What does it mean to create from a place of hope? SACRED TIMES (2024) explores affirmations during these unprecedented times. These times include the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, genocide in Palestine, natural disasters, and so much more. Our individual and collective capacities are continuously tested. The phrases within these three banners --- YOU HAVE EVERYTHING YOU NEED AROUND YOU TO CREATE CHANGE, EVERYTHING THAT COMES FROM YOU IS SACRED, YOU ARE SACRED --- are gentle reminders to the individual of the agency and power that we have in creating change in our private and public environments.

Blak Pearl and Seventh warmly invite you to celebrate the arrival of spring and the culture and creativity of this remarkable group of artists.

Join us for the opening celebration with a BBQ, refreshments, and informal discussions with artists and community members.

Blak Spring showcases visionary works from First Nations artists who gather at Blak Pearl Studio, featuring: Aunty Minelle Creed, Aunty Colleen Beeton, Thelma Beeton, Jai Wright, Clay Holland, Robert Wolfe and Julie Coleman, Kurly, Luke De Nittis, Ben Fletcher, Clinton Lingard, Uncle Ronald (Ringo) Terrick, Tianna Parkinson, Jaguar Stevenson, Gerard Pol, Den, Rowan Edwards, Cassie, and Morgz.

In traditional times, spring—September and October—was a season of abundance. Lilies, orchids, and Murnong (Yam Daisy) blossomed, offering both beauty and sustenance. The landscape was alive with vibrant blooms like wattles, hop goodenia, burgan, and kangaroo apple. Tuberous orchids and small lilies emerged after winter, while wildlife thrived: snakes and lizards became active, young kangaroos ventured from their pouches, and migratory birds like the Sacred Kingfisher returned. Rivers, fed by melting mountain snows, flooded the plains, rejuvenating the billabongs—flooding that is now largely controlled. Falling in Guling Season, the exhibition celebrates the transition towards change and the anticipation of new growth to come.

Grow home is part of ‘Hot Compost Home Tour,’ a home-based touring exhibition series curated by artists and gardeners in Naarm. Curated by Mei Sun and her child, ‘Grow home’ is a roving exhibition that draws on the creativity of migrant culture to make a home with a young child in uncertain times.

After years of roaming internationally, we set up a base in Naarm. We came with a curiosity to deepen our understanding of where we live through First Nations initiatives; through the local ecology and community. Home grew to be wherever my toddler and I could be planting, tending, weeding, un/learning together, hands in the soil, with the microbes, the fungi, the minibeasts, our fellow growers, and the chatter over morning tea.

For ‘Grow home’, we will be weeding and planting alongside a quilt made by Emily Simek that uses fabrics dyed with homegrown and foraged plants, recalling a time when everyday textiles were made locally and told the stories of place, plants and culture. We will be at a social enterprise urban farm and a neighbourhood habitat garden. There will also be a private exhibition with a children’s group. At each site, after tending to the plants, we will come together for the ritual cuppa. There will be worm tea for the plant locals and a chance to see if we can listen underground to our minibeast neighbours via a contact microphone and headphones.

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Hot Compost Home Tour is an off-site exhibition series by Emily Simek in collaboration with Merri Cheyne, Anna Dunnill, Eric Jong, Mei Sun and Doug Webb. The home-based tour explores composting as an approach to exhibition practice. Using relational ethics as a framework, the project considers the conditions of the various exchanges that ‘create’ compost: how and where does it come to exist? How are different collaborators implicated? Instead of a purely material process, composting becomes about the work of relationships within systems of exchange.

This project is supported by a VCA50 Creative Development Grant, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.

Image courtesy of Mei Sun, 2024.