PAST EXHIBITIONS 2024
BENJAMIN & KITTY: THE CREATIVE BRIERLEY FAMILY
15 November - 7 December 2024 | Albany Town Hall
Kitty Brierley (1903-1979) was a member of the creative Brierley family which was prominent in the Albany art and literature scene in the mid-twentieth century. Her artistic father Benjamin (1857-1920), an English migrant, set her on her path. Their watercolour paintings, drawings and sketches are spread throughout the state.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
Albany Regional Prison Prisoner Art Exhibition
10 October - 8 November 2024 | Vancouver Arts Centre
Explore the creative works of inmates at the ARP Prisoner Art Exhibition, showcasing a variety of artworks.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
TETHERING
11 October - 9 November 2024 | Albany Town Hall
In her solo exhibition Tethering, Annette Davis explores ideas of connection and holding on.
Her curiosity about trees growing from rocky crevices and coastal shrubs clinging to windswept granite boulders was her starting point. Inspired by nature’s will to survive, Annette has used materials and techniques associated with rural life to create this new body of work.
The first step in her creative process involved the materials having a conversation with nature, either through natural dyeing, frottage or being buried under leaves for extended periods. Using techniques of knotting, looping, stitching, and twisting, these raw materials of canvas, cloth, paper, rope and wire have been transformed into artworks which express connection to place.
Annette Davis is an artist and curator from Albany who is interested in landscape and history. Each year she stays near the Murchison River in the mid-west for extended periods, where she immerses herself and her materials in nature.
This exhibition is proud to be a part of the IOTA24 Festival, supported by Lotterywest.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
VIRTUAL TOUR of Tethering
2024 southern art + craft trail
21 September - 6 October 2024 | Vancouver Arts Centre + Albany Town Hall
Join us for this year's Southern Art + Craft Trail from Saturday 21 September – Sunday 6 October 2024.
VANCOUVER ARTS CENTRE
- Felters in the Great Southern (FIGS)
- Heather Brown, Morgan Burke, Zoe Phreo and Stones
- Bev Doig, Helen Fitzhardinge and Sally Marshall
- Jane O'Halloran
- Butter Factory Studio Artists
- Albany Pottery Group (Located in the pottery workshop at the rear of the VAC)
ALBANY TOWN HALL
- Albany Art Group (Located upstairs)
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
PURITY OF PASTELS
6 September - 5 October 2024 | Albany Town Hall
The Great Southern Pastel Artists collectively share their individual love of soft pastels.
Join us for 'The Purity of Pastels', an exhibition showcasing the brilliance, immediacy, beauty, versatility, and precision of pastel as an artistic medium. Pastel is pure pigment held together with a little binder enabling the intense colour.
Image: 'Autumn Reflections', Suzanne DeLandgrafft Moore, Pastel on Paper, 57 x 80cm 2024. Photo by Nev Clarke.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
Trill Death Cult
28 August - 13 September 2024 | Vancouver Arts Centre
James BL Hollands
Australia, 59 mins 59 seconds, video and sound / 12 x 16 alumalux prints / strobes
WARNING: Trill Death Cult contains strobe lighting and flashing imagery.
Trill Death Cult is an hour long video installation with sound, containing over 50,000 non-AI images of skulls made by the artist, alongside 10 stills from the film, displayed with strobes. In spite of its dark imagery, Trill Death Cult is a hallucinogenic holy psychedelic video epic providing feelings of immanence, ecstasy and joy. Trill Death Cult is based on Buddhist ideas of The Third Bardo. The Lord of Death holds up a mirror of karma to you, and thousands of demons approach and inflict torments upon your soul - one potentially attains liberation by enduring this and recognising the voidness in all things, and that this is all a projection of your mind.
Trill Death Cult is a transcendental work, comprising of video, prints, sound and light, creating a ossuaric temple within the gallery. The video is created and animated in a tradition of artists from Len Lye to John Whitney, and uses techniques influenced by the work of Ryoji Ikeda and Paul Sharits.
