An art-school friend once referred to me as a sophisticated bogan. I’ve enjoyed the term ever since. In capturing the duality of a poor kid from Sydney’s western suburbs committed to art, fashion, philosophy, and poetry, my friend incidentally poeticised a perceived incompatibility between class and cultural consciousness, repositioning the otherwise egalitarian aims of art as esoteric.

Though I first properly felt class distinction at university—in peers who seemed to follow different social codes, wore designer clothes, and lived in beautiful eastern-suburbs homes without needing to work—I hadn’t grasped how profoundly it shapes empathy or relationships. While at university I began working at Sarah Cottier Gallery, where I met Justene Williams. We have remained friends and collaborators ever since, based on our shared commitment to art despite—or maybe because of—our plebeian backgrounds. We speak the same language and share reference points. We believe art’s transformative power supersedes class. For us, art’s punchlines lie in subversions of established orders, often at the expense of our own comforts. We’re both sophisticated bogans.

Born in 1970 in Darug/Western Sydney, Williams graduated from the University of Western Sydney in 1991. That year she had her first solo exhibition, at 2701+m3, above Firstdraft in Annandale, run by artist Mikala Dwyer. The show featured a single sculpture: a copper-clad suitcase filled with vegetable oil. Williams now lives in Meanjin/Brisbane, where she is a Senior Lecturer at Queensland College of Art and Design.

Williams’s early experimental photography work quickly evolved into an energetic amalgam of performance, sculpture, and video. She is now renowned for her elaborate costumes and immersive environments, which repurpose found detritus and humble materials into sets for delirious actions that invoke the spirits of historical avant-gardes while alluding to her autobiography. Her video Milk Seeped in Bread and Rocked the Leg (2012–3), for instance, features an ad hoc environment comprising geometric cardboard claddings and old furniture, in which Williams stultifies domestic activities with her mother and father as a way of processing her father’s mesothelioma. Documentation of similar performances is screened within sprawling installations or gesamtkunstwerke (total works of art).

Shaped equally by her time in her father’s wrecking yard, her years in retail, and her close study of art history—particularly the Bauhaus, dada, and constructivism; futurism and fluxus, and arte povera—Williams’s work draws its remarkable inventiveness from lived and learned experience: proletarian and artist, pleb and intellectual. The ‘cathedral of socialism’—imagined by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius to describe a future society where art, craft, and architecture would unite to serve the common good—is made manifest in Williams’s incredible worlds, far from European art history, in the Australian suburbs. Gropius’s spiritualisation of class equality echoes in Williams’s redistribution of the means of cultural production; a kind of sophisticated boganism.

Thinking about Williams’s work over the years, I’ve become fascinated with the idea that our bodies are vehicles of evolving information, coded by lived experience and expressed through behaviour. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to this as habitus: the dispositions shaped by class and unconsciously reproduced through the body. Neither destiny nor identity, habitus is the accumulation of what we inherit and how it shapes our perception and our place in and views of the world. Using discarded materials, bodily memory, and historical art, Williams deals with what we inherit and its capacity for reinvention, fusing class and cultural consciousness, capitalist and anti-capitalist visions, failures and desires, into spectres of where we’ve been and where we could go.

In his unfinished book Acid Communism, philosopher Mark Fisher argues that working-class consciousness and cultural consciousness were never meant to be separate projects. Against the neoliberal positioning of culture as elitist or purely economic, he imagines reconnecting political imagination with aesthetic experience. Williams has been quietly performing something akin to this for more than three decades. Her practice makes use of art history like it does wrecking yards and shopping centres, inhabiting it through a body whose experiences of labour and intellectual life are inseparable. By channelling her own labour histories through art, she tests the working-class body as a site of continual conditioning, asking: Can this conditioning be meaningfully rewritten? Can conditions inherited through personal experience, work, and so on provide grounds for association and imagination? Can we reimagine class as liberating rather than subjugating?

Williams’s roots in the so-called ‘grunge art’ scene suggest they can. Coined by art critic Jeff Gibson in his landmark 1993 essay ‘Avant-Grunge’, the term referred to a group of Gadigal/Sydney and Naarm/Melbourne artists—including Williams, Dwyer, Hany Armanious, Dale Frank, and Adam Cullen—who were subverting traditional gallery spaces with intentionally messy, trash-strewn, and lo-fi installations. Gibson’s essay title reconciles established art with a new counterculture scene characterised by DIY aesthetics, anti-form installations, and larrikinism.

Earlier that year, Frank curated Rad Scunge at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Naarm/Melbourne. Reviewer Chris McAuliffe wrote, ‘it seems to me that the artists are playing the margins, triggering patterns of interpretation which enable the viewer to salvage some metaphorical or art historical credibility for the objects, only to have the pieces collapse back into non-art status under the sheer weight of their tackiness’. Here is the dilemma of reconciling class and culture: Can junk be art? Can grunges be artists?

