The Mudskipper and the Punk: Justene Williams Takes Over QAG

There is a small, extraordinary fish called the mudskipper. It lives in swamps. It breathes air. It pulls itself out of the water on fins shaped like stubby legs and skips across mudflats with a kind of absurd, determined energy. It has absolutely no business being on land — and yet there it is, doing it anyway.

Justene Williams has been that fish for thirty years.

The Brisbane-based artist — born in Sydney in 1970, now deeply rooted in Queensland — has spent three decades making work that refuses to stay in the water. Performance, sculpture, video, installation: she moves between them all with the same daring adaptability the mudskipper embodies. Her practice is loud, layered, and entirely its own thing.

This October, the Queensland Art Gallery gives her the full room to run.

Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers opens on 3 October 2026, running through to 7 March 2027 in Galleries 3 and 4 at the Queensland Art Gallery — the Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Gallery. It is the largest survey of her work ever mounted, and it arrives with the kind of energy her practice has always promised.

Punk, Feminism, and the Echoes of Art History

Williams draws from an unlikely but precise combination of references: Futurism, Dada, Bauhaus, avant-garde opera, retail culture, fitness videos, suburban Australia. She takes the visual language of art history and runs it through a blender with pop culture and personal narrative, then presents the result with total conviction.

QAGOMA Director Chris Saines describes her work as "visually spectacular and intellectually layered" — which is accurate, but perhaps undersells the sheer physical presence of it. Williams doesn't make quiet work. Her installations fill rooms. Her performances demand the body. Her videos are dense with costume, movement, and colour.

What ties it together is a deeply held feminist intelligence. She is not subverting the art historical canon for shock value — she is interrogating it, finding the places where women's work, suburban life, and consumer culture have been written out of the official story, and dragging them back in with spectacular, sometimes uncomfortable force.

The Mudskipper Metaphor

The exhibition title isn't arbitrary. Williams chose the mudskipper as a metaphor for a particular kind of human condition — the desire to escape, to evolve, to pull yourself out of the primordial swamp and find higher ground, while also accepting that the swamp is where you live. We are all in the muck together, she suggests. The question is what you do with your fins.

It's a generous metaphor. Not triumphant, not despairing — just honest about the mess of being alive and trying anyway.

What to Expect

The exhibition spans her three-decade practice and includes ambitious new installations alongside key works from across her career. Among them: Moonwalking Mumma (2024), a towering figure in closed cell foam and fibreglass; She Has No Beginning Or End (2022); and The Worker (2016), first shown at the 20th Biennale of Sydney.

Suburbia features heavily — the wear and tear on the Australian dream, the textural richness of ordinary objects and materials elevated into something stranger and more alive.

Entry is free. This is one of the most significant Brisbane exhibitions of 2026, and it runs through to March 2027 — plenty of time to go more than once.

Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers | Queensland Art Gallery, Stanley Place, South Brisbane | 3 October 2026 – 7 March 2027 | Free entry | qagoma.qld.gov.au

Hero image: A Metal Cry (performance still, Carriageworks, Sydney) 2017. Photograph: Ashley Barber. Courtesy: The artist, The Commercial, Sydney, and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.