Palace Theatre Paste Up Project

I have the exciting opportunity to curate a paste up project in collaboration with Volcano Theatre and Coastal Housing Group funded through the Arts Council of Wales’s Ideas : People : Places initiative.

The Palace Theatre Paste Up Project is a cornerstone project of From the Station to the Sea, and will be part of The Troublemakers' Festival in Swansea, UK this July.

We believe The Palace deserves to operate again and this project an opportunity to wonder on what it might have been like when it was first launched in 1888, or when operated as a theatre until the 1970’s or what will it look like when it’s renewed from disrepair?

For more information go to the Street Art Walking website.

Visiting Orange Regional Gallery

This month I had the pleasure of being invited to open an exhibition, titled Editioned - Prints From The Collection, curated by Madeline Holborow at Orange Regional Gallery. As a Printmaking major back in my university student days, when I had the chance to work alongside Maddie at ARThive, I was absolutely excited to see what works on paper were hiding out in the Orange Regional Gallery collection and the show did not disappoint!

I arrived early on the Friday 21 October so that I could have some time to visit the space and see this curious collection that I would soon be delivering a speech on. I was pleasantly taken aback by the facilities surrounding the gallery including sculptural works and the newly renovated museum. Upon arriving upstairs to Editioned I was impressed by the way Maddie had managed to bring together so many different styles and mediums of work. 

I met with the newly appointed Gallery and Museum Director Brad Hammond whom told me more about their collection and the idea of inviting others in to curate works, a very welcome change of programming that I have been familiar with when concerning public art galleries. The atmosphere was refreshing and invigorating, welcoming different perspectives on the spaces and the collection.

The works featured a range of artists, quite a few that I have admired since first discovering them at university such as Arthur Boyd, Sydney Ball, Charles Blackman and Wendy Sharpe with works dating from the 1970's through to 2005.  I am pleased to leave Orange Regional Gallery with a renewed passion seeking out art and will be looking up the artists I was not personally familiar with such as Errol Smith as the woodcut series portraying artists such as Gauguin, Schiele and Van Gogh were striking.

I am honoured and inspired to be part of the opening for Editioned, not only because it was a regional gallery near my own home town of Mudgee, but also because it instilled a level of faith in myself as an arts worker that public galleries do not have to be closed off institutions, which had primarily been my experience whilst studying. When I started ARThive gallery there was little hope of interaction within the programming of the Newcastle Regional Gallery, yet years later in a different regional gallery setting, the doors were open for interaction and ideas. The conversation with Brad about fueled with enthusiasm to keep the programming engaged with contemporary artists and the wider community, which is clearly happening with Editioned, the first of many exhibitions to be curated by an invited guest.

To see Orange Regional Gallery engage Madeline, a pivotal leader in the Orange arts community as an artist, gallery owner and all-round mover-and-shaker, provide recognition in her work to establish Corner Store Gallery whilst also an opportunity for further professional development curating contemporary art is commendable and rewarding to be part of.

The following day I visited her gallery and tried my best to see everything on the list of things to visit. You definitely need more than a day in Orange to discover all that is to offer which is lucky because Editioned is on show until 15 January 2017. Take trip to the country and be pleasantly surprised.

Failure:Lab Sydney

Photographs by Elise Blakeney.

My Own Biggest Failure

One would think that organising the first Failure:Lab in Australia would have me prepared for the question, 'What is your biggest failure?' However, today I found myself rambling and scrambling upon answers when being interviewed. The more that I have reflected on this, I realise that there are so many degrees of failure, but my biggest?  In the spirit of last week's CV of Failures post, and this week's Artshub article featuring Vivid Ideas Curator Jess Scully, I shall delve down in and share my own failures. Perhaps you can help me decide which is biggest.

1. HSC Fail - Most of my school years I was very studious, striving for good grades and taking pride in my work, I enjoyed it! However, something shifted after I changed schools and combined with a poor selection of Higher School Certificate electives, my attention for classes waned as my interest for new friends increased.

Living in close proximity to the school meant I often found myself sneaking home, with friends in tow. This kind of behaviour would have been unthinkable, as well as impossible, at the Catholic school which I was at until Year 10. Our teachers saw us at the start of the day for assembly (and prayer), the concept of walking off grounds sinister. I remember skipping school once when I was at Saint Matthews with my friend Chris Morrissey to go to KFC, around the corner, and one of our teachers came spotted us, came in and shouted 'Get Back To School!'. Never again would we subject ourselves to such potential shame.

At Mudgee High I had become invisible, by comparison, in a sea of hundreds of students. I had chosen Photography as an elective, which (of course) was not a board endorsed subject - so not going to add to my end UAI, anyway. I was struggling in my Business Studies class, wishing I had taken Society & Culture after hearing about what my friends were learning in their classes. Even studying Visual Arts, there were so many better artists than me (Sam Paine, you are one of them!) creating their major works whilst I was still wondering where I fit. Upon reflection my favourite subject was probably IT - go figure. I remember getting the flu the week of my IT exam so the one exam I was excited about was a struggle to breath through. My end UAI was 42. Wow. 12 points over not even being valid. In eighteen months I had gone from a student getting 80+ results to exactly half that. Not my proudest moment. I shrugged it off and headed to the big smoke for other options, anyway.

2. Certificate IV Website Production Fail - So, now we live in Lane Cove and after (successfully) completing Cert IV in Interactive Multimedia I found myself in another course which would prepare my to develop websites. For the most part, I enjoyed the course, but I certainly started to grind on writing code. It just was not where I wanted to be. Plus, I failed the CSS module.

3. Finding work with my skills Fail - So I was equipped with 1 and-a-bit Cert IV's but apparently so was every other person who studied IT in 2001-2. Plus, they were all better than me. Not even that. They cared more about doing it and getting better themselves. I just didn't. So, I packed up and drove myself back to Mudgee.

Until tomorrow when I ponder on my failures, 2003 and beyond!