The Opera, the Clairvoyant and the Climbing Wall: Inside Justene Williams' World

QAGOMA is calling Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers her biggest survey to date, but curator Ellie Buttrose is quick to push back on the word "survey." This isn't a neat, chronological march through three decades of work — it's a concentrated hit of her most significant installations from the last fifteen years, weighted heavily toward new pieces, built around a title that's really a warning: swimming in the primordial swamp together, we could end up back there again.

To understand why that warning lands the way it does, it helps to look at three specific works doing the heaviest lifting in the show.

Victory Over the Sun (2016)

Williams came up through Sydney's grunge scene in the 1990s alongside Mikala Dwyer, Hany Armanious, Adam Cullen, Sarah Goffman, Elvis Richardson and David M Thomas — a DIY sensibility that never left her practice, even as the ambitions got bigger.

Victory Over the Sun is the clearest proof of that scale. Commissioned for the 2016 Biennale of Sydney by then-artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal, it's a restaging of the 1913 Russian Futurist opera of the same name — the one whose original set, designed by Kazimir Malevich, produced a stage curtain that would later become his famous Black Square. Most of the original score is lost; the libretto was written in an invented language. Williams designed and sewed the costumes herself, rebuilt the opera's masculine narrative around a strong female lead, and worked with Sydney Chamber Opera to bring it to the stage more than a century after its debut — with drones, data and modern noise dragged into a story originally about destroying the sun itself.

The Vertigoats (2021)

If Victory Over the Sun is Williams at her most historically engaged, The Vertigoats is her most direct hit on the present. Candy-coloured climbing holds, department-store shelving, and mannequins with limbs stretched into absurdity turn a QAGOMA gallery into a hyped-up retail floor — one where climbing the social ladder and climbing a bouldering wall start to look like the same activity.

QAGOMA's own account of the work goes further: the mannequins aren't just shop props, they're stand-ins for people "mindlessly devoted to contemporary trends," a few of them so absorbed in their own screens they've stopped noticing the room around them. It's a broad, funny premise with a real edge — Williams using wit to make a point about how thoroughly the beauty and wellness industries have colonised the idea of self-improvement.

Santa was a Psychopomp (2014)

The most personal work in the show doesn't announce itself as such. Staged like the inside of a snow globe — snowdrift sculptures, a pile of used Christmas trees, a projection of Williams performing in a blue-and-white costume — Santa was a Psychopomp was made while she was deciding whether to keep the Santa Claus myth alive for her own young child, not long after her father's death had reshaped how the family spent the holidays.

The work's video is an improvised performance built from an actual conversation Williams had with a clairvoyant about her father, tied loosely to a Norse tradition that casts Odin — one inspiration for the modern Santa — as a figure who ferries spirits to the other side. It's a strange, specific piece of grief to build an artwork around, and it sits oddly, deliberately, next to the show's louder, funnier moments.

What's new

The newest works in the show point somewhere else entirely. Her 2025–26 "Emote Sculpture" series — including Spirit Strider — takes its titles and poses directly from Fortnite's in-game emotes, rendered in dripping resin and visible foam cells. It's the same instinct that drove the grunge-era paper-circle costumes of Your Boat My Scenic Personality of Space (2012): take something instantly recognisable, then stretch and distort it until it turns strange.

Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers opens 3 October at Queensland Art Gallery (Gallery 3 and Gallery 4) and runs until 7 March 2027. Entry is free. Opening day includes a free artist talk (10:30am), two pop-up performances from Springboard Opera (11:15am and 12:30pm), and a discussion panel (1pm).

Details on Williams' key works draw on curatorial material published by Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, including an essay by curator Ellie Buttrose.