Troy-Anthony Baylis

Robert Andy Coombs’ compelling photographs explore the intersections of queerness, sex and disability – often with the artist himself as subject. Here, VAULT chats with Coombs about relationships, performativity and being at war with Instagram.

Emma O’Neill unpacks how American painter Loie Hollowell translates personal experiences of sex, pregnancy and childbirth in a language all her own.

Jenna Gribbon wants you to look. She wants you to enjoy the act of looking, but she also wants you to know what you’re doing. Nipples are a glaring pink. Limbs are suggestively entwined. But it’s not quite what you’re thinking. She talks to VAULT from New York about bodies, pleasure and the ethics of looking.

Uncanny creatures, beautiful and terrifying, come to life in the hands of sculptural and textile artist Julia Robinson, whose practice looks to fairy tales and myths to tell universal stories of life, death and the human condition.

Best known for painting women, American artist John Currin has built a career on treading the line between low and high, satire and chauvinism – and always turning the mirror back on the viewer.

Forbidden fruits

Is there a feminine creative form, and if so, what does it look and sound like? VAULT explores the art and enquiry of Michelle Ussher.

VAULT spoke to Aiko Robinson about why the Japanese art of Shunga has been an ongoing source of creative and cultural inspiration for her practice, and how the ‘naturalness of sex’, as presented in her work, seeks to normalise conversations around the still-taboo topic far beyond the art world.

Tom Of Finland seeded generations of gay men who built themselves in the image of characters. He imagined a world where gay men fucked and frolicked with joy, and where hierarchies of power were refigured as topographies of pleasure and play. VAULT looks back at the explosive art-pornography of Touko Valio Laaksonen.

VAULT gets a rare glimpse into the extraordinary collection of erotic art amassed by notoriously private Brisbane-based collectors Alex and Kitty Mackay.