Bound to Resist: Karla Dickens at The Lock-Up
Image credit: Exhibition view, Karla Dickens, Locked On, 23 August - 16 November 2025, The Lock-Up Contemporary Art Space, Muloobinba/Newcastle. Commissioned by The Lock-Up Contemporary Art Space in partnership with New Annual. Courtesy the artist. Photographs by Lauren Moulton
The Lock-Up in Muloobinba/Newcastle presents Locked On, a major solo exhibition by cross-cultural Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens, running until November 16, 2025. Staged in partnership with New Annual, the exhibition entwines climate crises, histories of dispossession, and feminist resistance into a body of work that is both deeply personal and universally resonant. Dickens offers a grounded yet uncompromising perspective on the world, challenging how we move through it.
The title Locked On references a non-violent form of civil disobedience in which protesters secure themselves to sites of resistance with handcuffs, bicycle locks, or chains. Such acts, whether sit-ins against the Vietnam War, tree-sits to prevent logging, or student demonstrations, have often been dismissed as ineffectual. Yet, they remain powerful in their vulnerability: embodied, defiant, and courageous refusals to accept injustice without replicating violence. Dickens reclaims this gesture metaphorically, staging her own “lock-on” within The Lock-Up, where art, history, and activism converge.
The exhibition brings together new commissions with significant recent works, including Rise and Fall from the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial and pieces from her 2023 survey Embracing Shadows at Campbelltown Arts Centre. Together, they interrogate colonial legacies, capitalism, and patriarchy, revealing their intertwined impact on post-contact Aboriginal experience and the environment. For Dickens, ecological devastation cannot be separated from dispossession, historical trauma, and systemic inequities. In the context of climate emergency and social upheaval, Locked On feels especially urgent.
Image credit: Exhibition view, Karla Dickens, Locked On, 23 August - 16 November 2025, The Lock-Up Contemporary Art Space, Muloobinba/Newcastle. Commissioned by The Lock-Up Contemporary Art Space in partnership with New Annual. Courtesy the artist. Photographs by Lauren Moulton
Renowned for transforming “found objects” into vessels of meaning, Dickens assembles discarded fabrics, tipped flags, worn tools, and rusted metal into layered constellations that collapse past and present. These assemblages confront uncomfortable truths while signalling resilience and possibility. Yet Dickens resists the labels others wish to place upon her: “I’m not a politician; I’m an artist, a storyteller. With my art, I talk about my personal experiences. I don’t set out to make political statements. I am political simply because I am who I am - content to share the way I see and feel my way through the world, as an aging queer cross-cultural Wiradjuri woman.”
This philosophy permeates Locked On. The exhibition pays homage to past acts of resistance while encouraging new generations to take action. Ecofeminist principles underpin the work, linking the exploitation of land and ecosystems with the ongoing marginalisation of women and Indigenous peoples, while invoking the divine feminine as a force of renewal and resistance. Public programs, including family workshops and an artist talk, extend these ideas beyond the gallery, turning spectatorship into engagement.
The Lock-Up’s history as a former police station and holding facility intensifies Dickens’ intervention. A site once defined by containment and control becomes, through her work, a place of liberation and reckoning.
Image credit: Exhibition view, Karla Dickens, Locked On, 23 August - 16 November 2025, The Lock-Up Contemporary Art Space, Muloobinba/Newcastle. Commissioned by The Lock-Up Contemporary Art Space in partnership with New Annual. Courtesy the artist. Photographs by Lauren Moulton
Beyond its local context, Locked On consolidates Dickens’ position as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists. In 2025, she will present in the inaugural Universe Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia. Her survey, Embracing Shadows (2023), charted three decades of practice, while her work has featured in landmark exhibitions including the Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN (2020), Know My Name at the National Gallery of Australia (2020), and Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial (2017). Yet Dickens’ practice continually resists institutional containment. Each assemblage demands reckoning, with histories of violence, ongoing injustices, and ecological collapse.
Ultimately, Locked On is not an exhibition for passive observation. It is an invitation to empathy, understanding, and action. Dickens fuses humour with grief, mischief with rage, creating work that is both reflective and urgent. In Locked On, that act resonates collectively, through art, conversation, and community, calling audiences to bear witness and imagine futures grounded in justice and renewal.
Locked On: Karla Dickens
Until November 16, 2025
The Lock-Up, Muloobinba/Newcastle
Presented in partnership with New Annual
Arts in the Yard workshop: September 27, 10–12 pm
In Conversation with Karla Dickens: September 27, 1–3 pm
