Alex Noble

Art Decks

I love it! With the CD now being eclipsed by the MP3, I find myself feeling even more nostalgic for the simple charm of the cassette. Australian artists Andrew Smart and Jared Schmidt create ‘large scale hand-made wooden cassette tapes, routed, sanded, bogged, primed, and painted with a high quality paint finish’. Aha! The perfect way to memorialize my old mix tapes. Read more

Justin Williams’ Between a Ghost and a God exhibition

Having just finished up two solo shows, one in Melbourne at Lee Gallery, and the other at Palmer Projects in Sydney, Justin Williams’ solo show, Between a Ghost and a God, is now heading to Brisbane’s Nine Lives Gallery, with the opening night on August 21. Read more

Siobhan Punshon’s Mesmerising Maps

Maps represent a landscape, but they can also mean much more. Victorian artist Siobhan Punshon has recently been working with all sorts of maps and charts, using them as source material then fictionalising the landscape with colour and patterns to create new interpretations of the technical documents. The results then push the viewer in several different directions, as familiar names and symbols are rendered confusing and nonsensical, taking on compelling and dreamlike qualities. Siobhan Punshon has held solo shows in both Melbourne and Sydney, been an artist-in-residence at the Melbourne Aquarium and a finalist in several major art prizes, including the Mosman, Paddington, the ANL Maritime Art Prize, the Fleurieu Peninsula Water Prize and most recently the Albany Art Prize.

Isabel Rock

Horses are a recurring for Isabel Rock. Pastel colours, gnomes, glitter and unicorns adorn other pieces. But this light-heartedness is balanced with dripping illustrations, gushing elaborately in swirls and fat blobs. Block color and a feel for excess hint at the distraction of love, yet darker undertones of struggle and conflict exist.

Kate MccGwire’s pigeon art

Kate MccGwire graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004 and has since exhibited all over London, winning a solo show at 2009’s Heart of Glass. Her most recent installations are taken from thousands of pigeon feathers, flowing water and even a mouldy growth on a wall. We asked her why she uses pigeon feathers: ‘I’m currently using pigeon feathers as they come from a bird that is generally reviled — regarded as vermin and referred to as “rats with wings”. I started to collect pigeon feathers that moulted from the birds in a shed next to my studio. I realized that they were actually very beautiful’.

Johnny Kelly designs the Don’t Panic poster

The latest Don’t Panic poster artist to create free art for your walls is Johnny Kelly, who drew on the theme of Democracy. Rather than just opening Illustrator and vectoring out something about Obama and his dog, Kelly created a super-detailed paper sculpture of the human head as a giant machine, and then photographed it. Of the project, he says: ‘The model was first sketched out a number of times in my notebook. Once that was fully worked out, I planned out the model more rigidly on computer, then got cutting. After everything was stuck into place, my friend Linda Brownlee — a photographer — came over and shot it with a Hasselblad camera. The actual model is A1 in size, so we needed to shoot it on film rather than digital to make sure we could capture as much detail as possible’.