Art Forum with Marion Abrahams

Painting and staying with the trouble

A look at how Marion has developed her painting practice over the past seven years, the key forces that drive her work and the recurring questions she continues to grapple with in the studio.

Guided by feminist instinct and a dark sense of humour, Marion’s paintings meld romantic and escapist notions, familiar clichés and art historical references with the muddiness of the natural world. ‘Staying with the trouble’ is a phrase from writer Donna Haraway that guides Abraham’s approach in the studio. It’s about remaining present with the complexity of living and dying on a damaged planet, rather than trying to resolve or escape it. In Marion’s work, this means making space for unlikely connections (what Haraway calls ‘making kin’) and embracing the messy, entangled relationships that come with all of that.

Parallel to those themes, the artist’s practice also operates as a rebuttal to seductive feelings of despair and the mysterious longing she feels between her family’s Lebanese lineage and birthplace in Molesworth, Tasmania. These underlying tensions lead her works from lightness into darkness, then back again, navigating ideas of the soul, reimagining power structures and centering the valorising of care.

Abraham holds a BA of Fine Art from RMIT, Melbourne (2021) and a previous undergraduate degree in Politics from UTAS (2010). Marion was awarded the Art Gallery of New South Wales Paris Cité residency for October - December 2025 and she is currently working on new paintings for Hobart Current: HERE, opening in November 2025.  Marion will be an artist in residence at Hunter Street as she undertakes this work.  

This event will be live at the Dechaineux Lecture Theatre on the Hunter Street Campus and streamed live to the Rory Spence LT, Inveresk Campus. If you are unable to attend in person please joins us via zoom:
https://utas.zoom.us/j/82158227133
Meeting ID: 821 5822 7133

Image credit: Grace Chia