Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers

Spanning performative video, sculpture, sound and installation from the past three decades, including significant new works, Once We Were Mudskippers celebrates the ambition of Justene Williams’s expansive practice. Like the amphibious fish invoked by the exhibition’s title, which exist between worlds, Williams’s artworks amalgamate materials and approaches, drawing on art history while reflecting contemporary aesthetic, cultural and economic concerns.

Employing a do-it-yourself strategy, Williams transforms disparate materials into immersive installations informed by ideas of ‘worlding’ and the imaginative potential of resources at hand. Her practice is deeply autobiographical, drawing on the intertidal zones of Sydney’s suburban waterways, with their mangroves and strange lifeforms, and her father’s wrecking yard, where salvaged components were recombined into Frankenstein-like constructions of new utility.

Williams’s engagement with twentieth-century modernism reflects the experimental and democratic impulses of the avant-garde. Working with ubiquitous plastics, synthetic fabrics and manufactured objects, she extends these traditions into the consumer aesthetics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her work reflects the accelerating plasticisation and digitisation of the world and their intersections with class consciousness, absurdity and the economic necessity of making do. Transforming commonplace materials, Williams dissolves distinctions between high art and popular culture, the disposable and the enduring, the artificial and the organic, while exploring the strangeness of contemporary existence and enduring human connections to ritual, mythology and the afterlife.