NGA Art Talks: The Gleeson Tapes is a new series revisiting key conversations from the James Gleeson Oral History Collection.
In the late 1970s, before the National Gallery of Australia opened its doors, the surrealist artist and writer James Gleeson set out across Australia with a microphone and a mission: to build an oral history archive that captured the stories behind key works of art in the national collection, told by the artists themselves.
In this episode Gleeson speaks with Melbourne-born artist Lesley Dumbrell. Dumbrell emerged as a key figure in Melbourne’s contemporary art scene from the late 1960s onwards, creating abstract, geometric paintings and contributing to the Australian Women’s Art Movement in the 1970s. Their conversation touches on Dumbrell’s many works of art held in the national collection, including Ripple 1972 and February 1976.
You can view Lesley Dumbrell’s work in the collection display Know My Name: Global, on display at the National Gallery until April 2027.
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