Australian Women Artists

Australian Women Artists
 The podcast
 
Ep 86 Elizabeth Barnett
 
 
Elizabeth Barnett is a painter and printmaker who also utilises textiles and pottery. Her still life and interior paintings have become instantly recognisable — plant-filled nooks, stacked books, jugs and vases, all rendered in a distinct palette that reflects the season. 
 She has a deep reverence for the everyday. From her early training in the rigorous world of printmaking to lush, translucent paintings on stretched linen, and eventually to thickly layered oil works in her bushland studio. 
 She is also an incredible community builder, having co-founded Melbourne's iconic Schoolhouse Studios, a massive, not-for-profit creative hub. 
 Today, working from her home studio in the Macedon Ranges, Elizabeth continues to celebrate the gentle, wondrous beauty of daily life while acting as a passionate advocate for female representation in the arts.
 “Her subjects do not sit flat upon the canvas, but instead reach up from it, enlivened by the wild and natural world. This liveliness belies the ‘stillness’ of still life painting and along with Barnett’s painterly gestures of shadow, line and colour creates a visual dynamism reaches beyond tradition.”
 
 
To have a listen to our conversation, head to the link in my bio or search Australian Women Artists wherever you find your podcasts. 
 
Elizabeth is represented by Flinders Lane Gallery in Melbourne. 
 
 
Images supplied by artists
 
1.   EB
2.   Nocturne Arrangement 2026 oil on linen 215 x 153
3.   Floribunda and Gwen 2026 oil on linen 81 x 91
4.   Nocturne 2024 oil on linen 153 x 122
5 & 6 installation shots

Australian Women Artists
 
The podcast
 
Ep 85 Nell
 
Nell is one of Australia's most distinctive contemporary artists, working across painting, sculpture, performance, video and installation. 
She has spent three decades building a visual language shaped by rock 'n' roll, Buddhist philosophy and religious iconography. Smiley faces, lightning bolts, ghosts, tears and eggs recur throughout her art and help create works that have been described as playful, insightful and poetic. 
Her work explores the binaries of human existence – birth and death, sorrow and happiness, light and dark. 
It’s a fascinating story and, with 300+ exhibitions to consider, I’ve had the unenviable task of choosing just a few to discuss without minimising the others otherwise we’d be still chatting well into 2027!
‘Nell has developed a unique visual language that traverses scale, medium and materiality. Regardless of the outcome, her work explores oppositional thresholds and the fertile space that exist beyond the binary: from intimate to immersive, found to fabricated, high to low culture, two-dimensions to three-dimensions, individual to collaborative, ancient to contemporary, sacred to profane.... At the heart of Nell’s practice is an offering of connection and companionship; a reminder that we are not alone.’ Station Gallery (representing Nell).
 

To have a listen to our conversation, head to my bio or search ‘Australian Women Artists’ wherever you normally find your podcasts.
 
 
 
Images 
 
1.    Holding Both, 2026, Museum of Contemporary Art, Photo Anna Kucera
2.    Let There Be Robe, 2011, Museum of Old and New Art, Photo Rémi Chauvin
3.    ROCK GATE, 2019, Carriageworks, Photo Zan Wimberley
4.    Nell x Colin McCahon: Through the Wall of Birth and Death, 2024, Dowse Art           Museum, Photo Sam Hartnett
5.    Face Everything, 2025-26, Heide Modern, Photo Christo Crocker
6+7. NELL ANNE QUILT, 2020-24, Photo Jenni Carter

Australian Women Artists
 The podcast
 Ep 84 Chelsea Gustafsson
 
 Chelsea Gustafsson is an artist whose work invites us to look closer at the quiet, often overlooked items of our daily lives—transforming mass-produced objects, ornaments, and domestic clutter into highly detailed, deeply metaphorical still lifes. 
 Her paintings are incredibly beautiful, but they also carry a sharp undercurrent of modern anxiety, apathy, and ecological grief. 
 From her early beginnings influenced by 3D sculptors to painting on her dining table, Chelsea has built a formidable practice that has seen her work acquired by the City of Melbourne, celebrated as a finalist in the prestigious Kennedy Prize, and exhibited internationally in Berlin. And very recently, she was selected for the celebrated Salon des Refusés at the S.H. Ervin Gallery.
 “I like to play with objects and textures that don’t necessarily sit well together naturally. Through the process of constructing items into a sculptural form and twisting or balancing them to find their sweet spot for a composition and watching how the light falls and reflects across them, they begin to gel as a single form and a beauty emerges.”
 
