Karla Dickens’ exhibition Recovery Mission is a powerful exploration of climate crisis from a First Nations perspective, offering a poignant commentary on resilience and the fight for a better future. Central to Dickens’s practice is an interrogation of the legacies of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, and their effects on post-contact First Nations experiences and the natural world. Recovery Mission brings these concerns into sharp focus, engaging with climate crisis and ecofeminism through a selection of works drawn from three recent bodies of work: Recovery Mission (2024) – from which the exhibition takes its title – Rise and Fall (2024/5), and Keeping It Together (2024).
The Rise and Fall series responds to the floods that devastated the artist’s hometown of Lismore in regional NSW in February 2022, and reimagines mermaid mythologies with a post-apocalyptic twist. While Recovery Mission, Keeping it Together and related works utilise assemblage, collage and installation to transform found and discarded materials – domestic detritus, personal ephemera and cultural debris – into densely layered works that deliver incisive and often darkly humorous commentaries on Australian culture.
Recurring motifs of the sphere, circle and water connect the works in this exhibition, highlighting Dickens’ ongoing engagement with cycles, environment and intergenerational endurance.
“I’m not a politician; I’m an artist, a storyteller. With my art, I talk about my personal experiences, Australia’s history and current ways of being. I don’t set out to make political statements. I am political simply because I am who I am – a queer mother, a cross-culture Blak Fella and a willing warrior for truthful story telling.” – Karla Dickens
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Exhibition opening event
Friday 4 September 2026
5.30pm: exhibition walk-through with exhibiting artist Karla Dickens and special guest Lisa Cahill, former CEO and Artistic Director of the Australian Design Centre.
6.00pm: opening event with a Welcome to Country by Djiringanj Elder Aunty Glenda Dixon and opening remarks by Bega Valley Shire Mayor Russell Fitzpatrick.
Bookings essential
Free event
Associated Public Programs
In Conversation with Karla Dickens and Meaghan Holt
Saturday 5 September, 11am
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About Karla Dickens
Karla Dickens is an artist of Wiradjuri, Irish and German heritage, living and working in Goonellabah, Lismore, on Bundjalung Country in New South Wales. Through her multidisciplinary practice – spanning painting, photography, video, collage, sculpture and installation – Dickens brings a black humour to her unflinching interrogation of subjects such as race, gender and injustice. Described as a ‘found-object’ virtuoso, her practice often places overlooked or discarded objects into new contexts to interrogate Australian culture, contest histories and agitate for change. Dickens has exhibited throughout Australia and abroad since the early 1990s. In 2023, she opened a major survey exhibition spanning thirty years of her art practice, Embracing Shadows at Campbelltown Arts Centre.
Other recent significant exhibitions include the inaugural Universe Pavilion of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (2025). 11th Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (2024/25). RISING: Shadow Spirit, Flinders Street Station, Melbourne, curated by Kimberley Moulton (2023); Return to Sender, Carriageworks, Sydney (2022); 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN, Sydney (2020); Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2020); Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2020); Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2017); and The National 2017: New Australian Art, Carriageworks, Sydney (2017). Dickens’ work is held in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Museum of Australia, Canberra; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; National Art School, Sydney; Australian Museum, Sydney; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney among others. Karla Dickens is represented by Cara Kirkland.