If we are not, as we thought, all in this together, or equal before the law, or equal in the face of climate change, are we at least equal before the cosmos?

I didn’t much like reading Freud. For a modern woman, a city girl, a philosophy syllabus that persisted with his endless essays on psychoanalysis felt lazy, musty, oh so very masculine.

It was during the long lockdown of 2020, that I first noticed my eyes ‘playing tricks’ on me, as if they too were bored by the great global shrinking...

The challenges of the body to an artist are many: shadows, proportion, perspective, the subtleties of muscle, bone and sinew that distort the skin. Interpretations abound. Few artists have ignored the human form…

A year living in Tokyo, apart from loved ones and in linguistic isolation, Kevin Chin paints. While depicting the schism one feels when out of water, he brings accord to the fictional panoramic scenes that have stayed with him, with dexterity and finesse. The result, his five-panel painting Between Bridges, is iridescent…

Like ‘Solo Man’ before him, ‘Handsome Steve’ – icon of refreshment – has been decommissioned. But before this one time publican, musician and café proprietor resurfaces – reinvented – there must be reflection…

At 528 Hz, love is said to reach us through music. Like the jazz standard interpreted, recorded and enriched (mainly) by numerous musicians (Fitzgerald, Sinatra, Baker), love too endures through art – contributing myth, nuance, and an evolution of form to the frequency (hopefully) of our spiritual connections…

Citing the anarchic potential of colour, Berliner Katharina Grosse pushes the boundaries of subject and object, letting her work bleed across spatial planes. Breaking the rules begins with the foundations – her canvas anything from terra firma, to vertical structures, to the void…

As in other faraway places, the culture of the ‘old world’ was deposited in Terra Australis without regard for its suitability to the landscape and climate, and with complete disregard for the Indigenous inhabitants, who had many millennia on the new arrivals…

Limited resources and basic necessity saw Zulu bowl and basket weavers turn to papier mâché, magazines, tins, aluminium cans, and telephone wire to make their wares, creating a look as synonymous with South Africa as its Shweshwe cotton prints…

When we visit Stephen Benwell’s St Kilda studio, we step into a space that has seen 14 years’ service. Past the Tetlow Kiln, his work bench is busy with familiar forms: the vase, the male nude, a jug. Yet here, something like an elongated dorsal fin, has a distinctly modern finish.

She’s an apothecary of knowledge in her field, her studio a study in precision – an orderly and extensive array of paints, brushes, tubs and tubes at her disposal. True to previous form, Hughes continues her meticulous record in this series of three large paintings…

April 2013, Chapter House Lane staged an exhibition of work by Melbourne photographer Benjamin Lichtenstein. I first met Ben when Lou and I went to Neo Frames in Collingwood to get works for another exhibition framed. He was working there as a framer…

Via Poland, South Africa and New York, the now Melbourne-based Nowicki, uses mixed media including pastels, graphite, ink and oils for his current collection, Feldgrau. Inspired by lesser known colours and the 1565 Bruegel work, Hunters in the Snow…

In contrast to previous, painterly pieces, Griffiths’ alternates use of self-fashioned totemic instruments to create lead-lined, brushed and scraped surfaces…

Pia Murphy’s small ceramic sculptural works from 2011 and 2012, including new works, descend on the city from their dreamy genesis off Victoria’s southwest coast…

Here and there… from local Anacortes, to Japan, France and Norway… But, it could as much be water lapping our shores; mountains straddling the New South Wales/Victoria border.

Wax on, wax off… the way water beads around a surface – fluid, yet precise. Similar forms are mirrored in a distant, opposing sphere – the vast outer regions of space.

To look in a child’s eyes can elicit the question: ‘What are you thinking?’. And the mistake would be to undervalue the answer…

Decisiveness is so rarely black and white. ‘Yes’ is just a word – an antonym to ‘no’ – and so lacking in the complexities we often want, or need to convey.