Marian Tubbs’ assemblage-focused practice explores her broad research interests in digital and vision technologies, materiality, language and ecology. Tubbs conflates material juxtapositions between body and object, high and low culture, analogue and digital, physical and virtual, natural and artificial, to transform the everyday into a space of interrogation. Her works often slide between these binaries, incorporating a variety of media, including video, digital and analogue painting, sculpture and installation. Often constructed from the physical and digital detritus of contemporary life – from found photos and surveillance footage to scavenged disposable items – her works position objects, images and text in new or unexpected combinations to question traditional notions of value.
Recent significant group exhibitions include Constructed Photography, Museum of Photography, Melbourne (2024) Backwash, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra (2023) and Know my Name: Australian Female Artists 1900-Now, National Gallery of Australia, ACT (2022). A major mid-career survey of Tubbs’ practice, we need privacy guys here too, was held at the USC Art Gallery in 2020, accompanied by a significant publication. In 2019 Tubbs was selected for the Artspace Studio, 12 month studio residency at Artspace, Sydney and in 2017, Tubbs was the recipient of the Marten Bequest Scholarship for sculpture. Tubbs' work is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Contemporary Art and international institutional collections. Tubbs holds a PhD from UNSW Art & Design and is course coordinator and senior lecturer in Art and Design at Southern Cross University. Tubbs currently lives and works in Goonellabah, NSW, Australia.
the sun will eat itself (where Gs go to paradise)
2021
installation view
Sediment, Metro Arts
Simone Hine
Sediment
2021
installation view
Metro Arts
Simone Hine
Backwash
2023
installation view
DSC00262
2023
Drill Hall
installation view
Backwash
2023
Drill Hall
installation view
LR_STATION_02
LR_STATION_01 copy
LR_STATION_06
MTubbs_outtamaihairintoaswim-LR
Station-Sydney-install-March 2021-web-2
Station Sydney-Media -march 2021-web-2
Station-Sydney-install-March 2021-web-6
SPRING1883
2017
installation view
MTubbs_steeperthanlegal-LR
Marian Tubbs
Over-coded, 2019
STATION
MTubbs
MT_my_internet
Installation view
2015
Quiet revolutions and enfant terribles
2017
Installation view
MT_over-coded_retakes-7
MT_over-coded_retakes-9
Quiet revolutions and enfant terribles
2017
Installation view
Tubbs_17_1_27_SC_IP_0160
MTubbs_Jupiter 2-LR
Marian Tubbs resort work video still