Behind the Art

Michelle Taranto is a Queensland-based artist, based on Darumbal Country, who's vibrant, joy-filled practice celebrates colour, comfort, and the wonder of everyday life. Since establishing her Yeppoon home studio in 2021 under the name Arco Iris Interiors , she has developed a distinct visual language that embraces bold palettes, playful compositions, and a maximalist approach to both art and living. Taranto’s paintings draw inspiration from her beloved dogs, her collection of tropical plants and cacti, and the coastal landscapes of Central Queensland. These influences often merge in unexpected ways—abstract botanicals intertwining with animal portraits, or whimsical roomscapes infused with humour and warmth.

On the afternoon of the opening of Too Deadly: Ten Years of Tarnanthi , Dr Melinda Mann has a yarn with Judy Watson one of the exhibiting artist's in the exhibition and Nathan Mudyi Sentance, RMOA First Nations Reference Group Chair.

Meanjin/Brisbane based artist, writer, and educator Sally Molloy's practice explores colonial pasts and presents as they relate to her everyday life through an open-ended engagement with Australian landscape painting history, the backyard, and popular culture. This framework provides a sweaty context for critique, loaded with the potential for meaning making, affect, and contemplation.Molloy works with painting, collage, sculpture, sound, and poetry often challenging the implied hierarchy of media with her strategically naïve aesthetic, humour, and enthusiasm for play. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has contributed to large-scale public artworks in South-East and Regional Queensland.

Three generations of Darumbal women, Nhaya Nikki, Kristina Hatfield & LeLarnie Hatfield having a yarn to celebrate NAIDOC week, 50 years of Deadly.

Best known for her evocative self-portraiture and collaborative storytelling through Modor & Dohter, a creative partnership with her daughter, Hoare’s practice explores identity, transformation and the unseen labour of caregiving. Her body itself has become an archive, marked by lived experiences of motherhood, breast cancer survival, and self-expression including tattooing her own skin in sovereignty. Naomi has also delved into breastmilk archival, memorial jewellery and mural painting, layering both intimate and public forms of storytelling into her work. She frequently experiments with new materials and processes to deepen her ongoing commitment to witnessing, reclaiming and reimagining the stories of women and families.

Locust Jones is a contemporary, Australian artist. For over 20 years, Locust's practice has woven layers of stories and images that replicate the frenetic pace at which society consumes everyday news and current affairs, in a variety of mediums. Jones' exhibition, To Bear Witness featured large scale vertical drawings cascading through RMOA’s Atrium Gallery. 18 October 2025 - 26 April 2026.

Michelle Hamer & Talitha Kennedy are two contemporary Australian artists. Hamer and Kennedy are part of a group exhibition titled Intimacy, on display at RMOA from 28 March - 5 July 2026.

In 2025 Sally Smart transformed RMOA’s Long Gallery, responding to the monumental yet intimate scale of this space through exploration of the legacies of theatre and visual art.

Shari O'Dwyer is an exhibiting Artist in the Cane exhibition. O'Dwyer's work is: It hangs over my head, it lurks in the shadows 2023, hand knotted sisal twine, private collection. Cane is exhibiting at RMOA from 28 February - 21 June 2026

Right of Reply: a response to 'Cane' exhibition at RMOA 28 February 2026 - 21 June 2026. Joella Warkill, Imelda Miller and Jacob McGuire in conversation with Dr Melinda Mann.

The work of Sandra Selig frequently meditates upon space, withmany of her works charting a course between the installation itself, and thematerials in use, which are often found. Here, Selig’s pieces use space totease out the poetic. Using small paper cuttings from extant book pages,sections are removed and singled out, represented as a kind of collage-poem, byway of installation. Specific words are left, removed, or simply blocked out,leaving a small sequence of images, and the voids left by text, to tell thestory, fitting in regard to the pages’ contents, which appear to be photographsof stars and lunar phenomena. Hidden Theorem exists in a space betweenforms and definitive meanings, like snippets of overheard conversation, or asong that one can’t quite place, reaching for the profound, but finding comfortin the everyday. -Jonathan McBurnie

My work gives form to personal observations and internalreflections. While walking the streets or tending my garden, I often discoverfragments of broken objects—tools run over, ceramics buried—each once part of apurposeful whole. Sometimes friends share their broken things with me, andthese too may find their way into my practice. These remnants become materialprompts for new works, carrying stories of use, loss, and transformation. Ifocus on the narratives these materials evoke, creating objects that areintimate in scale and easily transportable.

