Creative Conversations Art and Motherhood

Namila Benson is an accomplished broadcaster, writer and educator who’s hosted and produced multiple radio, tv and digital arts programs nationally and internationally. As an arts journalist, Namila skilfully guides complex conversations on race, culture and gender – challenging perceptions of ‘otherness’ through a creative lens. She specialises in visual arts and music, bringing thought-provoking nuance to challenging discussions. Namila continues to host creative conversations that offer an intimate insight into the world of artists.

Kate Just is an American-born Australian feminist artist. Just is best known for her inventive and political use of knitting, both in sculptural and pictorial form. In addition to her solo practice, Just often works socially and collaboratively within communities to create large scale, public art projects that tackle significant social issues including sexual harassment and violence against women.

Elvis Richardson works with collected objects and imagery sourced from the public domain, using storytelling and archival practices to explore socioeconomic contexts. Her work explores taste, class, and the everyday, reflecting on what it means to make art within an aspirational, exposure-driven economy shaped by precarity. Often working with humour and satire, she draws out the contradictions, promises, and quiet disappointments embedded in contemporary life. Alongside her studio practice, Richardson is the founding editor of CoUNTess, a long-running project that tracks gender representation in the Australian art world. She authored the first Countess Report in 2016, a landmark data project that continues to evolve through Countess.Report, produced with collaborators in 2019 and 2022. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in major Australian collections.

Mia Mala McDonald (she/her) is an Australian artist known for her vibrant, playfully theatrical portraits that centre the personality of her subjects. Born in Daylesford in 1982, her politically engaged upbringing fostered a deep curiosity about people, reflected in work that balances intimacy, humour, tenderness and power, Represented by Sydney-based agency Photoplay, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Monthly and Good Weekend, alongside commissions for Apple, Dulux, Myer and Arts Centre Melbourne. She has photographed many leading cultural figures including Troye Sivan, Mark Dreyfus, Magda Szubanski, and Helen Garner. Mia is the recipient of the Martin Kantor Portrait Prize and the 2023 Australian Women in Music Photographer of the Year. Her 2022 book, Once in a Lullaby, was published by M.33. She holds an MFA from RMIT and lives in Melbourne (Naarm) with her partner and two children

Karla Dickens is a Wiradjuri artist living and working in Lismore, New South Wales. Despite training as a painter at the National Art School, Sydney, in the early 1990s, Dickens quickly turned to collage and sculptural assemblage. Dickens is also a skilled writer, often using poetry and prose to amplify the themes of her mixed-media collages and sculptures, spanning the intersections of race, class and gender; motherhood; Australian culture and politics; and the ways in which the past informs the present.

MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection presents diverse stories drawn from across the NGV Collection. The exhibition features works by contemporary and historical Australian and First Nations artists, alongside international art.

It explores both universal and culturally specific experiences of motherhood – from private transformation and societal expectation to intergenerational trauma and loss, mythology and religious iconography, storytelling and language and the deep connection between motherhood, nature and Country.