Lou Hubbard
Ahead of her participation in the 2nd Melbourne Sculpture Biennale, held at Brighton’s Billilla mansion this October, VAULT met Lou Hubbard to discuss her particularly psychological, process-dependent practice of association, and her varied body of readymade sculpture, video and installation works.
Image credit: LOU HUBBARD,
Shafted, 2023.
aluminium extension pole, Coalbrookdale patio furniture,
dimensions variable
Photo: Christo Crocker.
Courtesy the artist, Conners Conners and Sarah Scout Presents, Naarm/Melbourne
Lou Hubbard’s reputation precedes her. Even if you haven’t heard the sculptor’s name, or seen her work, you will have certainly felt her influence in the proliferation of readymade and assemblage art shown at every level in Melbourne. From student shows to artist-run spaces and commercial galleries alike, Hubbard (b.1957), a longtime lecturer in photography at Victorian College of the Arts, counts many notable figures among her past students, devotees and acolytes. Curator Amelia Winata once described Hubbard as Melbourne’s “mother of installation art”; this is no exaggeration.
For Hubbard, “art is a problem”; and the artist’s process entails (re)solving the relationships of the variables that arise from the specific conditions of such problems. Before we discuss the Biennale, I ask Lou about her most recent exhibition, Grrr, held in March 2026 at Strawberry, a newish artist-run gallery in the old Pontian Club building in Brunswick. Hubbard sees the site of an exhibition as being as important as the art: “A few elements choose me,” she says, and the space, “tells me the work I need to make”. Formal and linguistic associations guide this process, with different connotations, modalities and registers of words or objects pushing meaning laterally. The Strawberry space immediately struck Hubbard for its likeness to an open maw. She responded to this “problem” by fashioning a sculptural installation in which a ladder seemed to stand as a surrogate for braces, a reparative gesture towards the cracked walls of the gallery. Doll’s shoes (recalling... Subscribe to read all articles in full
