Justene Williams works improvisationally with figures of the twentieth-century avant-garde through performance, video, sculpture and installation, packaged within the display logic of mass retail merchandising for a consumption-driven audience. Her performances resemble give-everything eisteddfods staged within sets and costumes of controlled chaos, built from repurposed materials and set in motion by the efforts of the working week. A sustained and impulsive commitment to art making underpins figurative sculptural and photographic works that draw on archetypes to create new heroines for our times.

Over three decades, Williams has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including her collaboration with Sydney Chamber Opera on a re-visioning of the Futurist anti-opera Victory Over the Sun (acquired by the National Gallery of Australia) for the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016), curated by Stephanie Rosenthal; The National: New Australian Art (2017), Carriageworks; and PERFORMA 15, New York, under the Creative Directorship of Roselee Goldberg.

In 2019, Williams’ installation work, Santa was a Psychopomp, was jointly acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, and Tate, London, with support from Qantas. In recent years, she has produced significant works for the public domain, including Sheila, a monumental bronze sculpture at Brisbane’s Queen’s Wharf inspired by the medieval Sheela-na-gig figure and conceived as a protective female presence in the city, and the larger-than-life Boccioni Babe, commissioned for the 2022 opening of Naala Badu at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and located in the outdoor sculpture garden. Her major 2023 installation, The Vertigoats, commissioned for Embodied Knowledge: Queensland Contemporary Art, curated by Ellie Buttrose and Katina Davidson, was acquired by Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Since 2018, Williams has been Senior Lecturer (Sculpture) at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. A portrait of Williams by fellow artist Julie Fragar was awarded the Archibald Prize in 2025.

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Justene Williams