Virginia Trioli

1 month ago | abc.net.au | Virginia Trioli

The headline screamed "Don't Fear the Donald", accompanied by an elegant portrait of actor and producer Marta Dusseldorp in a red suit and smiling with a preternaturally reassuring lack of concern. She seemed so unfussed for someone at the centre of a new global trade war that I almost smiled with her.

1 month ago | abc.net.au | Virginia Trioli

For the virtuoso violinist Richard Tognetti, the difference between success and failure is as fine as a single ridge of his fingerprint. He demonstrates, as I sit with my nose to his violin bow, trying to detect on the strings a finger movement that could be measured in microns. He begins to climb the daily music scales that he can never afford to shirk, talking me through each picked out note — good and bad. He starts playing: "Flat! Start again," he barks at himself.

1 month ago | abc.net.au | Virginia Trioli

There's something very charming about a pram jam: a jangle of buggies, yawning wide without their usual wiggly passengers, neatly lined up at the edge of the park and inviting a curious question — so, where did all the babies go? Over there! A convention of kids stretching along the edge of a new, green park, sitting neatly on blankets, nibbling decorously on the exquisite little snack boxes their mothers have made them as they all chat in the half-light of a cloudy Osaka morning.

2 months ago | abc.net.au | Virginia Trioli

The plaster warriors line the entrance to artist Tony Albert's rainforest studio, bristling with threat — except, they are only a foot tall, indignantly aiming their spears at my knees. I wince: here is a collection of some of the most awfully familiar, awfully racist bric-a-brac of the suburban 1960s: when white Australians decorated their gardens with figures of "natives", hunting among the hydrangeas.

2 months ago | abc.net.au | Virginia Trioli

Jenny Kee side-eyes me from behind those distinctive, red-rimmed glasses and purses her lips. "Are you going to wear that?" she asks, emphasising "that" in a tone of voice that slices through me, and not for the only time on a several-day shoot for an episode of Creative Types. She's dressed in one of her own intricately detailed patterns of bold black and white.