In acknowledgement of Pride month, Murdoch University is delighted to celebrate and pay respect to Pride WA and Murdoch Queer Collective with the announcement of an exciting new acquisition that will join the Murdoch University Art Collection.
The Huxleys, Where Have All The Flowers Gone, 2021, Giclée print, 75cm x 106cm. Purchased 2022. Image courtesy of the artists and Murray White Room, Melbourne.
At Murdoch, we strive to be a place where everyone feels welcome. Our university is socially rich and culturally diverse community where all students and staff can feel safe, welcomed, and thrive to be their best. It is a place where personal identity, cultural heritage, faith, gender expression, sexuality and ability are respected and celebrated as cornerstones of a vibrant and inclusive learning community[GL1] .
This new acquisition, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, presents a joyful yet intimate portrayal of the love shared between these two queer artists, who are both creative and life partners. Their challenging of stereotypes and celebration of diversity offers a fantastic and rich new dimension to the Art Collection.
About the piece: The Huxleys – Where Have All the Flowers Gone (2021)
Will Huxley and Garrett Huxley, aka The Huxleys, are creative collaborators who present camp commentary and spectacle across the visual art, performance and entertainment sectors.
Will Huxley grew up in the suburbs of Perth where he studied photography, making his work particularly relevant and relatable in a Western Australian context.
The two artists met in Melbourne, where they began to collaborate as The Huxleys. Inspired by the attention-grabbing and the outrageous, the artists embrace the glamorous, the absurd and the provocative and in doing so challenge convention and persuade their audiences to consider notions of gender, social norms and non-conformity.
Their photography and performance art traverses the classifications of costume, film, and recording. A visual assault of sparkle, surrealism and the absurd, The Huxleys saturate their practice and projects with a glamorous, androgynous freedom which sets out to bring some escapism and magic to everyday life.
Where Have All The Flowers Gone (2021) explores the fading magic of supernatural worlds in which The Huxleys cast themselves as exquisite outsiders, isolated and ornate, and existing on the fringes of places and the margins of society – finding love and solace in the florid arms of queer utopia.
This work is one of several prints from the artists’ 2021 series Places of Worship, which has been described as ‘a chaotic cataclysm of unapologetic queerness framed through a surrealist lens that jolts the gaze into spheres of existence’.