McAuliffe continues: ‘The viewer’s almost desperate need for these objects to be art—to will them into artness—is mapped by Justene Williams’s Untitled (1993). She places a magnifying sheet over an op-shop painting, suggesting that the object can be willed into art status by the viewer’s persistent, fetishistic attention.’

Even in her early work, Williams demonstrated class tensions. Referencing the detritus and disciplinary conditions of working life and suburban leisure—factories, offices, and shopping malls—she and her fellow grunge artists deployed sophisticated boganisms, invoking the endless extractions of consumer capitalism to critique a system that determined their class status. Their recycling is less an ecological gesture than a condition of necessary improvisation. As curator Anneke Jaspers, discussing Williams’s work, observes: ‘Improvisation is the epitome of being vulnerable’.

Throughout her career, Williams has realigned the egalitarian aims of art. She has channelled constructivism through the contemporary construction worker in Given That/You Put a Spell on Mine/Uterus (2014), reimagined Boccioni’s futurist figure as female for Boccioni Babe (2022), and recast the ancient sheela na gig as a distinctly Australian woman for an aptly titled monumental bronze sculpture Sheila (2024). In her hands, art becomes a portal through which anything—from mythology to pop culture, ballet costumes to Christmas trees, boganisms to cultural artifacts—holds potential for new meaning and social value. Rather than treating art history as fixed or authoritative, she salvages it, cannibalises it, and puts it back to work. This includes her own oeuvre. Her installations don’t reconstruct the past but re-envision it, revealing inheritance as provisional. Australian art is often positioned provincially as blind emulation of—or deference to—Euro-American art. But Williams shows us that derivation and adaptation are alive with potential. For artist-alchemists like her, art can transform inherited objects and histories, giving them a new use value.

These notions of inheritance and adaptation will reach an ambitious culmination in Once We Were Mudskippers, Williams’s forthcoming exhibition at Queensland Art Gallery. Her largest exhibition to date, it brings together major installations from the past fifteen years—including Santa Was a Psychopomp (2014), Victory Over the Sun (2016), A Metal Cry (2017), and The Vertigoats (2021)—alongside new commissions, surveying a practice that has remained remarkably coherent while reinventing itself. Rather than present bodies of work discretely or as they were first presented, it maps Williams’s oeuvre as an evolving project in which works are readapted. Like the wrecking yards that first shaped her imagination, her oeuvre is scoured for parts to be reconfigured into dynamic new installations. Costumes are reworked and shown on mannequins alongside new sculptures; new installations are forged from parts of old ones; past videos are scattered throughout new installations. It will be an archipelago of theatrical islands, each with its own ‘community-cum-dance-troupe’, opening channels of exchange, producing an interconnected network.

As Stephen Zepke writes in the catalogue: ‘Williams’s work, its excessive, messy, uninhibited and wildly animated conglomeration, shows us how to liberate matter from our pre-formatted ideas, our sad dreams and our tired and burnt-out bodies, in order to experience something new, something unrestrained by what we know, something dragged out of the future.’

Once We Were Mudskippers aptly starts under the water, with a riff on Sadko, a 1911 production by the Ballets Russes derived from the underwater scene in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian bylina-opera of the same name. It follows Williams’s last solo institutional project, Making Do Rhymes with Poo, commissioned by Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, in 2024, then reimagined for Contemporary Art Tasmania, Nipaluna/Hobart, in 2025. Williams saw Making Do as an evolving work, surviving through adaptation.

Built from locally sourced materials gathered from junkyards, each Making Do installation rematerialised industrial and consumer histories of the places they were made. Williams’s improvised live performances transformed her environments over the course of seven days or a ‘working week’. Her performance personas developed daily. In Nipaluna/Hobart, they included a swamp attendant tending to her ‘habitus’ like a caretaker.

The mudskipper emerges from Making Do’s primordial swamp, not escaping its conditions but evolving through them. Here Once We Were Mudskippers finds its central metaphor: an amphibious fish capable of pulling itself from swamp to land, with evolution as muddy, improvised, yet insistent. The exhibition title ‘places us all in the primordial swamp together’, writes exhibition curator Ellie Buttrose, suggesting that we all emerge from a swamp of inherited histories—of labour, class, and culture—‘looking for our own way out with daring adaptability’.

We might not all be sophisticated in the way my art-school friend meant—genteel, orthodox, privileged—but we are all products of evolution and capable of adapting, which for Williams, as for life everywhere, is the most sophisticated thing to be.