In lieu of a review this week, I’m looking back at some of the art that stuck with me this year. I won’t lie to you and say these are all strictly things covered for Lowbrow or Lowbrow-esque (the AGNSW was my first gallery of the year), but they are my picks, and I am inherently lowbrow. Please enjoy my top 11 picks from 2025 in chronological order (of course I couldn’t whittle it down to just 10).

January 3: Just like drops in time, nothing by Ernesto Neto at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The installation of this 2002 work overtook my senses. For the first time in my life, I smelled an artwork before seeing it. The stockings, filled with spices poured onto the floor, overtaking the space with their smell and colour. Having just been in San Francisco at the SFMoMA days before, I was immediately reminded of Ruth Asawa’s sculptures in the shape and feel of Neto’s installation.

I was working in a bookstore when Poor Artists hit the shelves and it was one that was mildly contentious in where it should be shelved. Fiction or non-fiction, in the art section or in biography? Poor Artists is like nothing I’ve ever read before in its structure. Co-authors Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad (who I’ll call G&Z from here on out) remind us at the start of the book that this is a piece of art criticism, but I see it more specifically as criticism of the culture that surrounds art instead. Which I guess is exactly what art criticism is.  G&Z have been running a UK-based arts and culture commentary site The White Pube for ten years and published Poor Artists as a somewhat expansion of that in 2024.

There’s something in the air, or is it in the oven- food has been a trend all over clothes (why are we so obsessed with tomatoes, and lemons, and canned fish?) that is now bleeding into the art world. For me (and most of us) food has shaped my life.An unconventional (read: international) upbringing exposed me not only to art at a young age, but a wide variety of foods. I grew up counting down the days towards meals- Canadian Thanksgiving (immediate family, Mum’s brûléed sweet potatoes), Christmas Eve (California, Auntie Lynn’s kielbasa hors d'oeuvre), Christmas (flaming plum pudding), Easter (ham), and Mother’s Day (Les Fougeres’ house salad). It was these moments at tables that made up the year more than the holidays themselves. In so much of the art I’ve seen lately, these links have been reflected back to me. Cooking and art are labours of love, they feed us, and often don’t get the appreciation the time and effort deserve.