Art Wank – Details, episodes & analysis

Gary has a chat with artist Julie Nicholson about her show, Nostalgia, opening May 21st at CBD Gallery in Sydney.

Julie has recently exhibited with CBD Gallery at the Aotearoa Art Fair (NZ), and her work has been widely recognised in national awards such as the Paddington Art Prizre and the Muswellbrook, and held in private collections in Australia and overseas. She co-hosts the popular arts podcast, Art Wank.

Her duo solo exhibition, Nostalgia, stems from a sense of homesickness after moving from the UK to Australia at the age of 23. A deep sense of nostalgia has shaped her life, and only recently did she discover that nostalgia was once considered a disease. The works in this exhibition sit within that tension, posing the question of whether nostalgia is something that nurtures us, or something that holds us back.

Many of the canvases in the exhibition are split across multiple panels, reflecting the fractured experience of trying to locate familiarity within a foreign landscape. Moments of recognition such as sketching in Berrima in the Southern Highlands, where the landscape can feel momentarily like home are interrupted by distinctly Australian elements, like a palm tree or native plant, which jolt her back into the awareness of distance and displacement.

Julie has also titled many of the works using Old English words for landscape elements—such as weald, meaning forest. This reflects her interest in etymology and the evolution of language over time. Just as words shift, fall out of use, and take on new meanings, her understanding of the Australian landscape has also changed. Language, like memory, holds a connection to the past while continually adapting to the present, mirroring her experience of navigating place, identity, and belonging.

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Brett McMahon is a Newcastle-based painter whose work explores the structures and rhythms of the natural and built environment. Represented by Nanda Hobbs, McMahon has built a significant practice spanning painting, drawing and installation.

His work is known for its distilled, abstract language, bold lines, shifting geometries and a strong sense of spatial tension. Drawing from the coastal bush, industrial architecture and lived experience of place, his paintings sit somewhere between observation and reconstruction, where landscape becomes structure.

Over a career spanning more than three decades, McMahon has held over 30 solo exhibitions and exhibited widely across Australia and internationally. His work is held in public, corporate and private collections across Australia, Europe, Asia and the United States. 

In this conversation, we talk about painting as a way of thinking, the role of environment in shaping visual language, and how a practice evolves over time without losing its core concerns. We also get into scale, material and the push and pull between control and intuition in the studio.

Brett is represented by Nanda Hobbs in Sydney

Brett's show at Gosford Art Gallery Understory, opens 16th May 2026

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With a practice that integrates sculpture, moving image, performance and painting, Sydney based artist Todd Fuller is, at his core, a draughtsman. Underpinning all aspects of his practice is a love of drawing and a belief in its power as a democratic medium to connect, engage and delight audiences. 

For ten years, Fuller has been crafting hand-drawn animations that grapple with love and loss, as well as ideas of place, identity and community. Often narrative in form, these award winning works are derived from Fuller’s experiences with different communities, sites and histories. He has been awarded a number of residencies that have informed and developed his practice, including time spent at Bundanon Trust, Hill End, Grafton Regional Art Gallery, as well as international stints at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, the British School of Rome, and recently the NG Creative Residency in Provence.

A graduate of Sydney’s National Art School, Fuller has exhibited widely across Australia over the last ten years. He was a finalist in the 2019 Sir John Sulman Prize, won the prestigious Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award in 2018, and his work is present in various public and private Australian collections, including the Parliament House Art Collection, Artbank, Sydney Harbour Trust, and numerous regional art galleries. Alongside his national success, Fuller has gained international attention, with his works in exhibitions in the United States, Italy, France, South Korea, Bangladesh, England, Singapore and Malta.

Fuller’s practice extends into curatorship and arts production, having held roles with Waverley Council, Biennale of Sydney, Sculpture in the Vineyards and d/Lux Media Arts. The areas under investigation within his curatorial practice overlap with his artistic output. Just Draw, the 2016 exhibition Fuller curated with Lisa Woolfe, which toured regional galleries, showcased artworks that exemplified the varied nature of contemporary drawing practices, a subject close to Fuller’s heart. He is one half of interdisciplinary performance collective Flatline, and one third of the Hardenvale - our home in Absurdia touring initiative.

Find out more from his website 

https://www.toddfuller.com.au

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Antonia Perricone Mrjak invited us to interview herself and fellow studio mates so we said yes! We focussed on shared studio space as the theme. It was a really interesting chat about what they love and hate about sharing a space. A shared studio space creates a community for artists, a source of inspiration and a support network. Of course we wanted to move in y the end of the conversation.

We recorded the interview at Nanda Hobbs so thanks to Ralph Hobbs and staff.

list of artists interviewed -

Antonia Perricone Mrjak
Marissa Purcell
Graziela Guardino
Michael Simms
Annalisa Ferraris
Caroline Zilinksy

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Thanks to Catherine O'Donnell for speaking to us in her lunchbreak from teaching at the National Art School. We spoke to Catherine about her drawing practice, coming to art later in life, judging an art prize, and her love of the fibro shack! 

She has an exhibition coming up at Campbelltown Arts Centre in July and at Dominik Mersch in August. 

'Essentially my artist practice is about the beauty of the uncelebrated and ordinary.

