‘Here the people spread out across and remain embedded in the soil. It always was and always will be Wiradjiru because country holds us and we hold it’

‘That is the task. If not now, when? If not us, who?’

“The idea of quietly staring at a rock, piles of sand, or blinking stars for hours, if not weeks, seems, weirdly, profoundly countercultural today, in a world where people tweet bubbles, livestream the arching of eyebrows and spend holidays distracted by how best to market themselves on Instagram…”

Deceived by her eyes by Thilini Niruja Nuske is the winner of the WMQ Award at the 2020 Art from the Margins Queensland Outsider Art Awards.

Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence is full of personal stories of encounters with beauty that illuminate hope in situations of darkness.

Despite the so-called secular turn, religion continues to be a powerful and symbolic institution in the construction of sociality within communities.

‘I experience beauty as that which connects rather than removes…There is no transcendence here. It is embodiment and connection. It is enfolding, grounding, reminding, startling, unsettling, shaking and restoring.’

When my eyes can’t see past the given image, blue, spring skies really do bring relief, but, more than that, they remind me that new possibilities and ways of seeing exist.

‘It seems that our female nurses are almost forced to make a choice between their career and their family and I cannot help but wonder how many male nurses are required to make such a choice’

‘I am tossed around, around and around…’

factory workers are treated like machines. They are counted, rather than named. They are trained with documents that read like software programs, under the assumption that sufficient training will create high quality, repeatable products. This is worse than commodification, it is technification…

Can we see the beauty, the desirability, of atypical, even disabled bodies?…To recognise and accept our own beauty requires us to break away from the shackles of our social conditioning.