In the studio with
Nicholas Currie
AUGUST 2026
Afternoon Nick! Family, Mob and identity are central to you and your work, so let’s start there. Where are you from/who’s your Mob?
Hey! Yeah, based down here in Narrm but on my dad’s side are Mununjali and Kuku Yalanji with European ancestors as well from my mum’s side too. Got family everywhere in all forms so it comes through in the work even if I don’t notice it.
You have a solo coming up here, and you’ve taken inspiration from the late, great, Jimmy Little. Tell us about Messenger.
The body of work is derived from listening to the album by Jimmy Little titled Messenger. So, the album came out in June 1999, and it is a collection of interpretations of “Australian” rock songs by popular bands, and Jimmy Little, a Yuin and Yorta Yorta musician, covers them and claims them as interpretations. Songs like Randwick Bells, Cattle and Caine, and Into Temptation–his voice is incredible and a feast for the ears. This album is one of the formative artworks for me. Little states: “It just had to be my interpretation... Breathing my sentiment into the songs that were already breathing their own sentiment and feelings. I really just followed on and added, I guess, a little bit of me.”
I guess if I can do that via some paintings, then I’m kicking goals. I laid on a beach in Boorloo repetitively listening to one of his songs with the waves coming closer thinking of imagery, colours and what to do for this show. It all clicked laying in the sand. Listening to the songs as I paint and having the titles of the pieces be the songs themselves. I am not gonna say my favourite song but let’s see if you can tell from the paintings.
This act of interpretation, of translation, of remixing is key to Little’s approach to art making and performance. I guess you become a kind of translator too, translating his songs into paintings. Can you speak to how this act of interpretation, and then making something your own, has informed your practice and these paintings?
I wouldn’t say translating directly but more of communicating and sharing. Everyone comes from eons of histories and experiences, so in an era of immediacy it’s more of a reminder for me to look and not get washed away with what’s new. Interpreting is a key method within the making because it’s a reflective act.
Interpretation is about learning and learning is about reflection. Our own actions and how to be better from ourselves, the people or teachings around us. Listening is important. I am no perfect person, and I am sure not a perfect painter. With art it’s a tight rope of wanting to run and be prepared and poised.
Jimmy Little is the primary source of inspiration for this current body of work then, but have there been other artists or references that have also influenced this series?
Been always running back to old favourites yaknow, like the songs Little is covering. Rose Wylie, Arthur Jafa, Thea Anamara Perkins, Gordon Hookey, and I’ve been rocking with all my friends honestly. I keep calling em and asking how these mob looking. My family group chat, my biggest critic.
Watched the film My Father’s Shadow by Akinola Davies Jr. and the colours and mood in that film are crazy-ways, and a margin to a feeling of what I’m tryna create in these works.
Andrea Illés did a work in 2023 where she looped Aretha Franklin’s Natural Woman as they performed to just say “you make me feel”, true god I cried at that cause that’s the goal yaknow. Don’t matter what the feeling is but if you make someone feel then the art is doing something.
You’ve also planned a sculptural work for the centre of the gallery titled, empty rooms with performers, for a performance piece titled, got no place to go, got no place to be. How does this interact with the eleven paintings? What is the narrative at play within the work?
It’s a stage, more of a catwalk to be honest, in the middle of the room. I grew up singing and my mum thought I’d be a star.
With this wooden structure, it’ll lay in the middle of the gallery. I worked in the gallery as a studio over the summer and the acoustics of the space are beautiful. I would end up singing along to the music I was playing, and I would be mesmerised by the echo of the gallery.
It’s a show about music. I love music, I’m gonna sing. It’s my return and I don’t think a lot of people know I can sing. My whole family sang so it feels right to sing again. Watch me get ashamed and not want to do it. Come to the opening and see if I do it.
Tell me about the intersection of your art and music? It’s obviously very important to you.
I always have music playing, anywhere I go really. I use music as motivators to do things; I’ll do a task to an album or time myself based on songs. I DJ a lot too, so I am always listening for new sounds or remixes of songs to dance to. Music is beautiful. I have a tattoo on my leg that reads “I love music” inked by one of my friends. I got it before I started DJing. I really enjoy gigs and the culture of that with being an artist. A lot of my friends are musicians too so it’s this revolving ecosystem of going to each other’s gigs, shows or events.
My favourite concert I went to was Lauryn Hill when she played here in 2023. I went by myself to treat myself after selling a painting and after paying rent. I played a game of basketball before, won the game, got ready at the stadium, took the train thinking I would miss the start of the set and accepted that “that’s life”. I got there to hear over the loudspeaker “we are sorry again for the lateness, the show will start in 5 minutes” and I got to see the whole set in GA and then went home to get a good feed and sleep.
There are a handful of motifs that repeat through your work: horses, the crocodile, spiderwebs, radiating arrows, the jack-o’-lantern–could you share with us what they represent?
