Lou Hubbard
(b. 1957, Brisbane, Queensland. Lives and works in Melbourne)

Lou Hubbard’s practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and the moving image. In a surreal coalescence of humour and sentimentality, her work often employs utilitarian objects from personal and domestic spaces, manipulated and set against one another to form new – and sometimes uncomfortable – relationships and meanings.

Walkers with dinosaurs, 2021–23, encapsulates Hubbard’s idiosyncratic tone and tendency to meticulously manoeuvre her works in each unique exhibition space. Originally shown at Mejia, Melbourne, its reincarnation at Melbourne Now sees a heaving mass of inflatable walkers (or Zimmer frames) tumbling out into the foyer of The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia’s third floor. In this obstructive mise en scène – childlike in its billowing form, yet indisputably recalling mortality – Hubbard presents visitors with a calculated, unavoidable moment of physicality and reflection. Elsewhere in the foyer, the sculptural encounter extends to two stacks of colourful, dinosaur-shaped children’s chairs, at once droll and sinister in appearance with their skeletal form and cartoonish teeth and eyes. It’s a motif that recalls Hubbard’s work in the 2013 Melbourne Now exhibition: a video series entitled EYE OPS, 2013, that depicts the artist rolling, slicing and arranging a series of eyeballs constructed from marshmallows.

After a long career in film and television, Hubbard resumed her art practice in 2000. She has shown her work extensively around Australia, including in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; MONA FOMA, Launceston; West Space, Melbourne; ACCA, Melbourne; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; and has also exhibited at galleries in Istanbul, Singapore and Berlin. She has undertaken residencies in Barcelona, Paris and Antwerp, and in 2015 was awarded the Art Gallery of Ballarat’s Guirguis New Art Prize. In 2020 Hubbard was awarded a Doctor of Visual and Performing Arts from the University of Melbourne where she is a senior lecturer in Photography at the Victorian College of the Arts.