Database

Marcus Bunyan is a gay, disabled artist who works with all forms of image making. His artistic practice investigates the boundaries between identity, space and environment. He trained as a classical black and white photographer, then moving through colour, installation and found images in his art practice. Marcus curates the art and cultural memory archive Art Blart (November 2008 onwards) which posts mainly photography based exhibitions from around the world, with insightful research and commentary. With over 1,450 posts in its archive, the thirteen year old website is a research tool and a form of cultural memory. It has a readership of 3,000 people a day and over 5,000 likes on Facebook. The site is being archived by Pandora from the National Library of Australia. https://artblart.com

Margaret Rose Preston (1875–1963) was one of Australia’s most significant painters and a key figure in the development of modern art in Sydney from the 1920s to the 1950s. Preston championed a distinctly Australian style that was at times controversially based on elements of modernist, Aboriginal and Asian art. Born in Adelaide, Preston went on to study at the National Gallery of Victoria school from 1893–94 and 1896–97, and then at the Adelaide School of Design in 1898. Her first relationship was with artist Bessie Davidson, a former pupil, and the pair travelled and studied in Europe together extensively for several years before returning to Adelaide and leasing a studio together in 1907. After their relationship ended, Preston went back to France and Brittany in 1912 with her ‘intimate companion’, the artist and potter Gladys Reynell, whom she had also taught in Adelaide. It was on her return to Australia in 1919 that she met her future husband, William George Preston, and the pair were married later the same year. Settling in Sydney, Preston worked on her now well-known still life paintings that resonate with the avant-garde art in Europe, characterised by bold geometric shapes and black outlines. Preston would go on to travel extensively throughout the Pacific, Asia, India and Africa where she gained an interest in non-European art and culture. These styles and motifs were incorporated into her paintings as she sought to create a visual language that engaged Australia’s place within the Asia Pacific region.

Mary Cockburn Mercer (1882–1963) was an Australian painter prominent in the interwar period who became known for her decadent nudes. Born in Scotland, Mercer grew up in the Western Districts of Victoria, Australia until moving to Europe with her mother as a young teenager to complete her education. At seventeen Mercer ran away to Paris where she lived a bohemian life in Montparnasse, making friends with numerous artists including Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. During the 1920s Mercer worked at L’Académie Lhote in Paris as a studio assistant. During this time Mercer became intimate with Janet Cumbrae Stewart, a relationship that would reignite many years later in Melbourne, Australia. During Mercer’s time in France, much like other Australians including Grace Crowley and Dorrit Black, she was influenced by André Lhote’s teachings that promoted Cubism and combinations of basic geometric forms. Before returning to Australia in 1938, Mercer lived in Cassis, on the island of Capri, Spain, Tahiti and an island off Guam where she met the painter, Ian Fairweather. After returning to Melbourne, Mercer rented an apartment on Bourke Street where she lived and held art classes, her students included Lina Bryans and Colin McCahon. Mercer exhibited her work with the Contemporary Art Society, often shocking audiences with her frank depiction of sexuality. In 1953 Mercer returned to France where she would stay until she died in 1963.

Mathew Jones (b. 1961) is an Australian-born contemporary artist who also took British citizenship during a 20-year sojourn in the UK. Jones completed a BA at the Victorian College of the Arts, a MA at London Metropolitan University, and a PhD at Monash University. Since the late 1980s his work has dealt with the double-edged complexities of gay identity and queer theory. He has held over 20 solo exhibitions in Australia, New York and Canada and been included in over 45 group exhibitions throughout all Australian states and in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, São Paulo, Caracas, Copenhagen, New York and London. A survey of his photographic work from 1989 to 1994 was held at Monash Art Gallery in 2016. He was artist-in-residence at PS1 Museum, New York 1995/6, and the Acme Studio in London in 2001. He received an Australia Council Fellowship in 2003. His earliest work such as *Silence = Death* (200 Gertrude St, Melbourne; Artspace, Sydney; and Institute of Modern Art Brisbane throughout 1991) embraced notions of silence and refusal as political strategies in ways that pre-empt the interests of many younger queer artists today. *I Feel Like Chicken Tonight* (Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne; Canberra Contemporary Artspace, Canberra, and Artspace, Sydney throughout 1995) highlighted the expulsion of NAMBLA from ILGA during the mainstreaming of gay politics, whilst *Poof!* (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 1993 and 1995) exploded the idea of a stable gay identity and *The New York Daily News …* pined for a time before Stonewall. Other projects of note include *A Place I’ve Never Seen* (Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo; Optica, Montreal; and Ace Art, Winnipeg), and, *Mathew Jones & Simon Starling* (Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2002), and several public art projects. If his work of the 1990s critiqued gay identity politics he is more likely now to bemoan the hegemony of queer politics and recent works look backwards at creative ways we can forge gay links with artists of the past.

