Nell (artist)


Nell is an Australian artist working across performance, installation, video, painting and sculpture. In 2013 she won the University of Queensland Self-Portrait Award. In 2017 she was inducted into the Maitland City Hall of Fame in the category of The Arts.
Nell lives and works in Sydney.

Biography

Nell was born in 1975 in Maitland, New South Wales. Her wife is the celebrity chef Kylie Kwong. She practises Buddhist philosophy.
Nell studied under Lindy Lee at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney, with Joan Jonas and John Baldessari at the University of California Los Angeles and with Annette Messager at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

Career

Nell's work often engages with binaries – life and death, happiness and sadness, dark and light. She draws on imagery from rock 'n roll, and employs a lexicon of repeated motifs in her work including smiley faces, lightning bolts, clouds, rain drops, suns, and faces.
Nell's work has been included in over 200 exhibitions in Australia and abroad. In 1999, early in her exhibiting career, her work was selected for Primavera, an exhibition of notable Australian contemporary artists under 35 years old, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney.
Around this time she also staged exhibitions at Galerie Y-Burg, Vrieshuis Amerika, Amsterdam, and with the Indian artist Neha Choksi at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney and in Byculla, Mumbai. Nell's first institutional exhibition was mounted at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2001.
In 2011 Nell was commissioned by the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, to produce the exhibition Let There Be Robe. Two performance works that took place in multiple iterations and venues were also commissioned, Chanting to Amps and It's a Long Way to the Top.
In 2012, Jean-Hubert Martin curated Nell's work into the exhibition Theatre of the World at MONA in Hobart,((cncn|date=May 2020

Awards and residencies

Nell has undertaken residencies at the British Academy of Arts in Rome, in Beijing with Red Gate Gallery, at the Australian National University, Canberra and Artspace Sydney.
In 2002, she travelled to Ravenna, Italy, on The Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Artists.
In 2001 Nell won the People's Choice Award in the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize. In 2005, 2011 and 2013 she was Finalist in the Blake Prize.
Nell won the 2013 University of Queensland Self-Portrait Award for a video performance work.
In 2017 Nell was inducted into the Maitland City Hall of Fame in the category of The Arts alongside previous inductees John Bell AO OBE and Ruth Cracknell AM.
Since 2017, she has been a resident at the Carriageworks studios in Redfern, Sydney. Her great-grandfather worked at the Eveleigh railyards at the same location as a boilermaker, and a great uncle as a draughtsman there.