Image: QAGOMA, Brisbane
The exhibition runs from 3 October 2026 to 7 March 2027. It is described as Williams’s largest survey exhibition to date.
Spanning performative videos, sculpture, sound and installation from the past 20 years, the exhibition includes a wealth of new works. Opening-day programming includes an artist talk, live pop-up performances by Springboard Opera and a discussion about the ideas and influences shaping Williams’s practice.
The exhibition description presents Williams’s practice as a do-it-yourself strategy that fuses disparate textures and concepts into compelling artworks, reflecting her belief that a shared future can be forged with resources at hand and transformed by the imagination. Her artworks address ideals of beauty, careerist and consumerist pressures, the strangeness of living in both the physical body and virtual space, and human connections to rituals and the afterlife. The mudskipper invoked by the exhibition’s title exists between worlds, a position echoed by artworks described as an amalgam of materials and approaches, grounded in art history while reflecting contemporary issues.
Williams’s 2022 work ‘Boccioni Babe’ is made from bronze and silver metallic epoxy paint. Influenced by punk, feminism and improvisation, her practice encompasses performance, sculpture, video and installation.
One video projection shows Williams performing in a blue-and-white costume amid fake snow, responding to her experience of parenting a young child, including the question of whether to encourage the child’s belief in Santa Claus before later telling the truth, and to the recent death of her father. The projection is based on an improvised performance arising from a conversation between Williams and a clairvoyant about her father.
