Photography: Jacqui in her Abbotsford Studio by Eryca Green, 2024

Jacqui Stockdale is a Naarm/Melbourne-based contemporary artist known for her distinctive exploration of Australian history, folklore, and marginalised narratives. Her multidisciplinary practice spans photography, drawing, painting, collage, and performance, incorporating elements of masquerade and ritual. Growing up in rural Victoria, Stockdale graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1990 and has since exhibited extensively both in Australia and internationally. Her work is held in major collections worldwide. Stockdale's recent series, Angel at my Table, was awarded Best of the Melbourne Art Fair in 2024.

Notable exhibitions include, Horse Girl Energy, Latrobe Regional Gallery, 2024, Beating About the Bush, Art Gallery of Ballarat, 2023; 20/20, the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Magic Object, 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, AGSA; Theatre of the World, MONA; Alles Masquerade, Museum Rot, Germany; Todays/Tomorrow, Cape Town, South Africa, Living Rooms, by Robert Wilson, Louvre Museum, Paris; Outlands, Volta, Switzerland; and Wonderworks, Hong Kong. Her work has been acknowledged through major survey shows, The Offering, Tweed Regional Gallery, 2023 and Familija, Benalla Art Gallery, 2016.

In 2012 Stockdale won the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize and was a recipient of Creative Australia Barcelona Studio in 2014. Collections include 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 Butoh Dance Collective, 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, 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, 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