Australian Women Artists

Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 75 Lucy Culliton
 
 
Lucy Culliton is a gem.
 It was such an enjoyable conversation – she always has interesting stories, and I was just lucky enough to be sitting on the other side of the table.
 It becomes quite apparent that Lucy finds a portrait in everything she looks at — a cactus spine, a prize rooster, a knitted doll, a greyhound asleep in the afternoon light. And that’s because she paints with an intimacy that seems to breathe life into those everyday scenes and objects?
Lucy Culliton lives and works on a property at the edge of Bibbenluke in the Snowy Monaro. There she has created a beautiful garden, and she also shares the property with cows, sheep, goats, horses, pigeons, ducks and many rescued greyhounds. The farm is not a backdrop to the work. It is the work.
Lucy studied at the National Art School, graduating in 1996, and has spent three decades building one of the most beloved and distinctive bodies of work in Australian painting. She is a multiple Archibald, Wynne and Sulman finalist, and this year won the Sir John Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Her paintings make you slow down. They make you look harder. And they make the ordinary world feel, somehow, like more than enough.
I decided within seconds of starting this conversation that, for listeners to get the full picture, it would best to just let it roll. No editing. It is what it is with Lucy. And aren’t we all the luckier for that. 
Lucy is represented by @kingstreetgallery in Sydney and @janmurphygallery in Brisbane
Her exhibition, Grasses, Tussocks & Sedges is at King St till 4 July
 
Head to my bio for a link to the podcast episode or search for Australian Women Artists wherever you find your podcasts.
 
Images
1.   LC via Painted River Project
2.   Bibbenluke Spring 2025 oil on canvas 122 x 99
3.   Top Swamp II 2023 oil on canvas 199 x 122
4.   Toolah, artist assist and and model oil on canvas 140 x140 (winner Sulman Prize 2026)
5.   View From The Pavillion Gunningrah 2026 oil on canvas 184 x 183
6.   Love lies bleeding 2017 oil on canvas 244 x 183

Australian Women Artists
 
The podcast
 
Ep 74 Rachel Milne
 
Rachel Milne is a Newcastle-based painter whose work turns everyday interiors, objects, and moments into beautifully compelling paintings. 
 Rachel grew up in Cambridge, trained in Cardiff, and built an early career in Britain serious enough to earn her membership of the Royal West of England Academy. 
 Then, in 2013, she packed up and moved to the other side of the world — to Newcastle, New South Wales — and something shifted. 
 She is a painter of interiors. Of unmade beds and cluttered studios, of hallways and mirrors, of spaces that hold the shape of the people who inhabit them. 
 She works in oil, from life, often in a single sitting — because she believes the camera makes too many decisions on her behalf. 
 She has been a finalist in numerous significant awards including the Wynne Prize and Portia Geach and has won the Evelyn Chapman Award, Muswellbrook Art Prize and the Vincent Prize. More recently she has spent time as artist-in-residence at the Liddell Power Station — finding beauty in a building the world was busy demolishing.
 And who could have guessed this started from painting backgrounds for Wallace and Gromit. 
 
Head to the link in my bio to have a listen to our conversation.
 
Rachel’s latest exhibition: Newcastle, High is on at King Street Gallery on William (Sydney) till 4 July 2026.
 
For more info and examples of her work, head to www.rachelmilneartist.com.au
 
Rachel is represented in Sydney by King Street Gallery on William (@kingstreetgallery) and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne (@sophiegannongallery)
 
 
Images
1.   RM by David Griffen
2.   The Stage, Victoria Theatre 2021 160 x 120
3.   Nest, 2022 oil on board (winner Muswellbrook Painting Prize)
4.   Studio Haefligers 2016 50 x 80 (Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Collection)
5.   View From The Stage, Victoria Theatre, 2021 80 x 100
6.   Town Hall 2026 60 x 80

Australian Women Artists
 The podcast
 Ep 73 Kirtika Kain
 
Kirtika Kain was born in New Delhi, India and raised on Sydney's Northern Beaches, and is making some of the most viscerally powerful art in the country right now. 
Kirtika is a printmaker, a painter, and an alchemist. Her works often depict the overlooked. One of the extraordinary ways she does that is by taking materials such as pigments, wax, sindoor, human hair, charcoal, gold and tar and transforming them into works that carry centuries of inherited memory. 
Her practice is a reckoning with identity, and what might be termed the silences passed down through generations. But it’s more than that. It's also an act of celebration and the grandeur of a culture that has never been properly archived. 
She has shown at the Biennale of Sydney, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and in galleries across Australia and Europe. 

