Stephanie Radok is a writer and artist.
Her new book Under the Bed / Inventories 2020-2022 is now available from Wakefield Press. In July 2025 she was part of the Stella Day Out series. Watch now on Youtube.
Radok’s first non-fiction book An Opening: Twelve Love Stories about Art was published in 2012 and long listed for the inaugural Stella Prize. Becoming a Bird: Untold Stories about Art appeared in 2021. Becoming a Bird was selected by Nicholas Jose as his 2021 Book of The Year in the Australian Book Review and by Michelle De Kretser as her 2021 Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the Sydney Morning Herald.
A review of Becoming a Bird by Martin Edmond is at
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/radok-becoming-a-bird-untold-stories-about-art/
Radok writes: “My art practice investigates knowledge and its taxonomies. It explores the way that interpretations of the world are systematised and controlled. It questions the status quo and the authority of experts. It combines exploration of collections in institutions such as libraries and museums with observation of the everyday. It is engaged with issues of translation and migration – of plants, of people, of words. It has been shown in the Barr Smith Library, the Museum of Economic Botany and the South Australian Museum as well as in the window of the Samstag Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Geelong Art Gallery and at the Flinders University Museum of Art.
Though intellectual and investigative my work is insistently haptic and sensuous, poetic and associative. It uses the media of brush and ink on paper, of paint on found cardboard, of etching on paper, and books cast in plaster. The delicacy of each of these mediums emphasise the suggestive layers of knowledge and experience embedded in the works.The artworks encounter elements of the world around us – weeds, vegetables, birds, animals, trees – both as if for the first time and as they exist globally in history through documents and encyclopaedias.
There is a constant engagement with writing and images and their relationship to one another.”
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Recent writing includes Under The Bed in HEAT magazine https://giramondopublishing.com/heat/archive/stephanie-radok-under-the-bed/
and reviews of exhibitions at MONA, National Gallery of Australia and QAGOMA in The Saturday Paper.
The Right to be Lazy, John Knight, Berlin, 2016. Photo: Stephanie Radok
Stephanie Radok 