Main Drag Art Installation
Artist Statement
Local artist, Easton Dunne, combines two of their recent works into a new installation for 2025 Riverfest’s Arts on the Fringe. Dunne invites you to visit each of their artworks on display throughout the Walter Reid building to collect a souvenir postcard to colour in.
Main Drag is an installation consisting of six billboard sculptures featuring iconic shapes and symbols inspired by roadside advertising around Central Queensland. Dunne resurfaces these shapes using hot pink, fluffy faux fur that references cowhide in response to their experiences growing up as a queer, transgender and non-binary young person on their parents’ cattle property on unceded Wadja and Ghungalu Country.
By resurfacing imagery associated with the area’s industries (agriculture, mining, tourism) using a material that is soft, tactile and unashamedly, flamboyantly camp in colour, Main Drag resists and reframes the region’s stereotypically hyper-masculine, cis-heteronormative narratives around identity through a queer lens.
Featuring alongside Main Drag’s billboards are two equally hot pink and fluffy squatters’ chairs, part of Hail Holy Queen, an installation that recreates aspects of Dunne’s paternal grandparents’ house located on a cattle property on unceded Ghungalu Country. It was a location for many family gatherings, often after Sunday church services.
Dunne describes the house as follows:
"Squatters’ chairs lined the verandah and the lounge room was decorated liberally with taxidermied bulls’ heads and religious iconography featuring saints and martyrs in variously tortured and ecstatic poses against a backdrop of faux-brick wallpaper. These rural domestic aesthetics — often echoed in other settler-coloniser families’ houses in Central Queensland —are perfect examples of campness, because of their earnestness and sincerity, and inherent kitsch-ness and gaudiness."
This combination of Dunne’s works attempts to create a space for imagining a queer past, present and future that is entirely specific to Rockhampton and Central Queensland: one that has queer joy and belonging at its core.
Learn more about Main Drag - listen to Dunne's ABC radio interview.
Artist Bio
Easton Dunne is an artist, artsworker and arts educator based in Central Queensland on Darumbal Country. Their work explores connections between identity and place through an autobiographical lens.
They utilise drawing, sculpture, installation and time-based media to create autobiographical narratives offering their perspective on life as a queer, transgender and non-binary person who grew up in regional and rural Central Queensland and returned there to live as an adult after studying and working in South-East Queensland.
Informed by Rural Queer Studies, Dunne’s work aims to facilitate dialogue and exchange between regional and metropolitan communities around how socio-cultural and geographical factors influence diversity in queer identity work and practices.
Dunne completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Queensland College of Art in 2012 and a Postgraduate Diploma of Education at Queensland University of Technology in 2014. They have exhibited widely since and their work has won a number of awards. Their most recent solo exhibition, Welcome to Paradise, was held at Rockhampton Museum of Art during 2023.