I do have a recurring vocabulary with the current works I’ve been making. I know these will shift, diminish or flourish into new symbols but for the moment they sit nicely in what I’ve been making. A lot are symbolic, representing larger conceptual and cultural reflections in me and my family’s perspectives. Some represent family members, stories or critique. They also just come from looking around and seeing what’s been happening. Arrows are from my dad drawing them around as a kid on loose paper, and the spiderweb came from me and my cousin on a camping trip on Country. I use text but you can say more with a drawing sometimes.
You’re also a part of the upcoming ACCA exhibition NEW26 in September this year. Having both shows coincide, is there a sense of synergy at play or a dialogue that you’ve established between the works at either site? Does the work at ACCA connect to similar themes or musings explored in Messenger, or is there a departure?
They sit alongside each other, I’d say both these bodies of work are more siblings than partnered. Together but with distance, same mob. The studio is a bit of a melting pot of things welding and blending into each other. I am 25, so a lot is happening in my life at the moment, so my therapist and journal know about the interlocking, but I’d suggest seeing both bodies of work and trying to connect the works. (You can laugh at this one, it’s a joke).
Back to the siblings analogy, I’m using the same materials and methods but they both had different parameters in making. Different music was playing. I will say however that these two bodies of work are a distinct highlight of my career and life, and I feel I will look fondly on how these bodies of work would actually interlock in the future.
You work with a lot of different materials, but a key one is traditional: oils. You’ve also recently begun working with graphite. What inspired this exploration and what does it as a material mean to your work? What other materials have been important to you? I’m thinking perhaps of Keen’s Curry Powder?
I need to stop raiding my dad’s cupboard for materials. Conceptually, material is really important in the landscape of contemporary art for me. There is always a reason for interconnection: graphite stems from my grandfather on my mum’s side being a road paver, Keen’s Curry Powder is from pan-Aboriginal experiences of food and family. The inspo is that I used anything I could get my hands on and then reflected “okay, what is this to me, why is this here? And how would I use it?”
I was on the train once and I was introduced to a friend of a friend. He asked, “what do you do?” So, I answered “oh, I’m a painter”, thinking none of it. Then he replied, “you mob are the most dedicated on site, idk how you do it and keep it so clean”. Recognising that the fella thought I was a house painter I said “nah, nah. I am an OIL painter bruhz, and I get everything messy”.
Humour is important to your work. Tell me about this?
It’s easier to talk about hard or big stuff with a joke. It also lets me take time with how to sit with trauma or oppressive systems that are still more popular than ever. It also is an active way of being less direct and side-stepping it, so I don’t martyrise myself cause that’s gammin.
I’d rather laugh than cry cause if I started, I’m not sure if I’d stop. I’m not a special case in this instance, yaknow there’s so much happening that what is it gonna do for my people and family if all I’m thinking is “how I make people sad when they see my work”.
Sometimes I think there are multiple audiences you’re speaking to at the same time. For example, I feel like there are quite a few Mob in-jokes that perhaps don’t register for other audiences. Who do you want your work to speak to? And what do you want them to take from it?
I’m doing it for the mob that gets it and doesn’t get it. Oxymoron but ya get what I mean. You can take whatever you want from it. If we don’t acknowledge that yes, there’s coded language, symbols or choices that directly link to my experiences that I share or populate with my community then who we are doing it for. I’ve done the theory and been a visitor and in the walls of the gallery, but I really didn’t go to any gallery till I was 17, the art I saw was by my family or friends in our homes or out in the world.
We come from the oldest continuous culture in the whole word so course there’s gonna be in-jokes that some don’t get but yaknow it’s also a time to try to understand it too. It’s not a direct “this is for Blackfellas”, it’s a Blackfella is talking and I’m usually talking to other Blackfellas.
I know that it’s important to you to share the opportunities you receive with others. Do you want to give a shout out here to any other artists you think are deserving of some attention?
Look out, this just gonna be my cousins:
ENOKi
E Salmon
FOG
Cater 2 U
Ari Mills
BBYJ
Madika Penrith
Marli Maddison
Tre Turner
Mobstar
Lily Arapera Gentile
When you’re not making art, what are you doing?
Honestly, riding my bike and playing basketball. I go to the movies, have a feed with friends. I live a good life.
Let’s manifest, Nick–what’s the dream project you want sent your way?
Let’s go international with it. If I can do it, then nothing stopping no one. Highkey, an album cover would be deadly. Or maybe just some art my family can go see.
A wrapped sports car with one of my paintings on it and then I get to keep the car.
A brief list, what are you currently:
- reading
Because a white man’ll never do it, Kevin Gilbert
Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine
Beloved, Toni Morrison
- watching
Just finished Sex and the City
The Muppets movies
Basketball highlights on YouTube
- listening
Messenger, Jimmy Little
Flockaveli, Waka Flocka Flame
Hello Love, my guardian angel
- enjoying
Playing basketball with my friends
Singing along to songs
DIY projects to make the apartment I rent better (changed the lights in the bathroom)
