Oscar Wilde once said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” For artists today, the idea of “being yourself” can be a challenging and complex undertaking.
In a world where ideas about identity, expression, and freedom are constantly shifting, the question of what it means to be an artist—and whose stories get to be told—remains vital.
Artistic practice is shaped by many forces: culture, age, lived experience, relationships, gender. These influences intersect in ways that can be surprising, enlightening, and sometimes deeply personal—informing not only what an artist creates, but also how and why they create it.
This exhibition brings together three artists whose image-making is a way to explore and express these layered connections, with each artist offering a distinct lens through which to see and understand the world.
Nani Puspasari blends vivid colour, whimsical forms, and cultural references to explore migration, memory, and belonging. Grounded in her Chinese-Indonesian heritage, her work balances playful surfaces with deeper emotional undercurrents. While her figures may appear humorous or light-hearted, closer viewing reveals nostalgia and dislocation. There is resilience too, as her practice inhabits the space between past and present, using visual storytelling to reshape her own sense of self.
Ramak Bamzar creates staged photographic portraits that blur the lines between performance, fashion, and self-representation. Drawing on her experience growing up in Iran and now living in Australia, her work explores constraint and freedom—how identity is shaped both by internal desires and external expectations. The title of her series, Rebel Femmes (2023), sends us a message of strength. The simple act of wearing denim jeans, something most Australians would never think twice about, was a perilous act when the artist was a teenager living in Iran. Bamzar’s rebellious photographs, despite their intensity, retain a sense of gentleness and femininity. This tension reflects the complexities of self-expression in the face of cultural boundaries.
Bronwyn Kidd’s practice similarly investigates identity through the visual language of performance and fashion. In Ice Queens (2023), created with Virginia Dowzer and featuring models Claire Collins and Chelsea Scanlon, fashion becomes both ritual and reverence. Fabrics and textures are collected, draped, and adorned like treasures, creating regal silhouettes that blur the line between attire and armour. The garments suggest the glint of chainmail, recalling medieval armour once worn into battle. In this sense, the work resonates with the idea of the “power suit” — clothing adopted by many professional women as part of their work identity — where fashion becomes both protection and projection, a way of embodying strength while negotiating social expectations.
This collaborative spirit continues in Kidd’s series Sea Lion Sisters (2024), again created with Dowzer and choreographer Carol Brown, where she explores intimacy, resilience, and kinship between women. Drawing on the protective movements of sea lion mothers, the project unfolds within a luminous set evoking mother-of-pearl, a symbolic feminine space of shelter and creation.
Together, these three artists—through dance, narrative, fashion, and moments of play—explore what it means to create art when identity is part of the conversation. What holds them all together is a unique view of their world, and a determination to express it in their own way.
Jenny Port
Curator
2025