Stephen Killick

Cartographies of the Absolute

Luminance Gallery Port Macquarie: 31 January - 26 February 2026

Stephen Killick (b.1947) has been making art for fifty years from a rural studio in central New South Wales, with large sculptural pieces (such as the oversized community of futuristic Travellers created in 1995 for Brisbane International Airport) now iconic markers of his - and our - passage through time and space.

Two of his sculptures also grace the Port Macquarie streetscape – notably Device for Orientating Oneself Within the Universe (2001) outside Port Macquarie Library. As this title suggests, working regionally has not inhibited Killick’s interests which are immense, holistic and untrammelled.

This exhibition in Port Macquarie travels through many of those decades, and revisits the prescience with which he examines the world. The constant touchstones of his practice remain vested in the elements that shape our world, climate and environmental change, and the apocalypse of many and constant international wars. In these artworks are sightlines of his experience and ideas; nature and culture, war and respite, humans at odds with each other, in harmony with nature, dressed for battle, and the spectre (with us already) of AI.

Aligned in comic format hung 10 cm apart, these artworks trace his lifelong work habit – with deep dives into the unknown, via technology and media. His ideas create visual consternation, developing increasing freneticism, to become vignettes of worldly disarray.

Then there is a lull, with a withdrawal into beauty – shapes floating on colour, optical puzzles that never quite resolve, assays about nature and the sublime.

Killick’s past 50 years are characterised by these ‘travels, quite rhythmic, from positive to negative repeatedly… with the resting point of the sublime. I balance the need for sanity with the weight of the world.’

His practice ‘artist – activist – diarist’ is a self and existential exploration, with lyricism, bewilderment and joy his accompanists. In his hands we share a journey that touches and echoes our own, as humans trying to make sense of a world that is at once tangible and removed; the push pull of modernity that may provide physical comfort but induce existential terror. The many facets of what we are and know are assembled in this pithy and electric exploration by one of Australia’s most significant artistic talents. Killick’s commitment is absolute.

- 14 January 2026, Louise Martin-Chew