drawings
writing
cv
Education:
2022-2024 BFA Visual Art (painting), The Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne
2020-2022 BA, Double Major Fine Art and History, University of Western Australia Design School
2025
Unseen,Australian Catholic University Gallery, Naarm
Landmarks 75/25: 50 Years of the Women’s Art Register, George Paton Gallery, Naarm
Feminine Rage,Group show by All The Rage, Naval Store Fremantle, WA
2024
Pressed,Arthouse Selective Group Show,Monphell Studios, Naarm
Grad Show The Victorian College of the Arts Graduate Show, VCA, Naarm
The Human(More),Corridor Gallery VCA, Naarm
Canossian Mothers,
VCA Artspace, awarded position in Global Travelling Studio to 60th Venice Biennale, Naarm/Venice
Not Too Long,
Corridor Gallery VCA, Naarm
cont’d
Hunter’s practice spans painting, poetry, video and installation, working to reproduce and remix images of medical practice, industry and craft.
new and upcoming projects:
Unseen: W.A.R. Members Exhibition
Australian Catholic University Gallery,
NAARM | 11-27 JULY, 25
Artist in Residence-Vancouver Arts Centre
KINJARLING|7 JULY-18 AUG, 25
2023
Billionaire Beuys Club,Joseph Beuys Cafe, Naarm
F^-1(x),VCA Artspace, Naarm
WormfoodVCA Artspace, Naarm
2022 +
Young Guns, on the left,Linton and Kay Galleries, Perth WA
Sensuous Beasts,group show and artist talk, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth WA
AIPSHIT (Artist Initiative Perth), Studio 281, Perth WA
Winter Collective,
UWA School of Design, Perth WA
“Boom, A Failure Story” & “Time Capsule”, University Drama Society Set Design, Perth WA
2020 Pulse Perspectives, Art Gallery of Western Australia
Press:
2025-Mass Memo in Memo Review by Pru Anderson
2024-VCA Graduate Catalogue:https://art2024.finearts-music.unimelb.edu.au/graduates/hunter-smith
2023-The Design Files, Architecture 2023: If You’re Reading artwork, under “A look into the original part of the home”: https://thedesignfiles.net/2023/05/architecture-curtin-residence-cast-studio
Grants:
2025 WA DLGSC Arts Projects for Individuals and Groups
+ Rage edit.
2025. Readymade Video projection.
Installation at All The Rage Group Show.
Using the violent emotionality of horror films and mining propaganda “as horror” in conjunction with the pleasurable mechanics of the Around the World music video, this work breeds an absurd dislocation of meaning. Two moving images side-by-side become jagged, unreadable and temporal. WA-isms appear throughout and blokey markers of state identity meet intinmate ultrasound footage identiyfing shadows of Endometriosis. These narrative discrepancies and awkward comparisons become a necessary convention in the horror of confusion. They also come to comment on the nature of the open-cut, a mining term and a reference to surgery. Performing surgery on appropriated footage from the news, advertising etc. is a reaction to the stress of utility and strategic propaganda. The All The Rage edit also included footage from Twin Peaks and Rage.
Feminine Rage was a group show presented by WA Collective All The Rage, tackling gender inequity in the arts, presented in The Naval Store on Walyalup land, Fremantle.
From left:
Around the World (141x190cm),
Messier 87 (130x190cm),
fifo (140x190cm).
2024. Oil on canvas, rope and hardware.
Installation at 2024 VCA Graduate Show.
“Three canvas panels are cinched in their top corners by rough metal hooks, strung up to the ceiling with rope and hanging like pieces of meat. Both sides of the panels feature oil paintings of galaxies, oysters with pearls, assorted viscera and… wait, is that from a Daft Punk music video? Hunter Smith’s Messier 87, Fifo and Around the World combine the cosmic vastness of space with the alien-ness of nature and the body. Messier 87’s black hole is framed on both sides by the grotesque fleshiness of oyster meat. On the work’s reverse, an ultrasound is tipped on its side and paired with what appears to be a close-up study of an oyster shell containing a pearl. The images may seem unlikely bedfellows, but they are united by a shared sense of form, the ripples of the ultrasound mirroring the intricacies of the oyster meat’s grooves and furrows. Similarly, the explosive titular Messier 87, a supergiant elliptical galaxy, recalls both the oyster’s connective tissue, and also the glimmering pearl that lies at its centre. I’m reminded of the Fibonacci sequence’s recurrence in nature, governing the patterns of growth of some natural objects—from the leaves on trees to arms of spiral galaxies”.
