Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.

Motherhood, childhood wounds and Freudian nightmares preoccupied the great sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who was especially iconic to younger followers in the latter part of her life. One of them was Philip Larratt-Smith, who became her literary archivist. He talks to Daniel about the importance of psychoanalysis on the artist. A new exhibition of Louise Bourgeois is on at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.  My thing is... the 'souvenirs' of consumerism. Artist Joyce Lubotzky takes plastic...

A culture that flourished 3,500 years ago in Thailand. They made jewellery and ceramics, not war.  You may never have heard of Ban Chiang —That’s possibly because the objects that tell the story of this fascinating archaeological site are in limbo, caught between voracious collectors, tomb-raiding locals and undercover federal agents. Art historian Dr Melody Rod-ari tells Daniel the story. My Thing is... Black Histories. Prince made 'Purple Rain' famous, but five years later in 1989, a group...

Vasily Kandinsky was a pioneer of abstract painting, writing influential theories on spirituality and colour. But for all his correspondence, his inner life can be hidden to art historians, the Guggenheim's Megan Fontanella tells Daniel. And with the discovery of earlier abstract painters like Hilma Af Klint and Georgiana Houghton, does labelling Kandinsky 'the first' still apply? Daniel speaks to Megan on the new eve of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. Inside the Victorian...

The town of New Norcia in WA is a monastery in the bush, home to a community of Benedictine monks and a treasure chest of 17th and 16th c. European religious art -- all of which was stolen in a brazen heist in 1986. It's an art crime that RN's Marc Fennell set out to unpack with art historian and fraud expert Dr Pamela James in a new SBS TV series. My Thing is… The Resilience Coat. Rowena and Angela Foong, from the label High Tea with Mrs Woo, have designed a coat for all bodies, all trends...

Catherine Sarah Young is an artist working with science to talk about the climate crisis. Most recently, she's making art about petrichor -- the smell of recent rain emanating from the earth, and what it might be like when fire and flood obliterate it... or what petrichor smells like on Mars! Catherine is the Art Show's ABC RN Top 5 resident. When James Tylor discovered the laborious but beautiful 19th C. photography method of daguerreotype, he found a medium that expressed the darkness of...

US artist Lonnie Holley is a prolific maker of things - whether it’s his assemblages of found objects or the fluid, jazz-style improvisations of his music. He’s one of those polymath creative spirits who don’t separate one artform from the other. But his life of improvisational creativity wasn’t a certainty for Lonnie, who was born 73 years ago in the Jim Crow era in a hotbed of racial politics in America’s Deep South.  Classicist Mary Beard examines art inspired by the lives and excesses of...

We start this week's episode on a lapping city harbour where Quandamooka artist Megan Cope has prepared 85,000 oyster shells for her monumental artwork Whispers for the 50th anniversary of the Sydney Opera House —  before that, it's where Gadigal people gathered for thousands of years. Tarek Atoui is attuned to the sounds of harbours -- from Sydney to Beirut, Porto to Singapore, the Lebanese sound artist records the many frequencies and sounds that make up the bodies of water around which...

How important is the 'social license' provided by arts events to fossil fuel companies? How significant is the money provided to art festivals by those companies? A recent study examines the current involvement of coal, gas, and oil corporations in arts sponsorship in Australia. Daniel speaks with the report's co-author Dr Adam Karg, Anna Weekes from a group that spearheaded a campaign to end fossil fuel funding of the Darwin Festival, and filmmaker Alex Kelly. My Thing is... nuclear test...

How do the much-talked about principles of care ethics apply to visual arts? Whether it be the treatment of others in the commercial art world, the trope of the lone male genius, or the practices of contemporary artists navigating political and environmental crisis. Jacqueline Millner has co-edited the book Care Ethics and Art and joins Daniel in convo with artist Jesse Boylan. Social societies make the happiest, so why don’t more artists join artist collectives? Even better, a festival of...

Newell Harry is one of those people that finds the connections, the invisible networks and chance encounters - that link us all. In his exhibition Esperanto Newell makes use of found objects and sourced materials alongside his own original artworks. The story it weaves is full of cross-cultural connections --from South Africa, where his family fled Apartheid, to Oceania. But also driven by moments of serendipity and linguistic twists and turns. My Thing is... the colour wheel. Jim Moginie is...

Hoda Afshar is a photo media artist known for examining people denied a voice, or those risking everything for freedom, or truth. At the same time, Hoda is  is also concerned with the politics of traditional documentary photography, and centres the humanity of her subjects. From her portraits of refugees detained on Manus Island, to immortalising whistleblowers as classical Greek statues and a series inspired by Iran's feminist uprising. Hoda's  first major solo exhibition at an...

Kara Walker is one of America’s most significant living artists, known for cut-paper silhouettes and gigantic public sculptures, using the visual artefacts of slavery in nightmarish black and white scenes. At the heart is an exploration of race, sexuality and gender, and a critique of white supremacy. Could the black-humoured delivery of the message get lost on Australian audiences? Hopefully not – two of her works, Your World is About to Change and a film, Testimony: Narrative of a Negress...

