Melbourne tastemakers are so smitten with the 27-year-old that the National Gallery of Victoria has already acquired 16 works for its permanent collection.
In Sydney, Mooney’s 40-metre Still Thriving mural remains on vivid display on the side of a Darlinghurst high-rise, about six months after it was unveiled for Sydney WorldPride.
And in Canberra, the National Portrait Gallery has just wrapped Portrait 23, its major exhibition for the year, which featured a series of Mooney’s hand-drawn illustrative portraits including text physically stitched into the paper with natural fibres.
Casual observers might assume that Mooney – whose practice centres on his queer identity and Indigenous heritage – is a product of one of Sydney or Melbourne’s bohemian enclaves.
But the feted artist is a Yuwi, Torres Strait and South Sea Islander man who grew up in Mackay in North Queensland and rarely ventured south before his career took off.
He has no plans to leave his current base in Brisbane, either.
In recent months, the artist has emerged as a fierce advocate for the preservation of the Torres Strait Islands and the seas of northern Australia. He says this, coupled with his ancestral connections – family members still live in the islands and he visits regularly – trumps the lure of art-world glitz down south.
“In an Indigenous context, the oceans provide us not only with our food but also with our totems,” he explains. (Mooney’s totems are the turtle and stingray.)
“We have an obligation to care for the waters, reefs and food sources that surround us, so that future generations still have those sources of food and that connection to those animals.”
Mooney’s burgeoning social media presence (50,000 Instagram followers and counting) has made him a particularly effective spokesman for issues affecting communities in the Torres Strait and coastal northern Queensland.
In 2021, a group of campaigners known as the Torres Strait 8 tapped him to create high-impact imagery for their Our Islands, Our Home campaign. His work turbocharged their efforts.
Last year, in response to a complaint lodged by the Torres Strait 8, the United Nations Human Rights Committee found that the Australian government was violating its human rights obligations to Torres Strait Islanders by failing to act on climate change.
A few weeks later, Ben & Jerry’s launched a new ice-cream flavour, This Is Our Whirled, featuring artwork by Mooney on the tub and messaging that calls for all Australians to rise alongside traditional owners of the Torres Strait in the fight to safeguard the oceans.
Much more needs to be done, says Mooney. “Over the past few years, islanders have been forced to move to other islands or to the mainland due to rising sea levels. Erosion is exposing ancestral remains that are buried in cemeteries near beaches, forcing communities to re-bury them in higher locations.”
He points out that the issues facing Australia’s northernmost Indigenous communities are not widely known or understood. “There is a lack of representation of Torres Strait Islanders in the news, in the arts and in Australia more broadly,” he says.
This lack of representation in contemporary Australia isn’t the only reason that Mooney’s ascent feels timely. His deeply romantic and undeniably modern digital illustrations of queer people of colour have been hailed as groundbreaking.
“His images promote a side of the queer and Indigenous experience that is often underrepresented in the media,” says NGV curator Myles Russell-Cook. “He reminds us that Aboriginality and Indigeneity exist within the queer community, in the same way queerness has always existed for First Nations peoples.”
The work’s significance has been acknowledged outside the art world, too. In March 2021, for example, Instagram shared Mooney’s work Our Moment with its 400 million followers.
Mooney’s gallerist, Nicholas Smith, believes the artist’s portraiture illustrates the purity and exhilaration of adolescent love and shows viewers that these emotions transcend race, gender or sexual orientation.
“I think it’s one reason Dylan’s work has resonated so broadly,” he says.
Mooney’s breakout 2021 exhibition at N. Smith Gallery, Queer, Black and Here, featured seven such portraits, each composed digitally and printed in medium and large editions of 10 and five respectively. The series sold out.
“Most of the larger size went to institutions,” says Smith, “while the mediums went predominantly to individuals – not just seasoned collectors but also people buying art for the first time.”
For more recent bodies of work, including a series of botanical illustrations known as Intertwined and the Still Thriving portraiture series, Mooney created unique editions by over-painting each digital print with Yuwi ochre.
He is legally blind – another reason his success is considered noteworthy in the art world – and gravitated towards digital illustration largely for practical reasons.
“Drawing and printmaking can be difficult on my eyes because I can’t focus that much and I get migraines,” he says. “But with technology, I can zoom in as much as I want to really get that detail.”
Mooney came to the attention of Smith, himself a Queensland-raised art-world wunderkind, in 2021, when veteran artist Tony Albert recommended him personally.
Mooney was in his final semester of a Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art at Griffith University. Although he was working across various mediums, Smith encouraged him to hone his digital craft.
The resulting work elicited an enthusiastic response from collectors, curators and brands (Google commissioned a homepage doodle to celebrate the First Nations activist Pearl Gibbs, and Rolling Stone magazine asked Mooney to design the cover of its Greatest Australian Albums of All Time edition). Mooney’s inclusions in the 2022 Sydney Biennale and the major NGV exhibition Queer further expanded his audience.
Yet when Life & Leisure meets Mooney at the Art Gallery of NSW on his most recent visit to Sydney, he seems only mildly interested in engaging with the art-world passersby who approach us. He’d rather respond to a flurry of messages he’s received that day on Instagram.
“People write to thank me, or to tell me what they’re going through in their life,” he says. “That’s how I know I’m doing something right.”
