Arrente and Kalkadoon Artist Thea Anamara Perkins Brings Stories of Country to Melbourne Art Fair
Each year, Melbourne Art Fair brings together exciting contemporary artists from across Australasia, both established and emerging – and the 2025 edition is no different.
This time around, there’s the chance to buy contemporary pieces from more than 100 artists (presented by 70 galleries and arts centres), plus large-scale installations, video art, activations, artist talks and more from February 20 to 23 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Ahead of the event’s return, we spoke to three exhibiting artists to find out about their careers, what got them interested in art, where they find inspiration and what to expect from their Melbourne Art Fair exhibitions.
Thea Anamara Perkins
Western techniques meet a Central Desert context in the portraits and landscapes of Thea Anamara Perkins. The Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist says it’s all about reappropriating visual language to say what she needs to say about Country and the people she features.
How would you describe your style?
Because I’m connected both to the southeast coast, where I grew up, but have also spent a lot of time in Alice Springs and saw what was happening with Central Desert painting there, my style developed out of that context in many ways.
I view the figurative as an appropriation of Western techniques. It’s taking that language, but using it to express what I want to express about Country – it’s playing with familiar languages to say something new. It can speak to people that don’t necessarily have an art background. Beauty can be such a good vehicle to deliver the hard truths.
Your mural Stockwoman contained both a portrait and a landscape. Is there a difference to how you approach each type of work?
They’re two frames of minds. The portraits are interrogating representation. They’re very personal. They’re also delving into memory, there’s a lot of forces at play and they’re very much about that moment of being and they’re quite intimate.
With the landscapes, I’m trying to convey a lot of things that [are] very much about love of Country and place and about my journey of connecting to Alice Springs. That kind of effloresces in the different kind of energy in both of them.
Bringing them together was like traversing those different modes, and putting them into the same thing with really expressive, larger gestures that’s quite dynamic, but with the more restrained mode of working on a portrait to establish likeness meant there was a cinematic notion that came into play.
What’s been interesting and good having both of the practices is it keeps you limber, you’re not getting too rigid in one kind of area.
How would you compare your practice and your style now to when you first started?
My goal was always to have a distinctive style that was true to myself, and I think that taking the approach of getting in there and working it out for yourself and not being too prescriptive from the outset is important for that.
A big thing is confidence, and it’s just getting more familiar with the mediums and what I want to do with them. And trying things with scale.
I’m just very intuitive and compulsive with what interests me, but I also really like to push myself too, like being in a constant state of evolution. It’s always good to be in that experimenting kind of phase – I don’t think it really stops.
What can we expect from you at Melbourne Art Fair?
It’ll be a landscape at this stage and it is going into this newer, kind of looser style that I’ve been working on that’s bringing together a lot of things. It’s a series of memory mirages – small paintings on this idea of mirage and figments of your memories and thoughts – and then in that process they got incredibly loose. I’m really excited to share these works.
Earlier on, it could be quite confronting having people respond to my work, especially because they’re very personal. Now it’s a funny thing because when it leaves the studio, it’s a release. I think if you don’t relinquish it, then you can miss out on some fun, interesting things in the wild.
