Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers

Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers brings together installation, sculpture, performance-based video, sound and costumes from operas spanning the past three 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’ artworks amalgamate 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, drawing on 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 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.