Magenta Art Prize

I am thrilled to be asked to step in just over the border in Mildura to judge the painting categories in the 2024 Magenta Art Prize next week. Opening next Thursday, come along and say hello!

2024 Magenta Art Prize to be held at the Magenta Woolshed at the Australian Inland Botanic Gardens Mildura-Wentworth, 1183 River Road, Buronga NSW 2648 from 29th March to 1st April 2024.

Prize Money of $13,500

Magenta Art Prize is a collaborative initiative in support of the Australian Inland Botanic Gardens (AIBG).This community driven art competition focuses on painting and photography and money raised goes to support the AIBG. Both the gardens and the exhibition are great community initiatives drawing cultural tourists from everywhere.

The garden includes preserved, mature mallee, including Eucalyptus dumosa, Eucalyptus oleosa, Eucalyptus socialis, Eucalyptus gracilis, and Eucalyptus viridis, some of which may be as much as 2500 years old. It is also a fantastic bird-watching spot.

Broken Hill Heritage Residency

A Rock Chick’s Residency

I am pleased to have been selected for a West Darling Art’s Broken Hill Heritage Residency along with a group of other local artists.My focus will on the Albert Kersten Mining and Minerals Museum in Broken Hill and the Line of Lode (slag heap).

Rocks shape our worlds. Rocks are connected to climate change and to the extractive industries. Rocks enable all our electronic interactions and energy storage in batteries. Rocks are inscribed with notions of value as objects. Practices of extraction, though labour and through impacts on the environment, are entangled in ethics. Rocks are often thought of as being solid, immovable and unchanging but the reality is they are changing all the time and our relationship to them also changing. My project is to undertake a research residency into the nature of rocks and Broken Hill’s relationship to rocks.

Research will be through the Albert Kersten Mining and Minerals Museum and the Broken Hill City Library Archives. I propose to develop a model of Action Research where I am developing samples as content.

I aim to devise methods (through research) to explore the physical, social, cultural, historical, political, environmental mobilities of rocks; through strategies such as story-telling, touch, lens, sound, weaving and speculation.

The Sunflower Collective 2021

The Sunflower Collective is a self-organising collaboration of experimental artists, exploring issues of uncertainty, resilience, of place and art-making. Their work is informed by ecofeminist philosophy and also explores how collective knowledge is accumulated and communicated; how we can move as a collective to produce actions of change. The group formed in early 2021 to explore these types of connections in their research; the outcomes to be exhibited at Wayout art space in Kandos NSW from 12 December to 8 January 2022. The exhibition includes process-driven work, sampling and proto-typing and objects. Our aim is to develop visibility for the environment and to connect  to a wider audience. The exhibition will also develop a solar power component as a model for artists to use in work.

The artists are: Kelly Leonard - Broken Hill, Michael Petchkovsky - Blue Mountains, Snowy Monaro, Julie Briggs - Narrandera, Julie Montgarrett - Wagga Wagga, James T. Farley - Wagga Wagga

The project spans art forms, invokes locations and operates as a concep- tual weaving of ideas, processes and objects. There is no curator or hierarchy, no program, no set contact time or place. The seeds for the collective came out of a seminar hosted by the CAD Factory and led by USA environmentalist of international standing, Joni Adamson in 2019. The conditions of the past 18 months have meant that this type of learning program has not been able to be delivered in the regions. This reality, accompanied by the erosion of creative arts programs in regional universities and TAFE, means groups like the Sunflower Collective are essential to support, creatively and emotionally, regional creative practitioners. The Corona Virus has led to a huge loss of work in the arts sector and the Sunflower Collective’s exhibition and process is a  direct action to capacity build mutual peer support and care networks regionally.