Australian Women Artists
Australian women artists have been (and continue to be) underrepresented and undervalued in this country despite the stunning artistic works that have been produced since the mid nineteenth century. This podcast will shine a light on those artists and their spectacular art works. I'll be talking to the artists themselves, both established and emerging, as well as experts on Australian women artists in history.
Dani McKenzie
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 77 Dani McKenzie
Dani McKenzie’s story begins, unusually, not in an art school studio but in a bedroom — where, after a formative trip through Europe and a chance encounter with the work of Belgian painter Michaël Borremans, she spent six months teaching herself to paint.
That instinct and passion carried her into the National Art School in Sydney, where she completed both her undergraduate and Master of Fine Art degrees, and where her enduring fascination with photography — memory, privacy, and the lives of...
Kate Shaw
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 76 Kate Shaw
Kate Shaw is an award-winning Australian artist who spends her time working and living between Melbourne and the US, having exhibited in Australia for over 20 years and internationally for over 10 years.
Through her luminous landscapes, Kate has created an artistic world that is quite breathtaking, but also quite unsettling. Over that career, it would be fair to say she has fundamentally reinterpreted how we perceive the natural world.
Her practice began to be recogniz...
Lucy Culliton
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 75 Lucy Culliton
Lucy Culliton is a gem.
It was such an enjoyable conversation – she always has interesting stories, and I was just lucky enough to be sitting on the other side of the table.
It becomes quite apparent that Lucy finds a portrait in everything she looks at — a cactus spine, a prize rooster, a knitted doll, a greyhound asleep in the afternoon light. And that’s because she paints with an intimacy that seems to breathe life into those ever...
Rachel Milne
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 74 Rachel Milne
Rachel Milne is a Newcastle-based painter whose work turns everyday interiors, objects, and moments into beautifully compelling paintings.
Rachel grew up in Cambridge, trained in Cardiff, and built an early career in Britain serious enough to earn her membership of the Royal West of England Academy.
Then, in 2013, she packed up and moved to the other side of the world — to Newcastle, New South Wales — and something shifted.
She is a painter of interiors. Of...
Kirtika Kain
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 73 Kirtika Kain
Kirtika Kain was born in New Delhi, India and raised on Sydney's Northern Beaches, and is making some of the most viscerally powerful art in the country right now.
Kirtika is a printmaker, a painter, and an alchemist. Her works often depict the overlooked. One of the extraordinary ways she does that is by taking materials such as pigments, wax, sindoor, human hair, charcoal, gold and tar and transforming them into works that carry centuries of inherited memory.
Her pract...
Lily Mae Martin
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 72 Lily Mae Martin
Lily Mae Martin is a remarkable visual artist known for her deeply personal explorations of womanhood, motherhood, and the human condition. Her own strength and resilience in the face of, at times, enormous challenges, is remarkable.
She is celebrated for her masterful draughtsmanship, particularly her delicate and detailed cross-hatching using fine liner ink pens, building up thousands upon thousands of tiny lines to produce an incredible tone.
After graduating from the Victorian College of the...
Julie Fragar
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 71 Julie Fragar
Julie Fragar is one of the country's most compelling painters.
For those who are familiar with that name, it could well be because she recently made headlines as the winner of the prestigious 2025 Archibald Prize. What is perhaps not as well known to the general public is that that win marked the 4th time she had been a finalist in that competition.
For over two decades, Julie's practice has been described as pushing the intellectual limi...
Lisa Bale
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 70 Lisa Bale
It would probably be fair to say that Lisa Bale sits outside the art establishment.
She lives and works remotely on a bush property situated in the hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
Not having formal art training has been no hindrance to an exceptional talent. In fact, it’s probably a big contributing factor to her success. Her works are witty, surprising, and visually arresting takes on modern-day dilemmas.
Her extensive career spans nearly four decades and she has...
Heidi Yardley
Australian Women Artists
The Podcast
Ep 69 Heidi Yardley
Heidi Yardley is a Melbourne-born painter whose work occupies a significant space in contemporary Australian art — intimate, psychological, and immediately recognisable.
‘[Heidi] works with found images to create scenes of mysterious temporality. Often painted in faded hues, her artwork is suggestive of a period that could sit somewhere between the 1960’s and 70’s.’
She works with oil paint and charcoal and incredible collaging techniques where she creates anonymous portraits of sexualised and domesticated femininity.
Over three decades she has drawn on vin...
Suzanne Archer
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 68 Suzanne Archer
Across six decades, Suzanne Archer has forged a singular career in Australian art, marked by independence from curatorial trends and sustained commitment to difficult subjects.
