Hello! Happy Lunar New Year of the Snake 2025—symbolizing wisdom, transformation, and resilience.

I hope this new year is a healthy, artful, memorable, and auspicious one Ahoy!

This summer, while having a short break and cleaning my artist’s studio, I am feeling thrilled and delighted to find queer bits and pieces from the 1980s and 1990s, including ephemera and photos of queer events like this one.

The Domestic Ritual exhibition staged at That Space by artists Peter Dwyer [pictured here with a friend discussing their work in the foreground and colleague Steven Carson to the right of the pic in the background], Mary North and Steven Carson in November 1987. The artists embraced queerness in material and conceptual form, exploring the messiness of the space between art and craft at the time. The artists foregrounded domestic shared spaces and houses where studio practices and art practices unfolded in simultaneity and were often invisible in, and unvalued by, the formal, traditional arts environment.

Hard to believe that this pic is from 40 years ago this year when That Space artist-run space opened to the public. Building the DIY, participatory, volunteer-based, queered, and pluralising ethos of independent artist groupings in Brisbane since the 1940s.

So it is an ARI anniversary year for That Space and hundreds of artists who co-founded the space and made so many events and cultural actions possible.

These affecting spaces in Brisbane, including John Mills National, among many others, actively troubled the deficits and deficiencies of mainstream galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and recordkeeping environments. What we know today as the Australian GLAMR sector.

Brisbane artist-run activity during this cultural moment when the Bjelke-Peterson regime was a catalyst for resistance and oppositional voices proved that artists, arts making, and arts-based collaborations were non-elite and more than GLAMR. This is perhaps a defining and enduring characteristic of these SEQ artist-run communities today. This oppressive political experience in Queensland is unlike any other state in the history of Australia.

Explicitly queer activity at the end of the Bjelke-Petersen era found added gravitas with Brisbane’s then-emergent, and also independent, Queercore music scene and the first LGBTQIA+ Pride March in 1990. Renewed energies, synergies, and aspirations celebrating a change of government and ‘legislative’ liberation of so many oppressed people and communities, and, symbolically, experimental conceptual creative explorations.

Photo: The Shared Camera, 1987

By way of an aside for current and new open-group members alike, please feel free and welcome to add your photos, stories, and memories here too.

Paul

Paul Andrew | he/they

Whistling Kite Artist Studio

Work Hours: Casual [On QUT Research Leave 24 Dec 2024 – 28 January 2025]

Interdisciplinary Media Artist, DIY coordinator & Community Facilitator.

CURRENT PROJECTS: