2025 Art + History + Theory + Culture

Essay by Gina Corridore for Contextualising Practice  Needlework is a multidimensional discipline that has historically served as a socialised cultural tradition, an artistic practice, and a form of feminised domestic labour. Needlework has been co-opted as a device to propagate read more …

Essay by Maree Nikimaya for Contextualising Practice  Content warning: This essay discusses domestic violence, suicide, violence, and trauma   From 1995 to 2000, my mother, father, and brother journeyed from South Sudan, which was on the brink of civil war, read more …

Essay by Angelique Ogierman for Contextualising Practice  Acknowledgement I would like to begin by acknowledging the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, whose unceded land I live, study and craft on. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, read more …

Essay by Eliza Baker for Contextualising Practice    Foreword In 2024, the deaths of several people close to me marked a point of rupture in my life and my art practice. These losses destabilised the systems I had internalised, systems read more …

Essay by Melanie Sky for Contextualising Practice  Acknowledgment I acknowledge the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung, and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the lands on which I live, work, and study. As I read more …

Essay by Millie Hopton for Contextualising Practice    Positionality Statement  I am a white, straight, cisgender woman born in 1999, who has spent their whole life in Australia. I come from a stable, middle-class background; my parents remain together, and read more …

Essay by Shing Hei Nathan Man As a queer Hong Kong immigrant residing and working in so-called Australia, I navigate the affective residues of displacement, repression, and racialised hyper-visibility. “Clinical psychology tells us that trauma is the ultimate killer. Memories read more …

Essay by Indigo Ripper-Stranieri for Contextualising Practice    Introduction / Acknowledgment  I offer my respect to the Traditional Custodians of the lands and waterways on which I conduct my research, study, and art practice, the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Worung read more …

Essay by Toni Vallance for Contextualising Practice    The requirement to write about my work fills me with a small amount of dread, as I suspect it does for many artists. It is not that I do not like writing read more …

Essay by Sara Jajou for Contextualising Practice    ‘The gaze…appears as an adversary, a knife, the evil eye…’ (Neugebauer (eds) et al 2021: 2) The gaze is a knife pointed at my body. It seeks to dissect and dismember bodies read more …

Essay by Zosia Slifirski Duckett for Contextualising Practice  Prologue Two years ago, on a cold wet afternoon in early September, in a moment of strange clarity after a shower, I took a photograph of my reflection in the foggy bathroom read more …

Essay by Anna McCauley for Contextualising Practice   ‘Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the read more …

Essay by Luke Jones for Contextualising Practice    Material > Inertia > Entropy > Becoming   In contemporary installation and sculptural practices, the artist’s role is increasingly seen as that of a facilitator of dynamic relationships between material, process, and read more …

Essay by Alicia Crowhurst for Contextualising Practice Introduction Transmutation is the action of changing or the state of being changed into another form. This essay argues that theatre grants you the faculties to forge transmutative capacity and, thus, engage in a practice of continual read more …

Essay by Michelle McLachlan for Contextualising Practice  In an era where visual information is incessantly mediated, edited, and curated, the question of what constitutes ‘truth’ in perception has become increasingly complex. Artists working with responsive and interactive materials —those that read more …