Justene grew up in a wreckers’ yard. Now her chaotic creations crowd the Queensland Art Gallery

“There is never too much,” he writes. “This is the chaotic rule of Williams’ art … until it reaches a point of tension that it can no longer sustain and the blister breaks, the primordial pond disgorges its foetal mass, and something careens into the gallery.”

Whatever that something is, galleries want it. Williams was in Auckland and Tasmania this year with a piece titled Making Do Rhymes with Poo, in which she performed menial tasks with recycled materials: labour presented as “pleasure, play and pain”.

In November, she will be part of the opening festival of the $915 million Powerhouse Parramatta museum, premiering an opera with music by nine neurodiverse musicians.

“A Magical Hotstart began with the Powerhouse Collection itself and with my memory of my mum trying desperately to hotstart her car,” Williams said when the work was announced in September.

In the meantime, Once We Were Mudskippers will bring under the one roof, if not a retrospective of Williams’ work, then a kind of monumental remix.

“You can’t really do a retrospective of her work,” Buttrose tells me, “because she’s like, ‘remember that sculpture? I cut it all up and now it’s this new sculpture’. It’s this sense of no waste, which I think must frustrate her gallerists, who are like, ‘I could have sold that!’”

Williams pauses by one of the humanish figures, the one with one brown leg that is curled up like a party blower. “I named him after my dad, Teddy. He’s not around any more. He’s got some wedges holding him up. The wedge is very important. If you pull it out, everything can come falling down.”

A few years ago, a purported psychic told Williams facts about her father based on some of his jewellery. It got her thinking about the supernatural side of family Christmases, and from that she created an installation called Santa Was a Psychopomp. The unicorns, once their dollar-bill horns are affixed, will be the reindeer, with sleighs made from eskies, yoga mats and bottles of whisky.

“When I made these, originally around that time of COVID and stuff, there was this thing about the world not being so great,” Williams says.

“I still want some happiness. I always hope there’s a bit of magic still in the world. Do you know what I mean?”

Justene Williams: Once We Were Mudskippers runs October 3, 2026, to March 7, 2027 at Queensland Art Gallery. Entry is free.

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