Matthew Harris’ (b.1991) practice often debases dominant hierarchies through socially critical and conceptual painting and sculpture. A queer sensibility and rhythmic seriality runs throughout his practice, with earlier works challenging conventions of taste and class, riffing on historical imagery with abject figuration in lurid colour palettes. More recently, Harris collides materials, traditional First Nations techniques and minimal abstraction in new ways. Harris was born in Wangaratta in 1991 of mixed European and Koorie descent. He has exhibited widely in Australia as well as internationally. Select solo and duo shows include Panopticon, Conners Connors, Melbourne, 2022; Spiritual Poverty, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne, 2022; Doom, Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne 2022; Goo, FUTURES, Melbourne, 2021; The Simple Life, Galerie Pompom, Sydney, 2021; and Hell, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2018. Select group exhibitions include *Between Waves*, Australia Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2023 and *Choose Happiness*, Murray Art Museum, Albury, 2021. He was a Gertrude Contemporary Studio artist between 2020-2023. His work is held in public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2024 he will present work as part of the Yokohama Triennial in Japan.

Michele Barker is an artist and academic working in the field of media arts with a focus on experimental cinema as a way of exploring the perception and experience of time and embodied engagement with the environment. Her work, in extensive collaboration with Anna Munster, has been included in Vidarte, the Mexican Biennale of Video Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Taipei, The Photographer’s Gallery, London; FILE Festival, Sao Paolo; Museum of Art, Seoul; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Out of a residency at Eyebeam in New York they developed the award-winning work, *Struck*, which has been exhibited in Australia, the US, China and Taiwan. Largescale works include: *évasion*, an 8-channel responsive installation; and the multi-channel interactive work, *HokusPokus*, jury-selected to represent Australasia as part of the International Festival of Digital Art and the Cultural Olympiad in London in 2012. In 2017, they were commissioned to create *pull* for Experimenta Make Sense: Triennial of Media Art, touring Australia, 2017–20, and most recently, *hold* (2019), both of which use water as a force outside humans’ short ‘moment’ in geological time in order to explore time and embodied perception. Currently, as the result of an Ars Bioarctica residency in Kilpisjärvi, they are working on a new project that extends our examination of duration and felt experience into the realm of geotime.

Neil Emmerson (b. 1956) is an Australian artist and printmaker whose work often features homoerotic elements. His practice addresses personal identity, as well as the experiences and politics of being a gay man, both in Western culture, as well as in China and East Asia. He studied painting at the Victorian College of the Arts from 1978 to 1980, and later completed a Masters of Fine Arts at Deakin University, Melbourne. Emmerson's work is collected in the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki, and he is featured in the 2012 book, *101 Contemporary Australian Artists*. Until 2021, Emmerson was a senior lecturer, and head of Dunedin School of Art's print studio. In 2006 he won the Fremantle Print Award.

Nell (b. 1975) is an Australian artist whose multidisciplinary practice crosses performance, sculpture, music, painting and immersive installation. Born in Maitland, NSW, Nell studied under Lindy Lee at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney (1995), with Joan Jonas and John Baldessari at the University of California Los Angeles (1996) and with Annette Messager at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2006). Nell’s work has been included in hundreds of exhibitions in Australia and abroad. Early in her exhibiting career, she was selected for *Primavera: Young Australian Artists* at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (1999), the annual curated exhibition of Australian artists aged under 35 years. Other significant exhibitions include: *Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2016: Magic Object*, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2016); *The National: New Australian Art*, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2017); and *Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now*, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2021). In 2016, Shepparton Art Museum presented an eponymously titled survey exhibition of Nell’s works, *NE/LL*. A monograph on her work, published by Thames and Hudson, was released in 2020.

Nick Henderson is an art historian, curator and archivist at the National Film and Sound Archives. He is also a volunteer committee member, curator and archivist at the Australian Queer Archives (AQuA). Nick has worked as a curator and archivist across national and state cultural institutions for two decades, including the National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia, National Archives of Australia and the Australian Performing Arts Collection at the Arts Centre Melbourne.