From youthful abstraction through immersion in the Australian bush to a fearless confrontation with death and time.
Suzanne has won major prizes including the Wynne Prize for landscape and the Dobell Prize for Drawing, and her work is held in significant public collections nationwide.
Her constant evolution is fascinating.
We discus...
Tracey Deep
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 67 Tracey Deep
For over twenty years, Tracey Deep has been transforming forgotten remnants of the natural world—from dried botanicals to recycled organic and industrial materials—into captivating, tactile sculptures.
Her art celebrates the regenerative power of the earth through the art of what’s been called intentional imperfection.
Today her work spans gallery exhibitions, immersive installations and major public artworks across Australia. Whether delicate and intimate or monumental in scale, her sculptures invite us to slow down and reconnect with the natural w...
Dagmar Cyrulla
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 66 Dagmar Cyrulla
Dagmar Cyrulla is an Australian contemporary artist whose work grew out of a lifelong interest in people, relationships, and the emotional texture of ordinary life.
Born in Germany and raised in Sydney from age one, she developed an art practice that blends portraiture, domestic scenes, and psychological observation into stories about human connection.
She is a distinguished figure in the Australian art scene, frequently appearing as a finalist for prestigious awards such as the Archibald, Doug Moran Portrait Prize, Dobe...
Shay Docking
Australian Women Artists
The Podcast
Episode 65 Shay Docking
Artists of Influence: Shay Docking (influencing Margaret Ackland, ep. 5)
Welcome to another edition of AWA artists of influence.
For those who’ve heard some of these podcasts, you’ll remember that the last question I ask is: Is there an Australian woman artist who has inspired or influenced you and if so, who and how?
I’ve decided to explore a little further the artists who were named as influences by my podcast guests.
If you’d like to hear in mor...
Celia Gullett
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 64 Celia Gullett
Celia Gullett has developed a beautiful distinctive practice over several decades. Her abstract works explore colour, light and surface with what’s been described as, ‘remarkable sensitivity’.
Her career has unfolded gradually, shaped by long periods of study, reflection and... life.
A major turning point in Celia’s artistic development came in the mid to late 1990s when she began studying at the Charlie Sheard Studio School in Sydney. And we’ll talk about the...
Camie Lyons
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 63 Camie Lyons
Camie Lyons is a Sydney-based contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, painting, and drawing.
Her creative approach is deeply informed by her background as a dancer, translating the rhythm and fluid lines of human movement into physical forms. Working primarily with bronze and charcoal, she often sources inspiration from the Australian landscape, using natural materials like eucalyptus branches to anchor her organic silhouettes.
Camie has received extensive academic training in Melbourne and Sydney, supplemented by international residencies in countri...
Deborah Halpern OAM
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 62. Deborah Halpern OAM
Deborah Halpern is one of Australia’s most celebrated multi-disciplinary artists, renowned for her vibrant, whimsical public sculptures that have redefined Melbourne’s urban landscape.
Rather than pursuing austere minimalism, which still dominated many sculpture departments, she embraced exuberance. Colour became central to her practice...and over a career spanning more than four decades, Deborah has explored a vast array of mediums, including sculpture, painting, pottery, glass blowing, and printmaking, though she is most famously...
Julz Beresford
Australian Women Artists
The Podcast
Ep.61 Julz Beresford
Julz Beresford is known for her amazing gestural depictions of rivers, bushland and alpine terrain.
She has a very distinct, energetic approach to landscape painting which we’ll discuss. Her works showcase the movement and light of the worlds she grew up in... The Snowy Mountains and the Hawkesbury River.
And I wanted to find out how she is able to bring those memories and sensations to the studio.
Her quite rapid rise c...
Kiata Mason
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 60 Kiata Mason
Kiata Mason’s work explores the quiet drama of domestic life.
Her paintings showcase rooms we all have and often just rush through them but, like all good painters, Kiata’s work causes us to pause. And reflect.
Her paintings often reference her own family history and the coastal home she now lives and works in.
Kiata’s formal training was at the National Art School in Sydney, where she undertook a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting. She la...
Adriane Strampp
Australian Women Artists
The Podcast
Ep. 59. Adriane Strampp
Adriane’s is a fascinating journey. She was born in the United States and educated in the UK before settling in Australia.
She brings the effect of that peripatetic life to her work. Her work is defined by its sensitivity to light, memory and place. Interiors soaked in soft light, distant landscapes, objects held in suspension.
