Artist Profile

Artist Profile is a leading quarterly journal taking its readers into the studios and minds of contemporary artists across Australasia and beyond. Industry professionals engage leading practitioners and emerging talent in conversations about their art, in their own words, while our exclusive photo shoots provide intimate access into artists’ personal and working lives. Readers gain knowledge of artists’ methods, preview works in progress and discover the life experiences that ignite artistic imaginations.

Artist Profile

Contributors

Editor’s Note • Artist Profile acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we work.

How the body forgets its recipe for skin • What does an artist’s legacy become over time? Nathan Shepherdson reflects on this question through his engagement with his father’s work, following a summer exhibition of paintings at Philip Bacon Galleries.

Milli Jannides: The Slipping Place • “I’m still trying to understand how to make a painting,” Milli Jannides tells me. Built from mirage-like layers and a mosaic of marks, her compositions cohere not through certainty but through a sustained tension between resonance and rupture. Each painting feels self-aware, sapient even, permitting the artist to brush it into being only on its own terms. They push back, resist, bristle with a kind of temper until suddenly the composition crystallises, as if it had been waiting all along.

Jordan Gogos is Electric • Jordan Gogos is electric, with an energy so big it can’t be contained within a discipline, a room, an industry. I see him walking past me and he is already one hundred steps into the next idea. Jordan Gogos is a future; he will call anyone, at any moment, in the fluid fight forward.

Ruth Waller: Painted Gardens and Deserts of Retreat • Ruth Waller’s recent paintings are subtle and surprising growths in the garden of Australian art. Since her retirement five years ago from several decades of teaching at the Australian National University School of Art & Design, this much-loved educator and artist’s artist has found a new rhythm in her backyard studio in Canberra on Ngunnawal Country.

The Glass Weaving of Jenni Kemarre Martiniello • It is nudging forty-two degrees Celsius in the shade when artist and poet Jenni Kemarre Martiniello OAM and I meet at Canberra Glassworks, housed in the former Kingston Powerhouse on the foreshore of Lake Burley Griffin. For just on eighteen years, the Glassworks has been her “sanctuary,” Martiniello tells me, a space for not only her physical making but also a space for her “internal work.”

The Conditions of Wonder in the Paintings of Angus Nivison • “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” Francis Bacon (1909–1992)

Yvonne Boag: Carried Between Worlds • In June 2026, Macquarie University Art Gallery will stage a survey of works by Yvonne Boag, alongside works by other artists from Boag’s personal collection. From the ordered chaos of dual studios in Sydney and Seoul, Boag discusses five decades of practice and the habits, processes, triggers and associations that influence her unique visual language.

Tony Slater: Twenty paintings for trying times • “Art has a way of eclipsing reality. I didn’t want to do that. I always start with a motif and try and hang onto it until the painting seems right.” Tony Slater, 2026

rules of refuse

AUSSIE

Measure twice, cut once • Bushwalking and making art are not that different; planning is the true origin of my process. Once I’ve made a start, I begin going through the motions of sheer confidence followed by self-doubt. Taking small breaks to clear my mind, I choose to keep going, one step at a time. I try not to overthink the process, understanding that inspiration is fleeting and visits when you least expect...