Australian Women Artists

Australian Women Artists
 The podcast
 
Ep 77 Dani McKenzie
 
 Dani McKenzie’s story begins, unusually, not in an art school studio but in a bedroom — where, after a formative trip through Europe and a chance encounter with the work of Belgian painter Michaël Borremans, she spent six months teaching herself to paint. 
That instinct and passion carried her into the National Art School in Sydney, where she completed both her undergraduate and Master of Fine Art degrees, and where her enduring fascination with photography — memory, privacy, and the lives of strangers — first took shape.
Early in her career, Dani worked from found photographs, creating imaginative worlds conjured from those images. But it was the ubiquitous disruptions of 2020 that changed everything. Forced to slow down, she began walking her own neighbourhood in inner-Melbourne, photographing it at night, and turning her lens — quite literally — on her own life and surroundings. 
The results are a stunning body of work. Paintings of glowing windows, quiet streets, and private moments caught in public space, executed with a photographic precision that somehow still feels deeply human.
Dani is represented by PIERMARQ Gallery, Sydney, MARS Gallery, Melbourne and Long Story Short Gallery (Los Angeles, Paris, New York) and has held solo exhibitions in Paris, Los Angeles, Sydney and Melbourne.

Dani mentions being influenced by Clarice Beckett. You could copy and paste this link into your browser to hear a conversation I had with Jennifer Higgie on Clarice:
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/australian-women-artists/id1794012822?i=1000695950466

Head to the link in my bio to have a listen to our conversation. Alternatively, search Australian Women Artists wherever you find your podcasts. 
 

Images
1.   DM image supplied by artist
2.   Waiting For You, 2022, oil & acrylic on linen 
3.   Waiting for Gelato, 2021, oil on masonite 
4.   That Little Italian Place on the Corner, 2022, oil & acrylic on linen 
5.   Room With a View, 2023 oil & acrylic on linen 
6.   Closing Time I, 2023, oil & acrylic on board 
7.   Date Night, 2024, oil & acrylic on linen 
8.   The Final Hour, 2025, oil & acrylic on linen

Australian Women Artists
 
The podcast
 
Ep 76 Kate Shaw
 
 
Kate Shaw is an award-winning Australian artist who spends her time working and living between Melbourne and the US, having exhibited in Australia for over 20 years and internationally for over 10 years. 
 Through her luminous landscapes, Kate has created an artistic world that is quite breathtaking, but also quite unsettling. Over that career, it would be fair to say she has fundamentally reinterpreted how we perceive the natural world. 
 Her practice began to be recognized not just for its innovative methodology, but for its ecological statements. 
 Kate has held solo exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong and throughout Australia. She has also been part of group exhibitions in many other countries.
 
‘Kate has become a compelling voice in contemporary painting, known for her immersive, surreal landscapes that probe our relationship with the natural world. Shaw’s richly layered works — created through ‘paint pours’, resin, and reflective surfaces — evoke geological and atmospheric phenomena while inviting contemplation on ecological fragility, climate change, and the psychological experience of nature.’ Olsen Gallery
 
 
To hear our conversation head to the link in my bio or search Australian Women Artists wherever you find your podcasts. 
 
Kate is represented by Olsen Gallery, Sydney (@olsen_gallery)
 
For more info on Kate:
www.kateshaw.org
 
 
Images:
 
1.   KS by Belle Stewart
2.   Divine Matrix 2026 acrylic & resin on board 120 diam
3.   89 Seconds to Midnight 2025 acrylic on board 120 diam
4.   Aurora 2016 acrylic and resin on board 120 diam
5.   Carbon Entanglement 2026 acrylic and resin 60 x 50

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