Eugene Carchesio has made a career of intimacy, explored throughdifferent media, usually through series. These include delicate papersculptures, small studies of leaves or birds, watercolours exploring colour andgeometry or gridded paper, music staves and collage. The artist’s 2008retrospective at Queensland Art Gallery was fittingly entitled Someone’sUniverse , and featured hundreds of Carchesio’s delicate pieces. One reallydoes get the sense from Carchesio’s practice of looking into somethinginternal, a world in miniature. Intimacy includes a series of theartist’s matchbox sculptures, which in many ways distil the artist’s work intoits most delicate and universal, reaching for sublime moments using everydaymaterials. -Jonathan McBurnie

Details of the Dispossessed The obsession with lifelike figures can be traced back toantiquity: the ancient Greeks painted their statues, to solid give solidpresence to what were idealized forms. With occasional exceptions, therepresentation of what was not part of a world of heroism, religion or fantasy,was limited to imagery of everyday encounters, such as we see in the Dutchpainting of the seventeenth century. Work, toil and deprivation only enter artaround the middle of the nineteenth century, and the associated movement inboth art and literature was named “Realism”. To those of the time, objectors tothis kind of art found it coarse and gratuitous, defying what they saw as thetruer aims of art, which was to project a better world. But to this day, thenotion of realism encompasses notions of honesty and unpretentiousness thatincludes the less privileged. One of the earliest exponents of hyperrealistsculpture, Duane Hanson, made figures from lower-middle America—a cleaner,overweight tourists, or a man down on his luck—which would all appeardiscordant within the gallery setting. With their blank expressions and intheir silence, Hanson’s figures were like intruders who are nonetheless unawareof their infraction. As a result, it is we that begin to feel uneasy, even oncewe adjust to the knowledge that the figure is just an inert facsimile—for ouruneasiness is at our immediate first impression. The work of Paul Trefry sits closely within the tradition thatHanson can be seen to founded. It is predicated upon the widespread inclinationto abstract from us what we find objectionable. It may be one thing to givedonations to a door-knocker, but it something very different to offer homelessperson a shower. Hence the expression, “cold as charity”. Our feelings ofcompassion are best kept in tact when out of proximity from those for whom thefeelings are supposed to be stirred. Horror and disgust are best kept atdistance and not experienced viscerally. We also feel sympathy for theloneliness of the elderly, but we recoil from experiencing it first hand, notleast because it reminds us of what could befall any of us. Trefry sculpts thehomeless, the aged, and the bewildered. A common thread to his work isvulnerability: of youth or old age, or of the caprice of fate. Key to his worksis frankness without condescension or melodrama. In his work we are facedsuddenly and unerringly with something that we instinctually avoid. In sodoing, Trefry faces us with our vulnerability. His work seeks to widen theambit of our empathy. Trefry avoids left-wing jingoism, and the work does notpreach. Rather it operates on a far simpler, human register. We will all feelapproach of time, and there will always be those, even if not seen, who live inunspeakable conditions. Trefry gives the less-than-visible the dignity of anasserted presence. —Adam Geczy

Intimacy is a sensation that I imbue in all my artworks. It startswith the way I create my artworks then it’s the close attention and empathy Iwant people to feel when they see my works. I lovingly craft my sculptures by hand-stitching leather andfleshing out with stuffing and wire. It’s a slow meditative practice that Imake in my home studio, which is my safe place where my imagination is free andmy hands play, to create something beautiful from what I see and feel of thenatural world. The intimacy of making with intricate detail, the directness ofshaping with my hands and the love I put into it is a quality that continues toresonate when the artwork is encountered by other people. I want the viewer tocome close to wonder what it is made from and how it was made. To discover thedetailed hand stitching of the soft sculpture and the skin-like texture of theleather. I want you to want to touch though we all know touching is against thegallery rules. Leather is skin not very different to your own skin, so part ofthe desire to touch is to understand what the sculpture feels like, but I cantell you, it feels like your own skin and body. Soft to squeeze, satisfying tohold, supple to shape, warm to touch. I work with leather because I want my sculptures to be cared foras intimate creatures. Primordial Buds are a mass of very small soft sculptures seemingly sprouting outof the wall. They are shaped to look like something just beginning to grow, asmall bud holding the potential to grow bigger. The shape suggests theearly-stage buds of plants, like the first signs of life on a bare deciduoustree beginning to bloom in Spring; or fruiting fungus emerging from hiddenmycelium networks about to become mushrooms, and also bodily growth, how cellsmultiply extending from a stem cell. These evoke universal forms of growth thatsymbiotic to many natural systems of life. The materiality of leather soft-sculpture and simulated naturalforms provoke a strange intimacy with nature and question what how we perceivelife-forms that we live with.

