Jemima Wyman is one of the highest profile practicing artists to come from Mackay. She was born in 1977 in Sydney, but grew up in Mackay, and currently lives and works between Brisbane and Los Angeles, USA. Wyman has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally since 1998. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in a significant list of group shows including locations such as Brisbane (2022-23), Canada (2020), Houston (2020), Switzerland (2019), Los Angeles (2019), China (2019), New Zealand (2018), Germany (2018), Korea (2017), UK (2012), Japan (2011), Sydney (2010). Wyman’s recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Crisis Patterns’, Artspace Mackay (2024), ‘Billow’, Agency Projects, Melbourne (2022); ‘A Haze Descends’, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2022); ‘Fume’, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney (2021); Jemima Wyman, Gallery Platform LA, Los Angeles (2021); and ‘At the Fray’, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2018).

Wyman’s work has recently been reviewed in New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Frieze, Artforum, Camera Obscurer, LA Weekly, Eyeline, Art Collector and Artlink. Her work has been collected by multiple Australian institutions including: Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Home of the Arts (HOTA), Gold Coast; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Internationally, Wyman’s work is part of major international institutional Collections including: 21st Century Museum of Art, Japan; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Wyman’s practice encompasses a range of mediums including performance, video, installation, photography, painting and collage. In her collaborative pairing ‘CamLab’, launched with Anna Mayer in 2005, the duo explore sculpture and video-based work. Drawn from Wyman’s personally developed MAS-archive compiled since 2008, her recent collages across paper, digital and textile media are created from hand-cut compilation imagery from global protest movements. Both visually delightful and visceral, her works are imbued with a specific focus on visual-based resistance strategies (camouflage) employed within protest culture and zones of conflict. Wyman’s practice embeds the genre of pattern and design as a powerful making and social tool in contemporary art.

'Cloud Conscience' is a new series of works on paper commissioned for inclusion in Wyman’s major 2024 solo exhibition ‘Crisis Patterns’ at Artspace Mackay. To create the vibrant compositions, Wyman overlays watercolour paintings with hand-cut photographs. The resulting series was developed as studies for surface designs (within the pattern family motif of ‘conversational’) for ceiling paper. This commission highlights Wyman’s increasing interest in the use of smoke and masks as a means of camouflage alongside a more local story - tracing her awareness of surface design to her mother’s creative influence as a child in regional Queensland.

Artspace Mackay 2024