There's an enduring appetite for novels about artists and their muses. Australian writers Kylie Needham (Girl in a Pink Dress) and Edwina Preston (Bad Art Mother) have written books centred on women artists who are navigating ambition, doubt, and freedom in art scenes where men wield the power and where women are routinely cast as muses rather than as creators. Recorded for RN's Big Weekend of Books 2023. Larrakia artist Gary Lee has led a powerfully creative life including pioneering work...

A life-size sculpted tree complete with parrots and a wandering dog won the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Art Awards (NATSIAA). Every element has ceremonial significance, says Thu' and Apalech artist Keith Wikmunea, from Western Cape York.  Brenda L Croft's 19th Century-style photograph tells a multi-layered story of family bonds and forced child removal. While Anne Nginyangka Thompson's ceramics contain a message about Anangu self determination and the everyday consequences  of...

Finnish artist Tove Jansson lived a richly unconventional life as a visual artist and writer and is best known as the creator of the troll characters, The Moomins. The Moomins were a hit children's book, cartoon strip, tv show and eventually theme park. The biggest exhibition of Jansson work will show in Paris in September 2023. Her biographer Prof Boel Westin talks about her bohemian life and enduring legacy. Filmmaker Adéla Komrzý spent a week filming the gruelling entrance exams for...

Since 2008 CoUNTess has been commenting and reporting on art institutions, prizes and journalism, exposing the unequal gender representation in the Australian visual arts sector. A new book about the pioneering blog and later, data project Countess Report, started by Elvis Richardson has been co-written by Melinda Rackham. Using the current of water as a metaphor for family memories, history and existential threats such as climate change, Gail Mabo along with Dominic White and Lisa Waup, are...

In 1989 photographer Anne Zahalka recreated a well-known painting of stylised, muscular white Australians frolicking on the beach, into a multi-ethnic tableau of an Australia that was more recognisable to her. Deconstructing the identity of the characters in famous Australian artworks is just one strand of her four-decade career. Anne talks to Rosa about using old-school museum dioramas to imagine climate crisis scenarios, and her immigrant Jewish mother’s story of survival. My Thing is…the...

Badiucao is a Chinese-Australian political cartoonist and artist who makes work primarily about China's human rights record and role in international politics. But with a rising profile has come a loss of anonymity, reported intimidation and attempts to have international exhibitions of his work closed. He talks to Rosa about Chinese government censorship, cartooning, his art heroes and his filmmaking lineage. My Thing is… the Sydney Harbour cocktail cabinet. Woodworker Michael Gill has been...

Painter Prudence Flint has a career spanning 35 years, best known for enigmatic pictures of female protagonists in surreal domestic scenes. Despite a serious local following, her paintings have proved much more popular overseas, and she only produces around eight a year. All situate the viewer in an interesting psychological space. A Beginner’s guide to art openings. The art exhibition opening is a rite of passage for artists and art lovers alike, but it can be an intimidating and...

Maree Clarke is a key figure in the reclamation and revival of South East Australian Indigenous art, over a three-decade career. For Between Waves at the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art (ACCA), she’s created a wall of multicolour microscopic images of river reeds, that once grew on the wetlands where ACCA now stands, on Wuruendjeri Woi Wurrung land. She's one of ten artists from South East nations that curator Jessica Clark has commissioned to explore the "shapeshifting ecologies...

When did artists begin doing ‘residencies’? From the patronage system of Renaissance Italy, to artists’ colonies of the 19th Century and the decades-long stint of an artist-in-residence at the NYC Sanitation Department,  researcher Amaara Raheem tells us the history and ideas behind the Artist-in-Residence. Producer Lisa Divissi catches up with the artist-in-residence of Melbourne’s Footscray Railway Station, David Wells. And artists Nicole Barakat, Nikki Lam and Gegee Ayurzana share messages...

Gunditjmara artist Hayley Millar Baker sets her latest film work at the witching hour, when the spirit world and physical overlap. Hayley previously worked in black and white photography, exploring the psychic scars of frontier violence and dispossession. Ghosts have always been present in Hayley’s work – and in her life. She’s part of the acclaimed new exhibition Shadow Spirit, on at at Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station. Marc Chagall is the quintessential 20th Century European artist....

Pierre Bonnard was a key artist in a movement that came after Impressionism: Les Nabis. Influenced by the flat colour and decorative elements of Japanese wood prints and Gauguin’s pure colours, Bonnard forged a style that was both radical and beautiful. Curator of the NGV’s winter blockbuster, Ted Gott and Musee d’Orsay’s Isabelle Cahn, discuss Bonnard’s life and long relationship with his wife and muse Marthe de Meligny. Enter the studio of Michaye Boulter, a nipaluna/Hobart-based painter...