We talked about her fabulously eclectic group of subjects she’s explored in her art including horses, dresses, landscapes, interiors, still lifes and the thread whi...
Amanda Penrose Hart
Australian Women Artists
The Podcast
Ep. 58 Amanda Penrose Hart
Amanda Penrose Hart is one of Australia’s most compelling contemporary interpreters of landscape.
In fact, judges at the Calleen Art Award recently described her as one of Australia’s most accomplished senior plein-air painters.
Amanda graduated with a Diploma of Fine Art from Queensland College of Art and then a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Griffith University, she developed a practice grounded in drawing, composition and a love of paint – which is becoming a wonderful thread through a number of th...
Sophie Perez
Australian Women Artists
The Podcast
Ep. 57. Sophie Perez
Sophie Perez was born in Brighton, England. Her early love of art led to her formal academic training which culminated in her obtaining a Master of Arts in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London.
How she ended up in Australia...is an interesting story.
When she settled in the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, she embraced the unique landscape, and it informed her artistic practice. Her work was described as loose, gestural brushwork, with sensitive colour relationships that sought to ev...
Caroline Walls
Australian Women Artists
The Podcast
Ep 56. Caroline Walls
Today on the podcast I’m very excited to be joined by Melbourne based contemporary artist Caroline Walls.
Caroline’s work explores the emotional lives of women through really bold but pared-back forms, and it centres on the female body, intimacy and ‘the emotional texture of everyday life’. Her paintings, drawings and sculptures sit between abstraction and figuration and the figures, at first glance appear to be simple flowing lines and rich, earthy tones. But her work makes you stop...
Prudence Flint
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 55 Prudence Flint
Prudence Flint is one of Australia’s most compelling contemporary painters.
For more than three decades, Prudence has been painting seemingly ordinary women in ordinary everyday interiors undertaking ordinary tasks. And the effect is extraordinary.
The paintings are imbued with a stillness and the subjects are caught...almost mid thought. And that is quite captivating. Those (often) solitary figures captured in private moments away from the male gaze.
Her work is fabulous, engaging and thought provoking and very recognisable.
...
Eleanor Ritchie-Harrison
Carly le Cerf
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 53 Carly le Cerf
Over the last decade, I think it would be fair to say that Carly le Cerf has become one of the most quietly compelling voices in contemporary Australian landscape painting.
Her paintings exude atmosphere and exhibit a beautiful balance of abstraction and observation. Her approach to colour, atmosphere and, I guess, stillness is what makes Carly le Cerf’s paintings so special and the reason behind her commanding a significant amount of collecting attention.
Her ins...
Janet Dawson
Nusra Latif Qureshi
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 51 Nusra Latif Qureshi
A conversation with Dr Rebecca Coates (MUMA)
My podcast guest today is Dr Rebecca Coates, and we will be talking about one of Australia's most compelling contemporary artists, Nusra Latif Qureshi.
Nusra Latif Qureshi bridges the ancient tradition of South Asian miniature painting with what has been described as, ‘urgent contemporary concerns about migration, identity, and cultural displacement.’
Her distinctive artistic practice challenges conventional boundaries between traditional...
Tracey Moffatt AO
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 50 Tracey Moffatt
(A conversation with Amanda Love)
To celebrate the new year AND the 50 th post for AWA (!!!) I wanted to start with a personal favourite artist - Tracey Moffatt.
There’s an argument to say Tracey Moffatt is probably Australia’s most successful artist ever, both nationally and internationally. She is certainly one of the few Australian artists to have established a global market for her work.
A filmmaker as well as photographer, Tracey has held around 100 solo exhibitions of her wo...
Dr Bonita Ely
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 49 Dr Bonita Ely
Bonita Ely stands as one of Australia's most significant contemporary artists.
She is a pioneering voice whose work has consistently challenged audiences to confront envir0nmentaI degradation and s0cio-poIiticaI realities through innovative conceptual art practices.
She has a diverse practice that spans sculpture, installation, performance, video, and photography, establishing herself as a formidable force in both Australian and international art contexts.
Bonita's work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major collections, including the Museum of Co...
Kaylene Whiskey
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 48 Kaylene Whiskey
(A conversation with Professor Dr Natalie King OAM)
I’m excited to bring this episode to you. I'm talking to Professor Dr Natalie King OAM and we are discussing the incredible unique work of indigenous artist Kaylene Whiskey.
Natalie King is an Australian curator, writer, editor and Professor of Visual Arts, Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne. She has curated three national pavilions at the Venice Biennale (including the Australian Pavilion 2017, the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion 2022 and the...
