Ellie Buttrose on social progress: ‘Things have changed and can’t go back’
As Ellie Buttrose prepares to launch her curation of the 2026 Adelaide Biennial Of Australian Art, she tells Neil Cooper why the show embraces a state of flux
‘Yield strength’ is an engineering term that defines the amount of stress a material can take before it is permanently changed. It is also the name given to the 2026 Adelaide Biennial Of Australian Art by curator Ellie Buttrose. But rather than impose a theme from the outset, the name was chosen after the 24 artists who make up the showcase were selected.
With the Biennial spread across the Art Gallery Of South Australia, Samstag Museum Of Art and Adelaide Botanic Garden, the name aims to capture the spirit of Buttrose’s discoveries. ‘As I was travelling, I noticed that there was a return to artists really playing with materials,’ she explains. ‘There seemed to be a lot of push and pull going on in the work; this sense that things cannot go back to the way they were after you’ve pushed past that point becomes a metaphor for the way some artists are pushing parameters, but also for others who are thinking about how things have changed and can’t go back.’
This is captured in very different ways by the work of two Yield Strength artists, Robert Andrew and Emmaline Zanelli. Andrew fuses elements of the natural and digital worlds to create works that evolve and erode over time in a way that explores hidden histories of Australia’s First Nations communities. In contrast, Zanelli presents a new video piece that explores the worlds of teenagers at work as they take on their first job.
‘I was interested in kids joining the workforce and the sense of independence that can facilitate, but also going from a dependent to being someone who is an independent consumer,’ Zanelli says of ‘Pocket Money’ (2025), which combines footage of young people with poetic text and a youth drum corps soundtrack. ‘I feel we really over-romanticise our memory of what we first bought and I was kind of tentative about painting this picture of it being this awesome experience because it’s also a life sentence to get your first job. I think there’s two sides to that coin.’
Andrew’s works appear in two venues. At the Art Gallery Of South Australia, ‘New Eyes – Old Country’ digs deep into his roots, using a moving television screen that charts the Yawuru Country coastline as it appears in the video, with charcoal dragging behind to trace its path of travel. At Adelaide Botanic Garden, monolithic structures made from compacted soil unearth hidden histories as they evolve and decay.
‘Part of the idea is to erode back or scrape back to show a non-western indigenous view of history,’ Andrew explains. ‘My mum’s people, Yawuru people, have been on that particular part of the Country for tens of thousands of years, developing language and a slowly evolving, but never static, culture, which was sort of locked-off. I suppose the work is trying to show a sense of time that, when you first see it, is barely perceivable. You have to stand there and then start to see the detail of the movement and how things are working.’
Through her day job as curator of contemporary Australian art at Queensland Art Gallery and the Gallery Of Modern Art in Brisbane, Buttrose is well versed in the disparate state of Australian art. Yield Strength embraces a state of flux. ‘I hope audiences aren’t only looking at the works through a thematic bubble,’ she says. ‘There are different types of practices and different threads that come out in the different spaces, and that starts to make you see the work through a different lens. What would it mean to have a figurative painter alongside other figurative painters, but then see them alongside more abstract work?’
Buttrose continues: ‘I didn’t want to be thinking about artists in a bubble and wanted to ask what it means to think about practices in relation to one another. If artists are drawing out the materiality of their work, I wanted the curatorial process to become obvious to people. If that’s what artists are doing, then it should also be reflected in the curatorial methodology.’
2026 Adelaide Biennial Of Australian Art: Yield Strength, Art Gallery Of South Australia, Adelaide Botanic Garden and Samstag Museum Of Art, 27 February–6 June; main picture: Joe Ruckli.