Justene Williams works improvisationally with the figures and utopian aspirations of the twentieth-century avant-garde reimagined through a contemporary suburban lens. Working across performance, sculpture, video, photography and installation, she draws on the vernacular of shopping malls, retail displays, theme parks, gyms and popular entertainment to create unruly and often carnivalesque environments. Her experience in fashion and sports retail, visual merchandising and suburban cabaret inform an astute understanding of the performance, labour and spectacle underpinning these worlds. Working quickly and at scale, Williams transforms salvaged materials, mannequins, costumes and consumer detritus into exuberant sculptural figures and theatrical scenographies. Her sustained yet impulsive commitment to art-making is grounded in reuse, reinvention and class-conscious improvisation. The heroic figure of the woman worker is a recurring motif, through which Williams explores the relationship between labour, the female body and the transformative possibilities of artistic production.
Over three decades, Williams has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally. In 2026–27, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, presents Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers, the largest presentation of her work to date. Curated by Ellie Buttrose, the survey brings together sculpture, performance, video, costume and installation from across her practice, alongside ambitious new commissions, and is accompanied by a significant new publication. Previous exhibitions and projects include 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 and 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.