My drawings an exploration of the architecture, culture and history in the everyday-ness of the urban environment. I see the suburbs as full of connection and disconnection, sameness and difference; in short, my drawings examine suburban living as a site of complexity. I am particularly interested in the way that the vernacular architecture and general street scapes of the places we regularly inhabit become recessed into our minds like wallpaper -they are at once visible and invisible.

It is the architecture of the suburban landscape which is the subject in my drawings. The absence of the representation of people in the drawings encourages viewers to consider the architecture from their own view point, perhaps igniting their own memories of suburban living. My drawings whilst uninhabited still capture traces of human intervention with narrative elements embedded in the commonplace structures: an open window; a door ajar.

My drawings are clearly representational but the realism in my work is not merely a reproduction of the visible. It is the elevation of the abstract form, the underpinning geometry and the distillation of the spatial composition that interests me. To this end I extract the building from its surroundings, deleting extraneous information, in order to emphasize the simplified form and obtain the final image. I use representation as a catalyst to ignite the imagination of the viewer and invite them to look beyond the mundane and banal. To revisit these spaces imaginatively and find the aesthetic poetry embedded within in the suburban landscape, while at the same time disrupting cultural prejudices which prevent people from seeing the underlying elegance of these simple buildings.'

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Thanks so much to Angus Fisher who picked us up from Patonga Wharf in his boat with his dog, to whizz us round to his home and studio on Dangar Island! It was such a special day out, we loved it. We also met his lovely wife and baby. We missed the ferry home from Patonga and were forced to have lunch at The Boathouse Patonga, such a shame!!!

We spoke to Angus about his love of drawing, printmaking and teaching. He is a wonderful man who is passionate about his practice.

'Angus Fisher’s art practice investigates nature and humankind’s relationship with the natural world. For Fisher, the idea of nature is a not a static term, but an evolving concept. Through the detailed study of history and natural subject matter, his work grapples with the idea of how nature exists, and has existed, in human imagination. Fisher does not only investigate ecology through his subjects, but the evolving attitudes and changing philosophical interpretations of the wider natural world. Primarily working with etching and drawing, he utilises traditional working techniques, methodologies and aesthetics to place his work in direct connection to historical contexts and traditions.'

Angus is represented by Australian Galleries in Australia and Jonathan Cooper Gallery in the UK

Links -
Sydney printmakers
Image for Dobell
Image for Hawkesbury Art Prize winning piece 

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What a great episode with artist, Tony Mighell, at his home and studio. Tony is extremely well read on the subject of art and artists, we could have talked for hours. We loved hearing about the NY Studio School when Tony attended in the 1970's, it sounded amazing. He also became the studio assistant of artist Roger Kemp.  Tony worked at the MCA in Sydney for 10 years as the manager of installations, and tells some fascinating stories about his time there. 

Since 2015 Tony has been concentration on his own practice and is now represented by gallery Nanda Hobbs in Sydney.

We hope you love this conversation as much as we did.

Thanks Tony.

Links to some of the artists tony mentioned -

Roger Kemp
Frederick Thursz
Robert Motherwell
Mercedes Matters

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Thanks you Emily Besser for your time and sharing your stories. You can find out more about Emily on her website.

https://www.emilybesser.com

or her instagram

https://www.instagram.com/emilybesser/?hl=en

You can find out more about Nicole Barakat workshop in the following link.

http://www.nicolebarakat.com.au/learn

Emily was also featured in Amber Creswell Bell’s new book, Australian Abstract!

Her upcoming show, 'Ground',  at Boom gallery opens 27th April - 21st May

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We interviewed Ali Tahayori at his home and studio in Newtown, Sydney, a long way from his hometown of Shiraz, Iran. Ali moved to Australia from Iran in 2007 after imprisonment and torture for being gay became unsustainable to remain in his homeland .  We discovered Ali at the NAS MFA Exhibition where he showed his impressive broken mirror artworks and video installation.

'Born and raised in the oppressively homophobic climate of 1980s Iran, Ali Tahayori assumed the identity of an outsider, further compounded by his migration to Australia in 2007. Combing fractured mirrors with text and imagery, his recent works draw on ancient Iranian philosophies about light and mirrors to create kaleidoscopic experiences; moments of both revelation and concealment hint at the conflicted nature of his identity. 

Translating the traditional Iranian craft of Āine-Kāri (mirror-works) into a contemporary visual vocabulary, his practice skillfully combines a discourse about diaspora and displacement with an exploration of queerness – in both cases, poignantly testifying to his experience of being othered. He holds a Doctorate in Medicine, a Graduate Diploma in Photography, and a Master of Fine Arts in Photomedia from Sydney’s National Art School. His work has been extensively exhibited in Iran, Europe and Australia.'

Ali is also a photographer, winning the 2022 Prix Yves Hernot Photography Award and in 2021 the peoples choice winner Bowness Photography award.  Ali continues working as a rehabilitation doctor in Sydney whilst being a very busy artist.

Congratulations Ali, your work is so multi-layered in meaning and beauty that we think you have a very long career ahead of you.

You can see Ali's work in his upcoming show, 'The Sky is the Same',  at Gosford Regional Art Gallery from April 1-June 4 2023. Opening Friday 14 April at 6pm. 

He is represented by This Is No Fantasy in Melbourne. 

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Many thanks to Trevor Victor Harvey from Harvey Galleries for an enlightening chat

You can find Trevor and his marvellous team on their website -

https://harveygalleries.com.au

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