Robyn Stacey
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 47 Robyn Stacey
Robyn Stacey is one of Australia’s most established and respected photographers, exhibiting widely in Australia and internationally since the mid-1980s.
As a photographer and installation artist she is celebrated for transforming ordinary spaces into cinematic worlds of light, history, and intimacy.
Through large-scale photographs, camera obscura works (which we talk about in our conversation), and evocative still lifes, she reimagines how we see the domestic and the personal.
Her art invites us to look close...
Michaye Boulter
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 46 Michaye Boulter
Michaye is a painter whose evocative seascapes and atmospheric horizons capture the delicate balance between isolation and connection.
She was born in Brisbane and at a very early age moved to Tasmania’s wild southern coastlines. Her father was a fisherman, and this meant Michaye’s life was sailing, fishing, and living close to water. These early experiences instilled in her a profound sensitivity to the ocean’s moods and mysteries, which would later become central to...
Loribelle Spirovski
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 45 Loribelle Spirovski
Today it’s my privilege to be joined by Australian contemporary artist Loribelle Spirovski.
Loribelle's passion for art began very early. She and her family moved to Australia from the Philippines when she was a young girl. This experience was very formative and continues to shape her practice.
Her formal art education began at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, and after graduating, Loribelle quickly established herself in the Australian art scene.
Her early works were marke...
Rachael Sarra
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 44 Rachael Sarra
Rachael Sarra is a proud Goreng Goreng woman whose incredible work bridges fine art, design, business and education.
You might know Rachael’s powerful visual language from a postage stamp that commemorated the 1967 Referendum, from murals lighting up Brisbane, or from collaborations with major brands like Kmart and Tourism Australia.
Her artistic style is distinct and contemporary, characterised by vibrant, striking, fabulous colours including purples, pinks, greens, oranges, and blues. As I said it’s visually striking and engaging. However, beneath the ae...
The Boyd Women Artists
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 43 The Boyd Women Artists: The Hidden Line.
A conversation with curator Sophie O’Brien
For decades, the Boyd name has resonated through Australian art history — yet the creative lives of the Boyd women, the artists who worked in the shadows and around the edges of that celebrated dynasty, have too often been overlooked.
At Bundanon NSW, a remarkable new exhibition is changing that. The exhibition is called The Hidden Line: The Art of the Boyd Women and it brings to...
Natasha Walsh
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 42 Natasha Walsh
Natasha Walsh doesn’t make art for the Archibald Portrait Prize. She is really interested in building her practice in a way that interests her.
Nevertheless, in 2025, in her early 30s, she became an Archibald finalist for the 8th time!
One of those finalist years (2018), coincided with her winning the Kilgour Prize, the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and the Mosman Art Prize tying with Margaret Olley as the youngest ever winner.
But it certain...
Evelyn Chapman
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 41 Evelyn Chapman - a conversation with Dr Anne Gerard-Austin
Dr. Anne Gérard-Austin is the Curator of International Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales and a significant contributor to the current exhibition at the AGNSW, Dangerously Modern, Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940.
And we were discussing the Australian artist, Evelyn Chapman.
By the time World War I ended in November 1918, Evelyn Chapman was already an established young painter, with training in Sydney, Paris, and London (which...
Amber Wallis
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 40 Amber Wallis
Amber Wallis has carved out a distinctive space in contemporary painting with canvases that blend abstraction and figuration, intimacy and intensity. Her art often emerges from deeply personal narratives.
Amber holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Canberra School of Art and a Master of Visual Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts. The VCA years were formative: she pushed an already fluid practice toward a deliberately unstable seam between figuration and abstraction, learning to let images “stain” their...
Justine Kong Sing
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 39 Justine Kong Sing
A conversation with Monique Watkins (AGNSW)
A few of Justine Kong Sing's works are on display at the new exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, Dangerously Modern, Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940. I had the privilege of sitting down with Monique Watkins to discuss this extraordinarily talented artist who has been largely overlooked in the Australian art canon.
.....My special guest today on the podcast is curator Monique Watkins, and this discussion took place in the...
Robyn Sweaney
Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep. 38 Robyn Sweaney
Robyn Sweaney is a contemporary artist who began exhibiting her work regularly from about 1992.
Her early work included still-life compositions, landscapes, and portraiture.
After relocating to northern New South Wales, she was inspired by her surrounds by painting houses. She could merge her philosophical interests with visual storytelling. And the paintings are beautifully reminiscent. But not in a ‘I prefer the old days’ sort of way. She just captures a moment.
More specifi...
