Jemima Wyman: Deep Surface, the first career survey of Los Angeles-based Palawa artist Jemima Wyman, will open on 16 February at the QUT Art Museum.
Spanning three decades of Ms Wyman's practice, Deep Surface brings together works from the mid-1990s to the 2020s, including collage, textiles, installation, video, performance and painting. It draws from the QUT Art Collection and numerous private and public collections, featuring rarely seen early works alongside her highly recognisable collages of colourful smoke imagery.
Ms Wyman, whose work has been exhibited internationally, graduated from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) in 1997 and completed her Honours in 2001. She later completed a Master of Fine Arts at The California Institute of the Arts.
QUT Galleries and Museums director, Vanessa Van Ooyen, said the exhibition was significant on several levels.
"With Jemima working alongside curator Katherine Dionysius, this collaboration has been a true partnership built on respect, artistic excellence and shared ambition," Ms Van Ooyen said.
"For Jemima, as a QUT alumna, it represents a homecoming of both personal and professional significance.
"The work that will now travel to other leading university art museums in Sydney and Adelaide."
Ms Dionysius said the exhibition invites audiences into a kaleidoscopic world of visual and conceptual complexity.
"Deep Surface offers a vivid lens through which to interpret Ms Wyman's richly layered practice," she said.
"The title, borrowed from her 2018 body of work, reflects the formal and conceptual depth that defines her oeuvre."
Coinciding with the exhibition is the launch of a 208-page hardcover monograph, the first major publication dedicated solely to Ms Wyman's work and featuring new texts by Ms Dionysius, Dr Chari Larsson, Griffith University, Dr Yuval Etgar, Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, and Dr Hanna Rose Shell, University of Colorado Boulder.
The exhibition will tour interstate in 2026 and 2027, to Adelaide's Samstag Museum of Art (from June 2026) and UNSW Galleries, Sydney (from February 2027).
QUTAM, located on the QUT Gardens Point campus, is free and open to the public. Jemima Wyman: Deep Surface opens to the public on Monday 16 February.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, as well as the Nelson Meers Foundation.
