Deep Surface
QUT Art Museum 16 February 2026 - 31 May 2026
Samstag Museum of Art 26 June 2026 - 18 September 2026
UNSW January 2027
Curator: Katherine Dionysius
Teeming with dizzying colour and intricate pattern, Jemima Wyman’s practice is a visually and politically charged exploration of camouflage, collective organising, democracy and dissent. Wyman is best known for creating vivid, kaleidoscopic collages composed of imagery of masked activists, coloured smoke and other recurring visual motifs drawn from her extensive archive of found photographs documenting global protests. Through her work, she contends that patterns and masking function as agents of resistance, with the power to reclaim both visibility and anonymity in the face of government surveillance and civil unrest.
Marking 30 years since Wyman began her undergraduate studies at QUT, Deep Surface is the first career survey of this Los Angeles–based Australian artist and Palawa woman. Over three decades, Wyman’s practice has traversed drawing, painting, video, performance, sculpture, textiles, and collage, with each medium exploring the porous boundaries between bodily interiority and exteriority, perception and experience, and individual and collective identity. The exhibition reveals the visual and conceptual complexity that has defined the artist’s diverse output and traces the evolution of her practice from the mid-1990s to today.
Drawing from feminist theory, protest culture, and pataphysical logic, Wyman invites viewers to consider camouflage as a way of knowing — a visual strategy for bearing witness, acquiring an expanded consciousness, and imagining new political possibilities.
This video documents Jemima’s studio in the lead up to the Deep Surface exhibition and was made by Sarah Brandes
Photo credits: Louis Lim