Nell (b. 1975), conceptual and performance artist, painter and sculptor, grew up in Maitland and completed an undergraduate degree at the Sydney College of the Arts before spending a year at the University of California in 1996. In 2006 she gained her master’s degree, partly completed on a scholarship at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Her other awards include the Pat Corrigan Grant in 1999, the National Association for the Visual Arts Marketing Grant in 2001 and the Rome Studio of the Australia Council in 2003. Since 2001 she has exhibited regularly at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. Several times a finalist in the Blake Prize for Religious Art, she has also collaborated with the fashion label Romance Was Born. In 2011 and 2012 her work was included in major exhibitions at MONA, Hobart and in 2012 she exhibited Hometown girl has wet dream at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery. She is well-known around Sydney as the partner of chef Kylie Kwong and in late 2012 she was curator of the zany MCA ARTBAR. In 2013 she won the University of Queensland National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize with a video of herself using a cricket bat to destroy a huge plastic fly (left-over from her Fly as high as me in 2002). Richard Larter, forty-six years her senior but a kindred spirit, painted Nell several times.
Gift of Patrick Corrigan AM 2014
© Richard Larter/Copyright Agency, 2024
Patrick Corrigan AM (130 portraits)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Elspeth Pitt talks to multidisciplinary artist Nell about ghosts, artistic lineages and hybrid art forms.
Portraits of philanthropists in the collection honour their contributions to Australia and acknowledge their support of the National Portrait Gallery.
