Undressed Porcelain: Nicholls’ Stylised Nudes is an essay that I wrote in response to Andrew Nicholls’ works titled The Four Seasons, a group of four drawings depicting nude male models that represent the changing of the seasons.

Nicholls’s work featured as part of HERE&NOW 20: Perfectly Queer, curated by Brent Harrison at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 29 August - 5 December 2020.

The exhibition catalogue can be found here.

HERE&NOW 20: Perfectly Queer

Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery
29 August – 5 December 2020

HERE&NOW20: Perfectly Queer is an exhibition of new commissions, bringing together eight multidisciplinary artists who draw on histories and their own lived experiences to reflect on what it means to be queer. The artists in this exhibition explore a wide range of themes and issues from notions of family and community, local queer history, and transgender and non-binary lived experiences. Through intergenerational dialogues these artists dismantle dominant heteronormative narratives and highlight the continued resistance of queer culture.

HERE&NOW20: Perfectly Queer is also informed by Queer in the West an exhibition that was hosted by the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) in 1996. The exhibition critiqued the draconian Law Reform (Decriminalization of Sodomy) Act 1989, that prohibited the “encouragement or promotion of homosexual behaviour”, making it illegal to display artworks with a queer sensibility in public spaces. Since the amendment of this law there have been very few exhibitions in major galleries that explicitly feature the work of queer artists. HERE&NOW20: Perfectly Queer is the first exhibition in over twenty years to exclusively feature the work of local queer artists at a Western Austalian institution.

The exhibition features work by artists Benjamin Bannan, Nathan Beard, Janet Carter, Lill Colgan, Jo Darbyshire, Brontë Jones, Andrew Nicholls and Colin Smith.