Surveying two decades of the artist’s practice, Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers brings together sculpture, performance, video, costume and remnants of experimental operas in an immersive, unruly, carnivalesque environment. It is a characteristically abundant and sensory mise en scène: a riot of colour and movement, a cacophony of sound and a hallucinatory space in which the boundaries between past and present, sculpture and performance, art and everyday life are continually unsettled.
We enter the exhibition through a large triumphal archway titled She Monster: The Opening Scene (2026). Based on a decorative headdress by Russian constructivist Natalia Goncharova, it might be a worthy new entrant to the pantheon of novelty “big thing” sculptures plonked across regional Australia. As we cross its threshold, we encounter a fibreglass speedboat which, in its previous life, most probably sat redundantly in a suburban driveway or yard. The boat has grown fantastical orange legs and been given new life as a curiously amphibious creature – much like the mudskipper referred to in the exhibition title, which inhabits tidal swamplands between underwater and earthly realms.
Inside this amphibian craft is a giant jellyfish fashioned from salvaged plastic, neoprene and crystal organza, its lurid tentacles oozing with monstrous feminine excess beyond the containment of this once-maritime vessel. It is a suggestive point of departure as we embark upon the transformative world of Williams’s scenographies.
Just as American architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown looked to casinos, billboards, parking lots, roadside architecture and commercial signage as worthy subjects of architectural inquiry, Williams draws on shopping malls, retail displays, theme parks, casinos, gyms and suburban vernacular to create her compelling psychosocial worlds.
Williams reclaims the detritus of consumer and media culture as a source of invention, finding within the fragmented logic and absurdity of contemporary life the potential for something expansive, generous and hopeful.
With decades of experience in fashion and sports retail, visual merchandising for wedding and bridal fairs, and suburban cabaret performance, Williams has an astute and at times lovingly absurdist understanding of the performance, labour and spectacle underpinning these worlds. She doesn’t simply appropriate these references from a detached, ironic position but subjects them to a process of careful material translation and class-conscious improvisation, informed by a nexus of what Williams calls “ideas around consumerism, fashion, capitalism, labour, goods received, used and then discarded”.
It’s a refreshingly uncommon perspective in Australian art. Wedded to an excavation of the historical avant-garde – Russian constructivism, dada, futurism and the Bauhaus in particular – it reimagines modernism’s utopian aspirations and its integration of art and life.
In conversation with exhibition curator Ellie Buttrose, Williams notes that “improvisation, making do and ad-libbing are a huge part of the way I work”. The apparently ramshackle accumulation of materials is underpinned by ingenuity and resourcefulness. Recycled materials – car and boat carpet, retail fashion mannequins, video screens and furnishings salvaged from a casino – sit alongside objects sourced from Bunnings, Facebook Marketplace and the $2 shop. Together, they speak to an ethic of reuse and reinvention, where “making do” becomes a vernacular form of social realism and bricolage. They also carry a semantic load. As Williams suggests: “There’s always been a bag lady person in my work … carrying your life around on your body. The weight of stuff on you, literally.”
The question of labour, and the heroic figure of the woman worker, is a recurring motif. An early video, Crutch dance (2011), showed the artist on a gym treadmill in an endurance performance of almost Sisyphean dimensions, trying to keep up with time as it accelerates, turning repetitive physical exertion into absurdist spectacle. Here, in a newly revised installation of The Vertigoats (2021), theatrical mannequins and constructed sculptural figures evoke the alienation and anonymity of repetitive labour, while Williams’s own artistic labour offers a contrasting form of agency.
As curator Victoria Perin suggests in a catalogue essay, the distinction between labour as a repetitive, constrained activity and art-making as an inventive, transformative act, a means through which Williams can unalienate her own labour in ways unavailable to the retail worker, is part of the tension that gives the work its charge. This tension also connects Williams to heroic representations of the worker in the historical avant-garde, from Fernand Léger’s monumentalised bodies to the constructivists’ vision of art as a form of socially transformative labour. Yet Williams’s workers are rarely heroic: their bodies, costumes, gestures and stuff are ludic and precarious, turning the neoliberal rhetoric of labour into something more ambiguous.
Williams’s engagement with the female body is disruptive, introducing a force that is at once comic, abject and resistant. Works such as Victory Over the Sun (2016) and The dynamism of Cecilia Forlani (2026) see Williams reinventing constructivist opera and futurist sculpture through striving female bodies, playfully reworking avant-garde histories and their predominantly male heroic subjects. Here, the disciplined, productive body of the worker gives way to something more unruly: a body that is exuberant, unashamedly performative and refusing containment.
Drawing on a sophisticated understanding of media culture, Williams’s work gives form to a contemporary culture of accumulation and acceleration, sensory overload and distraction, repetition and glitch. Rather than a collection of discrete works, the exhibition takes shape as an unstable network, a shifting kaleidoscopic world of proliferating images and screens, gym-freak mannequins and avatars, and the stuttering performance of self.
Notwithstanding the exhibition’s hyperactivity and digital saturation, dimensions of the mythical and metaphysical emerge. Possible other worlds are suggested by Spirit Box (2026), an installation of archival radios, buzzing with audio fragments and incantations, white noise and static; the prismatic constructivist chandelier of Crystal whisperer (2026); and the clairvoyant, shamanistic sculptural video installation Santa was a Psychopomp (2014).
The exhibition concludes on a more classical note, with two new Emote sculptures from 2025-26 elegantly installed in the Queensland Art Gallery’s expansive water mall, their contrapposto gestures and irreverent bodily exuberance giving Sarah Lucas and Franz West a run for their money.
Williams reclaims the detritus of consumer and media culture as a source of invention, finding within the fragmented logic and absurdity of contemporary life the potential for something expansive, generous and hopeful. Her work may be chaotic and slapstick, but it is also a form of attentiveness: to alienated labour, consumer capitalism and technological change, to the performance of identity and, ultimately, to the possibility of hope and transformation.
Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers is at Queensland Art Gallery until March 7.