Author Quentin Sprague and artist Chris Carmody discuss Carmody's exhibition All the Time, now showing at Civic Art Bureau, Canberra.

Chris Carmody’s paintings deal with library books and systems. This exhibition brings together two series of work painted in parallel, one focussed on actual book covers and the other propped up by imagined bookends.

Quentin Sprague is an arts writer and critic, author of What Artists See, Ken Whisson: Painting and Drawing andThe Stranger Artist: Life at the Edge of Kimberley Painting (2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for non-fiction).

Chris Carmody graduated from Canberra School of Art in 2009 and received the Qantas Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award in 2012, travelling to document faded library books across Australia and overseas. Since this time Carmody has painted and exhibited whilst moving about from Canberra to the Blue Mountains and the remote communities of Yuendumu and Nyirripi, NT, where he worked with Warlukurlangu Artists Inc. Carmody now lives in Meanjin/Brisbane, where he works in Libraries and has returned to the subject of faded books. Carmody’s work is represented in private and public collections including The ANU Art Collection and the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre. All the Time expands on the distillation of Fluorescent Array, his successful exhibition with Civic Art Bureau in 2025.

Contact the host of All the Time: Chris Carmody and Quentin Sprague in conversation