James Hollands is an artist who has lived in rural WA for the past 10 years. He graduated with a City and Guilds in Stonemasonry and Sculpture in 1995 and did a Masters in Computer Art at Thames Valley University, London in 2008. He has held over 17 solo installations and been exhibited globally including the Tate Modern and Whitechapel, London and biennials in Liverpool and Prague. He was the curator of “London’s Home of the Avant-Garde”, The Horse Hospital, for 7 years. He has been a practicing artist in video, sound, and text for nearly 30 years and his work can be found in collections such as St Martins British Artists Film and Video Study Collection, London; BFI Archives, London; Clark, Montreal and Divus, Prague. In WA, he was the manager of the Cannery Arts Centre in Esperance and has exhibited in the Pickle After Dark and Strange festivals in Perth to audiences of over 10,000 people.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
TOUGH PLEASURES
19 July - 31 August 2024 | Albany Town Hall
Art Collective WA in collaboration with the City of Albany Arts and Culture presents Toni Wilkinson's two extended suites of imagery that feature women and food from her book and exhibition: 'Tough Pleasures'. Revisiting the 2003 series that launched her early career in contemporary art photography, Wilkinson adds new works almost two decades later that meditate on complex themes of femininity, the absurd, desire, and ongoing debates around photography and art in an ever-expanding visual culture.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF BELLA KELLY
2 August - 29 August 2024 / Vancouver Arts Centre
Green Skills working with Mt Barker Noongar Elders, Caroline Narkle, Frank Krakouer and their family, Noongar and Wadjella artists, and with the support of community groups and farmers ran a program of three Landcare Art Day outings between October 2023 and January. The outings provided a wonderful opportunity for Noongar and Wadjella artists paint outdoors in locations around Mt Barker with Caroline and members of her family. Caroline Narkle is a daughter of celebrated Noongar artist, Bella Kelly (1915 – 1994).
The exhibition is based on works created on the three outings on country with Caroline, Frank, their family and other Noongar artists. The outings also benefited from the participation of visual artist and educator, Nikki Green (Great Southern TAFE Art lecturer) and other members of the Denmark Butterfactory Art Gallery as well as south coast eco-fabric artist, Jenny Wilson. Locations for the art outings included the Adams family farm at Woogenellup, the Saggers farms near Kendenup, and the Green Skills Tootanellup rural property near Rocky Gully.
This program of events is supported by Green Skills, The Koorabup Trust, Oyster Harbour Catchment Group, Southern Ports and CBH Group, the Denmark and Mt Barker Visitor Centres, Katanning Art Gallery, the City of Albany’s Vancouver Arts Centre & the Denmark Butter Factory Art Gallery.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
LOST SOLES AT SEA
3 July - 31 July 2024 | Vancouver Arts Centre
Claire Davenhall's exhibition ‘Lost Soles at Sea’, explores the multi-cultural migration of people to Australia. She makes social comments from the pressures placed on the early settlers to the journey of the migrants, refugees and convicts, travelling across the sea, in their search to reach a land of hope & dreams.
It’s a thought-provoking, intriguing and creative exhibition that dares to challenge your own lost soul and the story it has yet to tell.
WHALES, SEALS, AND WIRLO STORIES
7 June - 13 July 2024 | Albany Town Hall
Artworks from the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories picture books
Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories is an Aboriginal association who work to reclaim and revitalise south coast Noongar cultural heritage. They have produced six bilingual books that feature stories connected with the sandplain and sea Country of the Great Southern region. The books were illustrated by Wirlomin members and this exhibition presents forty of those artworks.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
WALLFLOWER
28 May - 26 June 2024 | Vancouver Arts Centre
An exhibition by Lucy Lunchbox at the Vancouver Arts Centre.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
SEEKING REFUGE, SEEKING RECKONING
2 May - 1 June 2024 | Albany Town Hall
seeking REFUGE, seeking RECKONING is an exhibition by Ruth Halbert of an immersive, participatory installation and hand-woven, stitched textiles, which shares the ways we have come to be here in Australia, and wonders what kind of welcome we give to people who ask us for refuge.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
50 WEEKS OF LIFE DRAWING
12 April - 23 May 2024 | Vancouver Arts Centre
‘50 Weeks of Life Drawing’ presents works by artist Anne Grotian in the front gallery at the Vancouver Arts Centre.
Anne Grotian participated in Colin Montefiore’s Life Drawing group at the Vancouver Arts Centre over ten years. "It was an inspiring space."
I always said: “Life Drawing got nothing to do with art but what you do with it might become art.”
