Artist Interview: Conversation with Marian Tubbs

Marian Tubbs is an artist practicing on Bundjalung and Kabi Kabi Country in the Northern Rivers district of NSW, whose assemblage‑focused practice spans video, lenticular photography, sculpture and installation. Exploring digital and vision technologies, materiality, text and ecology, her work juxtaposes natural and artificial forms, high and low culture, and physical and virtual worlds to transform everyday materials into spaces of interrogation.

Tubbs’ two- and four-layered lenticular works are composed of her photography, found images, and AI generated visualisations. Some works present narratives of plant life and place, others are more speculative and abstract. Often humorous and surreal, the works carry political resonances, resisting dominant narratives of technological progress and ecological decline.

This interview between Marian Tubbs and Sophia Smithwick, MAMA Visitor Experience Host, occurred in July 2026.

Your work often brings together photographs, found objects, screenshots, digital images and other collected materials. What draws you to working this way, and what kinds of ideas or surprises come from combining things that might not usually belong together?

Every new connection can invent a metaphor or analogy, bringing things together creates new narratives that is enjoyable in assemblage as it is poetry. I find the coagulation of ready-at-hand images, with casual phone snaps, my photographs using high-end cameras, and AI generated imagery effective in creating unexpected connections which keeps me present and engaged in these experiments.

You often use everyday materials or digital images that people might overlook or think of as disposable. What interests you about giving these things a new life in your work, and what do you hope people begin to notice differently because of it?

Value is central to my work in a polysemantic sense, I am interested in what is valued by culture, how humans hold values, and the worth of a thing. What has and does not have use value or cultural value is interesting to my discourse. As time is the greatest narrator of value I include speed and rhythms in my works, on exhibition at MAMA images arrive and disappear and activate the viewer to move around the works. The memetic image or cheap commodity is often relevant to the ‘just now’, the viral spread of something often relates to a cultural zeitgeist that could be disposed of the next day, by including these in my work they are given a longer life and in turn an historical archive is created.

Photography has changed so much in recent years with digital technology and AI. As an artist working across so many different mediums, what do you think is most exciting and/or most challenging about making images today?

At art school, every medium was interesting, everything was a road into understanding what art could be. The theory lectures on photography however were different for me. To learn about the history of photography was revolutionary to my education because of its complicated relationship with truth. From constructed photojournalist images that were published to present political narratives to Sontag, Benjamin and Flusser’s philosophical musings I was hooked.

For the question of what is exciting or challenging I find in my practice this has not changed as much as it might be thought. The apparatus changes or advances but it is still an apparatus, a tool. The artist’s job is to make the use and result poetic, not corporatized, not flat.

Marian Tubbs is a finalist of the 2026 National Photography Prize, presented by the MAMA Art Foundation.

On until 22 November 2026

Photography by Jeremy Weihrauch