Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.

Daniel catches up with Archibald Prize winner Laura Jones, who painted author Tim Winton. Painter and sitter share a passion for WA's Ningaloo reef and its survival amid climate crisis. Unusually, Laura's own portrait is also on display  –  she entered it in the concurrent Sulman Prize, on at the Art Gallery of NSW. 

Interviewing visual artists is just one of the things that Jennifer Higgie has mastered in her decades-long career at the helm of Frieze magazine and as a writer, reviewer and podcast host. Daniel speaks with London-based Jennifer as her new podcast series for the National Gallery of Australia is released. Listen to Jennifer and Daniel's conversation about women artists and the spirit world.

Ceramicist Vipoo Srivilasa’s work is beautiful, playful and highly technical…and he’s having a moment, featuring in several exhibitions during 2024 including the MAKE Award, Generation Clay and re/JOY. His work is a beacon of light and happiness in dark times.

Maria Madeira escaped the Indonesian invasion of Timor Leste in 1975, to end up in a refugee camp in Portugal. In 2005 she returned as the first artist to hold a solo exhibition there, ever. Now the artist, who came to Australia in 1983, is representing Timor Leste at the Venice Biennale.

The artist RONE was always attracted to street art's impermanence. He's since moved beyond street art and into large scale installations, involving space, sound, music, light and large scale art pieces, that breathe life into the rooms of decaying mansions and inside spaces. RONE's "Time" was on at AGWA Centenary Galleries in Western Australia

For four decades Judy Watson has been making layered, ethereal art about profound and difficult subjects: frontier violence, dispossession and ecological destruction. From her beginnings with the famed Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, to lithographs and her monumental public artworks, Daniel spoke to Judy Watson at her largest survey show at the Queensland Art Gallery, ‘mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson’.

Archie Moore won the top honour at one of the world's most prestigious and oldest art festivals – the Venice Biennale -- for a monumental work showing thousands of years of family lineage, and invoking lives lost under the colonial state.

Monsignor Alberto Rocca is an Italian priest and art curator who has a singular job: accompanying pages from Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus, to the other side of the world. This Codex is the largest collection of Leonardo's drawings and notes, made up of thousand pages.  After spending so much time with Leonardo's works  as curator of the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, Rocca has some theories about the Renaissance polymath.

'Unshakable destiny' was how democracy and self-rule was supposed to manifest for the people of Hong Kong, according to the last British Governor. Nikki Lam has been working on a trilogy of art films about that promise, as personal tragedy and the impact of the city's new laws alter her relationship to her homeland. The unshakable destiny is on at the Centre for Contemporary Photography.

Great conversations wiIn her complex installations, featuring dozens on objects and materials, Sarah Contos imbues and perceives a sensuality within everyday objects. She explores the mind, the womb, the soul and the belly of her major new exhibition, Eye Lash Horizon.

Monica Rani Rudhar explores how art has deepened her connection with her family and explains the deeply personal root of her large-scale jewellery.

And Mark Smith and Anthony Fitzpatrick celebrate 50 years of Arts Project Australia, as they discuss Intimate Imaginaries, a major survey at TarraWarra Museum of Art that includes colourful murals, vibrant textiles, ceramic recreations of domestic scenes, and paintings both abstract and figurative. th visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.

One of the most influential artists in the world, Cao Fei has documented China's rapid urbanisation and digital revolutions for over two decades. In a new exhibition at AGNSW, My City is Yours, she traces the connections between major cities like Beijing and Sydney, and explores how the digital and physical worlds connect.

And Karen Rogers and Sean Richard Smith share the collaborative process behind printmaking. How does this act of translation change or expand a work of art, and what is the relationship between artist and printmaker?

The histories our families share can be in the stories we tell, the food we eat, the objects that are passed down from one generation to the next. Finding our own place in those histories can be difficult, but it can also be exciting and crucial. How are Australian artists from the Asian diaspora creating their own stories? And how are they reckoning with the charged history of museum collections?

Leyla Stevens uses her camera as a tool to engage with interconnected webs of song, performance, and environmental reverence. In her work, deeply beautiful sequences of Balinese jungles are punctuated with the sonic intensity of cicadas and visions of shadow puppetry.

While referencing objects and materials specific to his Chinese heritage, Remy Faint considers big questions: What are the limits of painterly abstraction? How can painting be used to gesture towards cultural multiplicity? And how can you learn about yourself and your family through creating artworks?

The music in this episode is taken from Leyla Stevens' video work, PAHIT MANIS, night forest, which is on display at the Art Gallery of NSW

A time-travelling, multi-regional journey through the histories of ceramics that explores how contemporary artists are politicising this elemental medium.

Nell has said that “all my life is a practice", but what does that mean for the work she creates? And how has her latest piece, a quilt featuring work by 400 people, changed her perspective on collaboration?

Glenn Barkley looks back at the many histories of ceramics, shares his favourite skewer, and discusses the impact of the “Anglosphere mind virus.”

The self-portrait is perhaps the most ubiquitous image of the modern era, but how do contemporary artists use the portrait, not just to reflect themselves or their subject, but to shift our understanding of who we are and who we can be?

Atong Atem takes us into her practice of self-portraiture, exploring how the history of beautification has inspired her images, and why a love for interior design has been an important influence.

And acclaimed contemporary artist Joan Ross explains why fluorescent yellow became central to her work, and how she is reframing the colonial context of the portrait.

Those trees came back to me in my dreams is on at the National Portrait Gallery until February 2025