Mariota Spens
My practice is rooted in experimental drawing and painting that explores the political imaginations of Australia, the UK, and the world order. Using water-based paints, pastels and charcoal across varied scales, my drawing is a site of inquiry into how historic visions of utopia and conquest continue to shape collective realities in Australia: how power and colonialism endure, and how resistance can be built through imagination and visual disruption. Through image-making I investigate my Australian heritage, the paradoxes of colonial women, and the delusions carried in white identities.
I explore utopias of past and present, tracing how colonial fantasies and capitalist objectives underpin Australian society and global power structures. Through humour, irony, and satire, I enact small reversals of power, reconfiguring the symbols and ideologies that justify domination and environmental destruction. For me, painting is a space where old psychologies can be released and new ways of being can emerge.
Together in dreams
Watercolour on paper, 2026.
20 × 30cm
$350
Tabby and Eve
Watercolour on paper, 2026.
12 x 8cm
$350
Engaging with historic utopian thought, my paintings expose arrogance and violence and absurdity embedded in colonial psychologies. My series, “If it lives, we want it” explores the ecological delusions of the Victorian Acclimatisation Society (1861-1872), where this continent was seen as a utopian playground for white ecologists who sought to introduce every species of flora and fauna in the world to Australia. Their actions caused immeasurable damage to this ecosystem; an ecocide based in delusional thinking typical of the colonial mindset.
In “Together in Dreams” and “Tabby and Eve”, I have visualised the experience of the animals who were involuntarily placed in Australia by this society (or simply, in the case of alpacas, were planned to be imported, but never were in that period). Included in this system were also white women, like me, who were simultaneously complicity in this ecocide, while made to play the role of reproduction within capitalism, to grow society and continue the colonial project. These paintings visualise the feeling of surreal strangeness and not-belonging having been dumped in Australia, while being a naïve destructive force.