressed with a penchant for orange or yellow knitted ties against vivid shirts, his whistling of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ballet music at his desk and a shy, courteous manner that kept others at a distance”. He returned to Australia in 1951 and taught at Julian Ashton School. John Olsen was one of his pupils. Passmore died in 1984 in Stanmore, survived by one son and his wife, who he never divorced. In his will, Passmore left the entirety of the Passmore Trust to one Elinor Wrobel, who he had met at an art gallery. His work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, all State collections and many regional galleries and university collections. Extract from Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson "The Myth of Heterosexuality: Queer Australian Artists, Art Historians and Gallerists in London, 1930-1961", forthcoming 2024, with quotes from Barry Pearce, *John Passmore* (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 1985).