Image: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
The Queensland Art Gallery will present a new exhibition of Justene Williams’s key works from 3 October 2026 to 7 March 2027. ‘Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers’ is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date, surveying three decades of her practice through a multi-sensory journey and ambitious new installations. The exhibition occupies Gallery 3, the Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Gallery, and Gallery 4 at the Queensland Art Gallery.
Influenced by punk, feminism and improvisation, Williams’s practice encompasses performance, sculpture, video and installation, commenting on popular culture through echoes of art history. She draws on the visual languages of Futurism, Dada, Bauhaus and avant-garde opera to subvert contemporary retail, fitness culture and digital environments.
The exhibition’s title refers to mudskippers, small swamp-dwelling fish that can live both on land and in water, pulling themselves from muddy water to move across mudflats with specially shaped fins functioning as legs. For Williams, the metaphor places everyone in the primordial swamp together, looking for a way out through daring adaptability, while accepting a sometimes messy, swamp-dwelling life.
Williams distorts the mannequins’ limbs to draw attention to what she presents as the ridiculousness of the ideal body propagated by the fashion industry and social media. Climbing holds and geometric boulders reinforce the vertigo alluded to in the title while referencing in-vogue rock-climbing gyms.
