I am Anneke Burlinson, an anthropologist and artist based in Perth, Western Australia.

At the center of my practice is something simple and hard: holding the space while I make, without knowing whether the work will sell, be seen, or matter. Staying in limbo is something people are not good at. I make in it on purpose, and I ask what deep-time human behavior can teach us about being there.

For a long time I doubted my skill, whatever others told me. A voice kept saying the work wasn’t good enough, or wasn’t what sells. What changed was how I looked at the work: not as something to be judged, but as an expression of a philosophy. What would happen if I faced that voice and simply made? Beauty is all around us. Modernity has given art a different definition, one where the market puts a price on some things and not on others. This practice is my way of making without waiting for that verdict.

The work takes two forms. Embodied. Excavated. is a series of paper maché vessels made from egg cartons and what was already to hand, imagining a society where making is not about satisfying the market. My atmospheric abstractions are an ongoing series of oil pastel works, moving through color one phase at a time.

Both grow out of my anthropological research. For the deeper layer, my work is on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/communities/human-evolution-lab

Piece 5 from Embodied. Excavated. was selected for the 2026 City of Belmont Art Awards.

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