Adams’ work invites an awareness of the way in which perceptionsof how ‘signs’ operate. You might call his artworks ‘meaning composites’.Understanding that emotion and thoughts are complex and abstracted things, andnot able to be adequately pictured, Adams presents compositions that containmultiple elements and symbols. Much as semaphore or pictograms are systems forexpressing particular concepts, Adams relies on the process whereby a thing canbe spoken, written or suggested, and the recipient (us) thinks of acorresponding meaning. This process, in linguistic terminology, is calledconcretisation or actualisation. His use of graphics, colour, forms and textsare units which function as the building blocks to meaning, as are poems forexample, made up from the organisation of single words. Adams’ work is autobiographical, primarily Geometrical Abstractionleaning towards an aesthetic that resembles Concrete Minimalism, RussianConstructivism, Bauhaus and De still, influenced by Psychology, Philosophy,Architecture, Music and Design.

This body of work explores intimacy as something accumulated infragments, in repetitions, in layered marks and gestures. Working primarilywith coloured pencil, gouache, and fresco-like plaster surfaces, I’m drawn toprocesses that require slowness and trust: building, erasing, redrawing,responding. Yet there always remains the 'immediacy' of the mark - fast andslow. Sun damage - its palette, its distortion, has become a kind ofvisual language. Stretched forms, faded colours, shifting ratios: all speak tothe way things change under pressure, over time. These drawings begin with aline and build through repetition, shifts in direction, and patterns; circles,curves, ornamental motifs, street imagery, leadlight windows seen inperspective. Some forms emerge from memory, others from observation. All arefiltered through a desire to refine, to re-see. The materials themselves become collaborators. Gouache and pencilmeet plaster; each mark is an opportunity to commit, each layer partiallyerases what came before. This process invites uncertainty. It requires trust, akind of intimacy with failure and discovery. This work began with hesitation. I spend a lot of time buildingconfidence, building concept. But in the end, it needs to begin. These drawingsare not fixed images; they are accumulations of gazing, memory, and process.

I am primarily a cartoonist—an abstract expressionist cartoonist.I was educated during the New York School's dominance of the art world, and I incorporated many oftheir styles into my drawings, along with those of Picasso and a host of otherartists who had left a lasting impression on me. According to Andre Breton, Iam a surrealist, described as: “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes toexpress … the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in theabsence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moralconcern. “ The drawings are one-shot deals, begun without forethought orpurpose. Marks meander across the page, trying to force or coax my subconscious to decide whatshould be done. There are many failures, but sometimes my unknowable self makesthe perfect picture, and there is an explosion of well-being. Such acomposition cannot be recreated or improved. My particular style was born in1982 when I met Gordon Lish, who became my mentor. He was an editor at Knopf,known as “Captain Fiction.” He saw casual doodles in my sketchbook, loved them,and wanted more, pushing for emotional honesty as if drawing a still life of anemotion. I am shocked and overjoyed when the random marks and thoughts form adelicate balance that hints at the truth about the experience of living. It isa miraculous blessing.

This suite of collage works is comprised of diagrammatic imageryexcised from aged and obsolete textbooks, reference works, and instructionmanuals. Disinterred from their utilitarian points of origin, these images arereconfigured into idiosyncratic arrangements informed by the paranormal, theesoteric, and the occult. The works attempt to channel the aesthetics andatmospheres of the somewhat amorphous field of ‘hauntology’, as expressed inthe writings of cultural theorist Mark Fisher, the music of Boards of Canada,the whimsical pseudo-science of BBC Television’s ‘Look Around You’, and ghoststories in the tradition of M.R. James. In its use of schematics,illustrations, and infographics - images whose function it is to clarify,quantify, and explicate earthly phenomena - the body of work asks how suchapparently rational visual languages might serve to deepen the mysteries thatabound. The resulting outcomes perhaps sit somewhere between a celebration andgentle satire of the human urge to try to map systems of knowledge, and theinevitable inadequacy of such attempts.

When I search to find words go accompany this artwork, titled Mending , I would say that it is an ongoing pursuit, one that is hardly ever completed.