Jacqui Stockdale in her studio by Erika Green
“Stockdale’s work is an astonished combination of playful exuberance and deadly seriousness, of vivid colour tempered with dark undertones, of an innate sense of theatre heightened by masterly ability. Hers is bold, intelligent work that seamlessly balances risk and restraint.”
_Claire Bridge
Naarm/Melbourne based Jacqui Stockdale is a leading Australian contemporary artist known for her magical and symbolic imagery that spans theatrical photography, painting, drawing, collage and performance. Stockdale explores the human condition through masquerade, mortality and Australian folklore, steeped in carnivalesque theatricality. She grew up in regional Victoria, is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts and currently a research candidate at the University of Melbourne.
Stockdale has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and internationally and has been included in exhibitions such as Magic Object, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia; Theatre of the World, MONA; Alles Masquerade, Museum Rot, Germany; Living Rooms, curated by Robert Wilson, Louvre Museum, Paris; Outlands, Volta, Switzerland. Her works are held in major collections around the world.
In 2018 the Sydney Opera House, Sydney Festival and Art Museum and Library ŌTA, Japan presented Join the Dots, a real time digital art project that brought together artist’s Jacqui Stockdale and Nobumasa Takahashi. ABC TV ‘Artscape' Anatomy, Heart, directed by Amos Gebhardt, tells the story about Jacqui’s muse was awarded Best Documentary at MIFF 2008. Stockdale currently works with the Butoh Dance Collective in Melbourne, ButohOut!, receiving a Green Room Award for Best Visual Design in 2022. As recipient of the 2025 Yarra Arts Fellowship Stockdale’s latest project, SPRUNG2025 will premier in October at her Abbotsford Studio in the City of Yarra.
The making of The Quiet Wild 2012
“Jacqui plays expertly with absurdist theatres of desire and teases out latent satirical tensions; indeed, her theatrical works are uncanny, leaning as they do into the shadowy realms of the unconscious and subconscious.”
_Alexi Glass-Kanto, Artspace
“Jacqui Stockdale explores the enigma that is the diversity of humanity in works that mask and unmask our cultural mores, belief systems, superstitions, rituals, identity and means of belonging. Whether intentional or not, Stockdale’s art brings forward a sense of both childlike play and deep symbolic mysticism, as if her works themselves can transform into totemic objects of reverence. Ever present are the questions and curiosities, the explorations and ethics of her foray into the many and diverse cultures of our planet and yet through her eyes and hands we get a glimpse of something at the core of a multifaceted humanity.”
_Claire Bridge, Art World Women
“Underpinning all of Stockdale's work is her passion for the human body, from the most basic physicality of her drawings and paintings to the highly ornamented and performative evocations of her staged photographs. Her expression of the body’s erotic, psychological and physical dimensions is at its most experimental in her collage works, surreal playgrounds where found faces, textures and forms are conjured into humanoid creatures from a subconscious dreamscape.”
_Bryony Nainby, MAGNT