Guns to Roses

Close up of bright blue room with multi-coloured paper artworks. They are made like paper lanterns, taking the shape of fans despite being made from the shapes of guns

The bright, happy colours of the fanned paper sculptures in Li Hongbo’s work Gun No. 1 (2016) would not be out of place at a seven-year-old’s birthday party. But appearances are deceiving. The underlying structures of these ephemeral decorations are solid paper cutouts in the shape of bullets, hand-held pistols, and shoulder-mounted semi-automatic weapons. The rainbow […]

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Silken Diplomacy

Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Chifley liked to knit. On the wall of her rendered brick cottage at 10 Busby Street, Bathurst, nearby the comfortable sage green armchair where she often sat to pursue her craft, this beautiful Chinese scroll had been hanging since about 1948. Lizzie was Prime Minister Ben Chifley’s wife, and this was their home, […]

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