 
Head to my bio and follow the link to our podcast conversation...or search Australian Women Artists wherever you find your podcasts.
 
Chelsea is represented by:
Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne
Penny Contemporary, Hobart
Michael Reid Berlin
 
Images
1.   CG supplied by artist
2.   Self Portrait, 2026, Oil on board (all works on these images are OOB) 30 x 40
3.   Lobster, 2025, 15 x 20
4.   Surfcoast Highway, 2019, 15 x 20
5.   Mint, 2020, 40 x 50
6.   Tasmanian Tigers, 2024 22 x 30
7.   Trophy 01, 2022, 15 x 20

Australian Women Artists
 
The podcast
 
Ep 83 Nicole Kelly
 
Nicole Kelly is one of contemporary Australia’s most sensitive and intellectually rigorous painters, working beautifully across landscape, portraiture, and still life. 
She creates deeply evocative, expressive oil works that challenge the very mechanics of how we represent, and perhaps try to own, the Australian landscape. In fact, it would probably be fair to say that she is an artist who's spent nearly two decades quietly ‘unsettling’ one of Australia's oldest genres.
Since graduating from the National Art School and winning the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, Nicole has built a formidable practice defined by evolving technical processes and academic rigour. 
 She’s been a finalist in a number of awards and has also won significant prizes including her recently winning the prestigious Evelyn Chapman Art Award. She will utilise that to study Nordic painting traditions. And we need to discuss that of course. 
Her paintings pull you in with glowing colour and soft, pliable brushwork, then quietly remind you that no landscape is ever just scenery.
Her work is held in numerous public and private collections.
 
A really enjoyable conversation and to hear it, head to the link in my bio or search ‘Australian Women Artists’ wherever you find your podcasts. 
 
 
You can find more information about Nicole at her website:
www.nicolerenaekelly.com
Nicole is represented by
Nicholas Thomson Gallery, Melbourne (@nicholasthompsongallery)
Art House Gallery, Sydney (@arthousegallery)
 
 
Images
1.   NK via Nicholas Thompson Gallery
2.   Jumaadi + Clouds + Rain, 2017 oil on polyester (all paintings on this list are OOP), 150 x 130
3.   Rain Inscribed Lines, 2024, 169 x 198
4.   Bird Hour, 2026, 117 x 107
5.   Dance of March Flies, 2024, 138 x 167
6.   Waiting for the Sun, 2026, 122 x 153

Australian Women Artists
 
The podcast
 
Ep 82 Kirsten Coelho
 
 
Kirsten Coelho’s importance lies partly in how she actually expands the language of Australian ceramics.
Kirsten is one of Australia’s leading contemporary ceramic artists, known for almost ethereal porcelain vessels that sit between the functional and the sculptural. Her works in porcelain are “creating functional forms and vessels of other-worldly perfection that fuse the formal with the abstract.” 
Her work is shaped by the history of ceramics, architectural surfaces, and a deep interest in how ordinary objects carry memory and cultural meaning and it’s grounded in international ceramic history. But it also speaks to distinctly Australian conditions: light, landscape, domestic life, and the material traces of settler history. And we discuss that in our lovely languid conversation. 
Kirsten’s work is exhibited extensively internationally, and she has won significant awards, including the prestigious Sidney Myer Ceramic Award, the City of Hobart Art Prize and the Josephine Ulrick Ceramic Award. Her work is represented in numerous institutional collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
 
Kirsten is represented by Sullivan Strumpf NSW + Singapore, Philip Bacon Galleries Qld, Adrian Sassoon UK London, The Scottish Gallery UK Edinburgh. 
 

@kirsten_coelho_
 @sullivanstrumpf
@philipbacongalleries
@adrian_sassoon_gallery
@scottishgallery
 
 
 
 
 
Images supplied by artist
 
1.   KC by Daniel Noone
2.   Horizon, image by Grant Hancock
3.   Pillar, image by Grant Hancock
4.   Ithaca, image by Grant Hancock