
Elizabeth Pulie’s exhibition at UNSW Galleries reveals a brilliant feminist/feminine/female practice shaped in the wake of 1980s post-modern Sydney. Over the following three decades the artist has been driven by ontological doubt to operate on several distinct levels of practice, and at key junctures to make dramatic shifts in her own work to signal another way of going on. The exhibition, entitled #117 (Survey) and curated by James Gatt, eloquently lays out these moves in detail for the first time. Beginning in the foyer, the exhibition carves Pulie’s oeuvre into three distinct streams, which are then each separately elaborated in the three main gallery spaces. Her survey, the second of the University’s biennial art commissions after the remarkable Archie Moore project in 2020, is an initiative of the gallery director, José Da Silva, to support outstanding mid-career artists. Pulie’s new commission extends beyond the exhibition to include a new video work and a reader, compiling the artist’s significant body of writing from 2001–20.