Image credit: Eryca Green

Jacqui Stockdale lives and works in Naarm, Melbourne, Australia. Having grown up in the rural town of Panerang, Benalla, Victoria, Stockdale has established herself as an artist of international significance. Her multilayered art practice expresses a flair for the dramatic, as she confronts taboos around sex, death, rituals and folkloric traditions. Her most intimate series to date, Angel at my Table was awarded Best of the Melbourne Art Fair, 2024, Arts Hub. Her work was celebrated through the 2016 exhibition Familija, surveying 15 years of her drawing, painting, collage and photography and a recent survey, The Offering, Tweed Regional Gallery in 2023.

Jacqui has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and internationally and has been included in exhibitions such as Beating About the Bush, Art Gallery of Ballarat; 20/20, the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Magic Object, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, AGSA; Theatre of the World, MONA; Alles Masquerade, Museum Rot, Germany; Todays/Tomorrow, Cape Town, South Africa, Living Rooms, curated by Robert Wilson, Louvre Museum, Paris; Outlands, Volta, Switzerland; and Wonderworks, Hong Kong.

In 2012 Stockdale won the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize and was a recipient of the Australia Council Barcelona Studio Residency in 2014. Her work is held in permanent collections including the National Gallery of Australia, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Art Gallery of South Australia and the Watermill Collection, USA.  

Jacqui has worked in collaboration with Yumi Umiumare and Melbourne Dance Company, ButohOut, receiving a Green Room Award for Best Visual Design in 2022. 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.

Jacqui Stockdale is represented by Olsen Gallery in Sydney, Australia.

PUBLISHED TEXT

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, Director Artspace

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, Head Curator, MAGNT

Artist 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, ArtWorldWomen

Kali and the Cox, acrylic, ink and saliva on spectrum board, 64 x 51cm, The Yellow Room series 2023.

Behind the scenes during photoshoot for The Quiet Wild, 2012. Dressing the delightful Mimi Xavier for Rama Jarra the Royal Shepherdess

The crux of the artist’s revisionist position is the reanimation of voices that paternal histories repress. The awakening brings forth mothers, monsters, lovers and the wild folk, known to haunt the colonial scene. Damian Smith