In June, Nicholas Smith put on a group show at his eponymous Sydney gallery that explored nostalgia – as an emotional force, a cultural force and as an interrogation of “the act of remembering itself”.

“Right now, I think nostalgia resonates so strongly because we’re in a moment of cultural flux,” Smith says. “Looking back can feel like a way to steady ourselves.”

The show, titled Yesterday, featured 19 artists who revisited “personal and shared histories”, Smith explains. “Some reconstructed childhood memories, others delved into the aesthetics of past eras, forgotten traditions and mediums or the transient nature of human connection.”

As the exhibition at N Smith Gallery proved, nostalgia is a multifaceted thing. It’s an emotion. It’s a lens. It’s an aesthetic. It’s a narrative device. It’s a cultural phenomenon. It’s individual. It’s collective.

Nostalgia has long been expressed, examined and interrogated by artists, from the sentimentality-fuelled Romantic painters of the 18th and 19th centuries to the postmodern photography of Cindy Sherman, who used nostalgic tropes to critique, skewer and upend, in curator Eva Respini’s words, the “artifice of identity”.

Australian artists are similarly engaged with nostalgia, using it overtly and subtly, with warmth and with cynicism, in painting, photography, installation and beyond. Six of them share their work below.

Micheila Petersfield

Nostalgia is … a seductive quality in art; it draws you in through its familiarity and invites the audience to project their own associations onto the work.

My work taps into a visual nostalgia by drawing on media aesthetics from past decades … Nostalgia serves as a narrative trigger in my work, prompting viewers to draw parallels with things they have seen before, even if no explicit reference exists. For me, this contributes to the uncanniness of the imagery, where the familiar scenes are subtly distorted or made strange. I see nostalgia as a form of idealisation, which I employ to heighten the contrast with this underlying sense of unease.

Casey Chen

Nostalgia is... something personal for me. But I think it’s also an important part of a collective shared experience that is relatable between people.

My art practice draws heavily upon my personal lived experience. I’m inspired by feelings of sentimentality and the memory of the things that have stayed with me, and which I’m curious about. Nostalgia is an overarching theme that I regularly circle back to and reference. Looney Tunes, the Beatles, Journey to the West – they’re sincere and irreverent mashups I throw into my work. I borrow elements from pop culture as a light-hearted and accessible way of presenting a narrative that speaks to a collective shared experience between me and the audience. I draw on my feelings of nostalgia as a way to see the humour in everything, and as a way to resolve disparate themes in my work and unify my art practice with that of longstanding traditions of ceramics craft-making.

Atong Atem

Nostalgia is … to me, a tool that can help us reflect on history, the past and our own emotions.

In my practice, I use nostalgia as a way of making work that’s personal and sentimental by looking at what makes me feel nostalgic. I think that nostalgia is an interesting way to figure out what’s important to you. Nostalgia is often at the foundation of my work, but it’s also equally about thinking ahead and looking into the future.

Scotty So

Nostalgia is… a sense of longing for the past, whether it is real or not. It crosses culture, memory and identity. It’s formed from fragments of memory, fiction and longing. It can be a form of time travel that not only takes you back but also reveals what you’ve unknowingly carried forward.

Nostalgia in my work is never just about the past. It’s often a device, a mood or even a trap. As someone who moved from Hong Kong to Australia, I constantly question what I’m nostalgic for, such as family memories, youth, language, things I never fully had, or things I’ve lost along the way. My practice often builds scenes or characters that feel like they belong to another time, but closer inspection reveals contradictions and anachronisms. Whether through archival interventions, drag, chinoiserie patterns or ink paintings layered with digital screens, I use nostalgia to construct alternate histories, not to escape the present, but to complicate it. It’s a way for me to talk about displacement, queerness, and cultural memory, especially how the past is remembered, misremembered or remade in the present.

Thea Anamara Perkins

Nostalgia is … powerful.

It is a vividity of past or even a reimagining. What we yearn for can illuminate our shared values. An intangible attachment that lingers through shifting times.

Callum Preston

Nostalgia is … comforting and complex all at the same time.

I may [line up] a series of objects, create some signage, build a space that is, in my mind’s eye, a vision of something from a shared past as a child of the Australian suburbs, but it’s people’s personal memories that are more powerful than anything I could add physically. I’ve simply given them a springboard to dive backwards into their whole lifetime of memories. I’ve had people become emotional telling me about their grandparent’s milk bar or their Sunday-night ritual with a parent at the video shop, or even just the idea of community or familiarity that comes from walking into your local store, which feels more rare now. I take great pride in honouring the mundane but so familiar parts from a time when the world felt a lot smaller, but the possibility was huge.

This story is part of Broadsheet’s special Nostalgia Issue, presented by Up, documenting food, fashion, culture, travel and tech that makes the past new again.