MAKING DO RHYMES WITH POO

Justene Williams

31 May – 12 July 2025

Opening & performance: 5.30pm, Friday 30 May 2025

Performances continue 12 – 5pm: Saturday 31 May, Sunday 1 June, Tuesday 3 June, Wednesday 4 June, Thursday 5 June, Friday 6 June

Main gallery, Contemporary Art Tasmania

Curated by Kylie Johnson

A multi-format project with an Arte Povera attitude, MAKING DO RHYMES WITH POO presents an installation with a set design constructed from recycled materials, performances and an exhibition. Commencing with Justene performing a working week over 7 days, she will complete menial tasks with her body that transform the gallery.

Through her work, Justene Williams deals with conscious and unconscious forms of labour undertaken by the body. The title, MAKING DO RHYMES WITH POO reads as both a way of ‘making do’ with what’s at one’s disposal (a nod to the artist’s working-class upbringing and time spent with her father in his wrecking yard) as well as to describe the automatic labour of ‘making’ with the body, such as defecation or growing hair or nails. The title also points to the history of performance art and artists who have used their bodies and excrement to test limits and possibilities.

The gallery is the studio and the stage, a space where action, energy, ideas and sounds are produced, made and unmade across the week. Labour is presented as pleasure, play and pain.

Justene will produce ‘goods’ incorporated into the installation and used within the performances. The space may partly resemble a pond, the night sky, a factory, a shrine, a shop, a dump, or a workshop.  There will be a polyphony of materials including radios, foil, cardboard, water, timber, foam, industrial bags, video projections, screens, costumes, mirrors and pulped paper lovingly shaped into poo-shaped sculptures of varying lengths. Materials with a previous life that still hold energy and can be cannibalised, revived and made into something new.

RADIOS have appeared in my work since my earliest performances for camera. The sounds and conversations that come from the box are messages to me, and I use them to create a stream of consciousness script, receiving messages from people who have passed over to the other side. People have been trying to communicate with the dead since the beginning of human history.

Using costumes, Justene will be transformed — THE ROOSTER is the big cock, the boss chicken. When inhabiting this persona, I think about eggs, reproduction. Some of us are free range, whilst some of us are battery hens. Some of us are caged animals, and some of us cock-a-doodle dos.

After the working week, the documentation, materials and re-formed objects will be reinserted into the gallery to form the exhibition. Justene invites the audience to consider — What is work for an artist within our consumer culture? What is it to make artwork based in time and space with poor materials? What is the difference between work and life, freedom and alienation? How to perform time? How can I bring my job history and life into my art work? That of a cabaret performer, visual merchandiser, dancer, spruiker, salesperson, model, lecturer, mother, partner.

Flagship/ mothership/ ship wreck, the trinity from the hangover of a catholic education. The Flagship Store — repeatedly folding and displaying clothes, items for sale, models, modelling maquettes, and material, maternal, a mothership staying the course in outer space, shipwreck the world, salvaging the cosmos.

MAKING DO RHYMES WITH POO is an iterative work that was first developed for Te Uru Whitakere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland NZ in 2024. It will be reimagined in response to the local context, with this iteration developed on-site at CAT.

Artist bio

Justene Williams emerged in the 1990s as an exponent of Sydney’s grunge culture. Since 2016, she has led multidisciplinary teams to create spectacular, often large-scale, long-format live works. Now she returns to an earlier form of ‘poor art’, using a ‘make-do’ ethos and revisiting ideas of labour. Collapsing personal narratives, consumer culture and mythology whilst channelling the spirits of art history, she finds inspiration from figures such as her father and his auto recycling yard and Santa Claus, celebrating the avant-garde dream of the total artwork whilst deconstructing and communicating with a 21st century body. Justene attempts to transform the everyday via action, energy, and emotion.

Justene has an extensive exhibition history that includes: Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Auckland Art Gallery, NZ; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Performa 15 Biennial, New York; Project8 Gallery, Melbourne; Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW; Sydney Festival; and, Sydney Biennale.  Her works are held in several public collections including Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, National Gallery of Australia and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Justene is the Head of Sculpture at Queensland College of Art and is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Accessibility

The exhibition is mobility accessible. Roomsheet available online and in large font hardcopies at the front desk. Please contact CAT if you have any accessibility requirements.