HOTA Collects: Metamorphosis Sat 30 Aug 2025 – Sun 11 Jan 2026
Hello, and Happy New Year 2026!
Final days for this important multidimensional group exhibition at HOTA closing next Sunday 11 January 2026, a great joy and pleasure to be involved in. Speaking reflectively about the photomedia informed creative practice, experimental practice and social practice of Ruby Spowart [1928-2024] was an essential experience for me, as Ruby was one of many invaluable mentors for myself and many others as we set out as young artists in Eighties Brisbane to start a series of artist run spaces in Brisbane Magandjin. The short HOTA documentary includes artist colleagues from the Gold Coast region and forms part of the bedazzling exhibition. As a stalwart of Southeast Queensland artist-run communities of practice in the 1980s and 1990s Ruby’s practice is kaleidascopic in nature and her legacy continues today, a cultural polymath.
HOTA Collects: Metamorphosis
Artists have been transforming found materials through cutting, assembling and pasting for centuries. Processes such as collage and assemblage flourished in Australia from the mid-twentieth century, with artists repurposing the discarded detritus of modern life to create new meaning. Through collage and photomontage, artists reconfigure images to examine themes such as feminism, environmentalism, and the connection between self and place.
Metamorphosis brings together work by more than thirty Australian artists from the HOTA Collection, who have used these transformative methods to explore ideas of identity, memory and perception.
Included in the exhibition are works by Rebecca Ross, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Rosalie Gascoigne, James Gleeson, Robert Klippel, Julie Rrap, Sally Smart, Ruby Spowart, Brett Whiteley, Judith Wright and Jemima Wyman. Pictured here is an exhibition view and a screenshot of Ruby’s son, and interviewee Doug Spowart. Ruby and Doug co-founded Imagery as a photo-based artist-run space in South Brisbane in 1980. Imagery Gallery operated between 1980 to 1995 and showed 205 exhibitions featuring work by Ruby, Doug and many local, interstate and international artists. Photos by artist Charlie Hillhouse, To date, Imagery is also Queensland’s longest running ARI. EXTRA special thanks to HOTA colleagues Kimberly Stokes and Sam Creyton and artist colleagues Doug Spowart, Victoria Cooper and Rebecca Ross, and the amazing The Edit Suite crew!!!
Header Image; Photo by Charlie Hillhouse