Nell (b. 1975), conceptual and performance artist, painter and sculptor, grew up in Maitland and completed an undergraduate degree at the Sydney College of the Arts before spending a year at the University of California in 1996. In 2006 she gained her master’s degree, partly completed on a scholarship at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Her other awards include the Pat Corrigan Grant in 1999, the National Association for the Visual Arts Marketing Grant in 2001 and the Rome Studio of the Australia Council in 2003. Since 2001 she has exhibited regularly at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney. Several times a finalist in the Blake Prize for Religious Art, she has also collaborated with the fashion label Romance Was Born. In 2011 and 2012 her work was included in major exhibitions at MONA, Hobart and in 2012 she exhibited Hometown girl has wet dream at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery. She is well-known around Sydney as the partner of chef Kylie Kwong and in late 2012 she was curator of the zany MCA ARTBAR. In 2013 she won the University of Queensland National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize with a video of herself using a cricket bat to destroy a huge plastic fly (left-over from her Fly as high as me in 2002). Richard Larter, forty-six years her senior but a kindred spirit, painted Nell several times.
Gift of Patrick Corrigan AM 2014
© Richard Larter/Copyright Agency, 2024
The National Portrait Gallery respects the artistic and intellectual property rights of others. Works of art from the collection are reproduced as per the
Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). The use of images of works from the collection may be restricted under the Act. Requests for a reproduction of a work of art can be made through a
Reproduction request. For further information please contact
NPG Copyright.