Head to the link in my bio to hear our conversation. 
 
Kirtika (@kirtika.kain) is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 (@roslynoxley9)
 
Images
1.   KK in her studio at Parramatta Artists’ Studios, by Garry Trinh
2.   Chronicles, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025-26
3.   Mimetics, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025-26
4.   2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art
5.   Stone Idols, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery 2021

Australian Women Artists
 
The podcast
 
Ep 72 Lily Mae Martin
 
Lily Mae Martin is a remarkable visual artist known for her deeply personal explorations of womanhood, motherhood, and the human condition. Her own strength and resilience in the face of, at times, enormous challenges, is remarkable.
She is celebrated for her masterful draughtsmanship, particularly her delicate and detailed cross-hatching using fine liner ink pens, building up thousands upon thousands of tiny lines to produce an incredible tone. 
After graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2008 and winning the Lionel Gell travelling scholarship, she spent years refining her practice in Berlin and Wales before returning to Australia. 
Her work has always been predominantly figurative, with a love of traditional portraiture approached in an unconventional way — seeking to capture people outside of the polished, self-conscious way they present themselves to a camera.
She was a finalist for the 2016 Rick Amor Drawing Prize, Art Gallery of Ballarat; winner of the 2016 Ursula Hoff Institute Emerging Artist Acquisitive Art Award in the National Works on Paper exhibition, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery; and shortlisted for the 2016 Paul Guest Drawing Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery, Adelaide Perry drawing prize 2017 and the Dobell Drawing Prize 2019. Lily Mae also contributed to The Drawing Board – a four part segment exploring drawing on Radio National, The Arts Program in 2022.
 
Lily Mae (@lilymaemartin) is represented by Scott Livesey Galleries (@scottliveseygalleries)
 
I referred in our conversation to the National Gallery of Victoria ‘Drop-by Drawing’ programme of which Lily Mae was a part. The link is below
https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/multimedia/drop-by-drawing-with-lily-mae-martin/
Head to the link in my bio to have a listen to our conversation.
 
 
Images
1.   LMM supplied by artist
2.   Orchid Medley 2025 ink on cotton paper 15 x 20
3.   Waterloo State Forest 2016 ink on paper 76 x 105
4.   Nothing is Untouched (Moorabool) 2024 ink on paper 56 x 76
5.   Emerging

Australian Women Artists
 
The podcast
 
Ep 71 Julie Fragar
 
Julie Fragar is one of the country's most compelling painters. 
For those who are familiar with that name, it could well be because she recently made headlines as the winner of the prestigious 2025 Archibald Prize. What is perhaps not as well known to the general public is that that win marked the 4th time she had been a finalist in that competition.
For over two decades, Julie's practice has been described as pushing the intellectual limits of painting. Her works are deeply psychological, and weave together autobiography, historical narratives and intense human experiences. 
We had a great conversation talking about her childhood in country NSW, her art school experiences, her visual technique which she describes as not "layering," but rather as images "woven" or "knitted" together, where all images exist simultaneously on the canvas, the incredible works she produced after sitting in the public gallery of the Supreme Court and later when she shadowed a gynaecological surgeon and witnessed the visceral reality of the operating theatre and, of course, her 2025 win in the Archibald Prize. 
Julie Fragar’s work is held in major public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of South Australia; and the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art. She has been the recipient of major awards and institutional commissions. And Professor Fragar also happens to be Deputy Director (Research) at the Queensland College of Art and Design, Griffith University. 
 
Head to the link in my bio to hear our conversation, or search Australian Women Artists wherever you find your podcasts. 
 
 
 
Images
1.   JF, AGNSW, Diana Panuccio
2.   Flagship Mother Multiverse (Justene) 2025 oil on canvas, 240 x 180 (Archibald winner 2025)
3.   Richard, 2020 oil on canvas 180 x 135 (Archibald finalist)
4.   Trust, 2026 oil on canvas 180 x 135
5.   Drown in Your Own Ambition, 2021
6.   Origin of the World (or One Battle After Another), 2026