Justene Williams is in the middle of setting up her major exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery, and the space is crowded with crates, cardboard boxes, ladders and piles of detritus. Two silver unicorns resembling blocky Minecraft creatures stand to one side, three life-size cobbled-together human figures occupy a corner, and a decommissioned speedboat painted fluoro orange sits on a large trolley. When finished, the boat, named Darwin, will stand in the gallery on eight misshapen legs.
"I called him Darwin," Williams said, "because Darwin is actually the name of a mudskipper. There's always movement in my work, and this idea of how we move and why we move."
Inside the boat, Williams said she has placed a figure she calls the jellyfish lady, a costume-like sculpture based on a ballet. She wore a stripy blue pyjama-like outfit with a blue ribbon in her curly blonde hair as she moved about the space.
"I love when something's had a life," she said. "I believe that energy is stored in stuff, like that boat. They've had a life, and you can work with that. Then I get a bit hocus-pocus, because I start to think about what people have done with them before."
Williams grew up in a wrecking yard in Bankstown, Western Sydney. "Me and my sister, we'd hop in cars, and sometimes there'd still be a battery and the windscreen wipers would start, and you imagine yourself going off into another place ... I can still see the sea of metal."
The exhibition, described as a squishy, joyful world where too much is not enough, takes over the QAG this summer. It includes a recreation of the performance piece A Metal Cry from 2017.