The focus and concentration which is needed to create what you see on paper, is like a meditation. It is good for your mental health and trains the eye-hand connection.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
SHELTER WITH THE FIRST HUG
23 February – 4 April 2024 | Vancouver Arts Centre
SHELTER is a solo exhibition of textile and multimedia installations by Verity Byth, exploring notions and emotions of shelter in a climate-ravaged world. SHELTER is joined by THE FIRST HUG where choreographer Annette Carmichael has created an immersive installation about our needs for intimacy and emotional shelter.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
MAKING THEIR MARK
AN ARRAY OF RECYCLED REMNANTS
23 February – 4 April 2024 | Vancouver Arts Centre
MAKING THEIR MARK: An Array of Recycled Remnants presents textile work by Liza Stewart in the front gallery at the Vancouver Arts Centre.
“Rendered to capture and record some of the decay in my environment, both organic and inorganic some of the individual textile pieces have been re-assembled into flights of fancy that may hang, dance, drape, slump or gently continue to decompose.”
Working with a variety of methods, including botanical dyeing, dyeing with natural dyes, mono-printing from linocuts, rusting and mulching; Liza’s main interest has been the resulting mark making on cloth or paper, which though partly controllable still has the magic of the unexpected, encouraging further experiment.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
THE ALTERNATIVE ARCHIVE
2 February - 9 March 2024 | Albany Town Hall
Exhibition The Alternative Archive is a survey of regional contemporary art practice in Western Australia, touring the state with ART ON THE MOVE until 2024.
The Alternative Archive survey presents the work of 28 contemporary artists selected from the broader state-wide The Alternative Archive project that involved over 200 artists across 13 exhibitions in 2019. The survey iteration of The Alternative Archive debuted at Perth-based John Curtin Gallery in 2021. Now The Alternative Archive returns to the regions, offering a rare insight into the diversity of regional arts practice throughout the state.
Artists have responded to local archives and collections or have produced new archives that can preserve ‘untold’ histories. Working in a range of media – including painting, drawing, textiles, jewellery, video and sculpture - the artists of The Alternative Archive tell of deep, multi-generational connections to place and family. Their artworks unearth stories that have been lost, kept hidden or that need to be told in new voices, as well as new stories shared in public for the first time.
The Alternative Archive Artists
Naomie Hatherley (Broome), June Dijagween (Broome), Alana Grant (Mandurah), Lyn Nixon (Mandurah), James Walker (Mandurah), Deidre Robb (Mandurah), Claudette Mountjoy (Northcliffe), Louise Tasker (Manjimup), Lizzie Troup (Northcliffe), Maitland Hill (Dwellingup), Michelle Slarke (Lake Grace), Jeanne Melville (Lake Grace), Tania Spencer (Lake Grace), Marianne Penberthy (Geraldton), Charmaine Green (Geraldton), Mark Smith (Geraldton), Ellen Norrish (Geraldton), Gabrielle Butler (Perenjori), Chan Dalgarno (Narrogin), Karen McClurkin (Esperance), Serena McLauchlan (Albany), Tina Carmody (Kalgoorlie), Debbie Carmody (Kalgoorlie), Kgukgi Catherine Howard Noble (Kalgoorlie), Agnes Yamboong Armstrong (Kununurra), Brenda Mingen Ningamara (Kununurra), Mary-Lou Divilli (Kununurra), Peggy Madij Griffiths (Kununurra).
This project has been made possible through the Regional Exhibition Touring Boost managed by the Department of Local Government Sport and Cultural Industries, supported by Royalties for Regions and delivered by ART ON THE MOVE.
Image Credit: Vashti Innes-Brown
BEAUTIFUL BUMPS - ALBANY
1 February - 15 February 2024 | Vancouver Arts Centre
An exhibition to celebrate the families that participated in the WA Country Health Service Beautiful Bumps program events in Albany/Katanning.
The Beautiful Bumps program aims to promote healthy pregnancies and healthy babies. New and expectant parents, families with little ones, and support people were invited to program events where they connected with a range of support organisations and participated in art activities. The exhibition features a collection of mixed media developed from the program events.
The program is supported by WACHS, Healthway, WANSLEA, Palmerston, Amity Health and the City of Albany.