Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers

Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers brings together installation, sculpture, performance-based video, sound and costumes from operas from over two decades, alongside significant new works, celebrating the ambition of the artist’s expansive practice. Like the amphibious fish invoked by the exhibition’s title which exist between worlds, Williams’ work amalgamates materials and formal considerations, drawing on art history while reflecting contemporary aesthetic, cultural and economic concerns.

Employing a do-it-yourself strategy, Williams transforms disparate materials into installations informed by ideas of ‘worlding’ and the imaginative potential of resources at hand. Her work is autobiographical, invoking the intertidal zones of Sydney’s suburban waterways, with their mangroves and other seemingly alien lifeforms, competitive dance eisteddfods, retail merchandising and her father’s wrecking yard where salvaged components were recombined into Frankenstein-like constructions of new utility.

Williams’ engagement with twentieth-century modernism reflects the experimental and democratic impulses that motivate her. Working with ubiquitous plastics, synthetic fabrics and mass 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 the intersections of class consciousness, absurdist motifs and the economic necessity of making do with limited means. She transforms commonplace materials, elevating the pop cultural, the disposable and the artificial, reveling in the strangeness of contemporary existence as well as human connections to ritual and mythology.