- Pru Anderson, Mass Memo, Memo Review.
Read the full article: https://mass.memoreview.net/2024/painting-victorian-college-of-the-arts-by-pru-anderson
Images: Kim Feng Photography.
2024/2025. Clay, hardware and troll ears.
Exhibited at Landmarks 75/25: 50 Years of the Women’s Art Register, at the George Paton Gallery.
2024. Group show.
Fans.
Act 1: Sacred Bird Murmuration
&
Act 2: Labour, after Labour Leisure
Sacred Bird Murmuration Object. Black oil on carved plaster.
bloodclots and bunnies
and faces and gummies
and car-lots and carnies
and kumquats and armies,
and carnage and monies
and starcharts and pansies
and k-marts and tummies
and cow-calves and worries,
and cleaners and bunnies
and oysters and curries
and bruise-marks and hot-teas and bedsores and Harleys,
and perfumes and bent-knees and heartbeats and sheep-fleece and warm-breeze and toasters and sardines and fungis,
and bedtimes and brandy
and clock-hands and parties
and fishes and gem-thieves
and tickers and flame-trees,
and mustard and aunties
and ballads and smarties
and carrots and losers
and bedsheets and blue-jeans,
and thick-smoke and gum-leaves and crackling and ponies
and petrol and tea-leaves
and tvs and wetdreams,
and birdies and bodies
and blankets and shirt-sleeves
and sunshine and white-teeth
and lollies and calm seas.
2024. Oil on canvas, rope and hardware.
2024. Drawing on double-bed sheet.
Exhibited in Broke Companion and Pressed by Arthouse Selective.
Unknown Maker is decorated with drawings in coloured pencil and graphite. The work weaves together familial Celtic symbology, Western quilting traditions and absurdist mythological iconography. The sacred symbol of the cow is hidden all over, as is a conjoined spiralling ribcage and circular crest that imply the presence of life and death in one entity. Evoking bedding, shrouding, tapestry, quilt making and flag bearing, the sheet memorialises forms of maternal labour and imagines dreams. The title Unknown Maker speaks to acts of female and maternal labour that are rendered invisible. The sheet was used as a piece of peculiar costuming in a video collaboration known as Broke Companion, where it was worn as a ritualistic robe.
But All I Was A Goat, after Lebanon. 2024. Drawing on convent towel. Exhibited at Canossian Mothers and Pressed.
2024.
Props by Hunter Smith and Ginger Dymke, ritual performance at Macaulay Station, video, projection and installation.
b/w photograph, Unknown Maker Bed Sheet, Horse Head and Mink.
Broke Companion Horse Head by Ginger Dymke.
Broke Companion exhibition installation: Projection on Milk Sculpture, rope and Castrol can.
Milk Sculpture: Plaster brick, clay, acrylic paint, wire, plastic bags, gel medium and strawberry milk, with rope by Ginger.
BrBroke Companion is a collaborative project between Hunter Smith and Ginger Dymke, whose practice’s converge in site-responsive, narrative-based works, ambient projections and a shared curiosity for ritual.
Ginger’s practice is an exercie in conjuring the corpses of localised indsutry to re-establish their relevance today. The use of lo fi and hi fi materials (emphasising iconography, mess and a love of hard rubbish) entangles with Hunter’s practice, forming strong relationships with representations of human ritual found in popular media, mythologised histories and advertising.
The works intuit associations to the body, consistently returning to anthropomorphism and themes of birth and decay through material interactions with space, scale and movement. The first Broke Companion project was exhibited in 2023 in a group show at the Joseph Beuys Cafe, where two canvases were sandwiched together in response to Beuys’ animal obsession. Broke Companion’s most recent works proliferate the intersection between the two practices. Applying Hunter’s focus on the methodologies of celtic quilting, heraldry, human and women’s labour to Ginger’s poetic reinvigoration of dilapidated cultural artefacts, they form a shared sensibility that prioritises theatrical, engrossing and haphazard meditations on ritual, where objects are regarded like props in a stage performance.
Broke Companion.
2024. Coloured pencil on canvas and chain.
2024. Oil, thread, wire, clay and rope on canvas.
2023. Oil and acrylic on canvas (double-sided). 178.5x188cm.
2023.
Thing Porky.
Coloured pencil on canvas.
Chop and Tweety. Coloured pencil and acrylic on canvas.
That’s all gotta come out. Coloured pencil and oil on canvas.
Egg Madonna. Oil on canvas.
Big Dog/On the punt. Oil on canvas.
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