Justene Williams works improvisationally with figures and aspirations of the twentieth-century avant-garde, cast through a contemporary suburban lens via performance, sculpture, video, photography and installation. Her work draws on the display logics and motifs of mass retail merchandising, climbing gyms, gaming environments and dance competitions. With frenetic energy, she builds sets and costumes as frames for performance, and ‘dancing costumes’ as monumental sculpture, often using repurposed materials or materials that allow her to work quickly and at scale. Williams — the artist-worker — has a sustained yet impulsive commitment to art-making that underpins her figurative sculptural and photographic practice, workshopping new heroines and archetypes for our hyper-stimulated 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, 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