Joni
Dennis

Joni Dennis is an Australian artist based in Brisbane, Queensland. Working across large-scale painting, mixed media and video art, her practice explores memory, landscape, female presence, movement and emotional atmosphere. Her work has received recognition in Australia and internationally, including 5th Prize at the Florence Biennale for Waltzing Matilda.

Dennis is known for richly layered oil and acrylic paintings that combine landscape, figure, pattern, collage and gestural mark-making. Her surfaces often carry traces of fashion, body decoration, textile traditions and storytelling, with hand-cut stencil forms, carbon lines, metallic elements and saturated colour used to create images that feel both intimate and theatrical.

In recent works such as Letters from Byron, Dennis draws on the Australian coast, memory and personal mythology. The painting moves between abstraction and figuration, suggesting water, bodies, fragments, letters and emotional traces held within the landscape. Her imagery often resists a single reading, allowing humour, sensuality, vulnerability and strength to coexist.

Dennis’ video work LOLA - ANTICIPATION extends her painterly language into movement. Through animation, music and atmospheric transformation, the figure becomes suspended between portrait, performance and dream-state. The work reflects Dennis’ ongoing interest in the psychological landscape of the body, where gesture, decoration, colour and motion become carriers of emotion and identity.

Across painting and video, Dennis’ practice is driven by a belief that images can hold memory, beauty, playfulness and unease at once. Her work celebrates the decorated figure, the emotional force of landscape, and the fragile, shifting space between reality and imagination.