Maiya Burnan Nyauwi (Winter Sunrise) is an exhibition of ambitious new works by Gail Harradine, created during her residency at Seventh and the Women’s Art Register (WAR) in 2024. Gail's research project, Archival Anabranching - Decolonising, Creating Dialogue and Reaching Out, embarked on a multi-layered journey beginning at WAR. This project examined the WAR archives, uncovering both the connectivity, but also, primarily, the dearth of archival information relating to Victorian First People’s women.

A passion for collecting material is an innate part of us in many ways, however delving into archives, often reveals institutional biases and broader collecting focuses. This investigation is crucial for understanding what collecting signifies to diverse communities. It raises questions about legacy and its significance within singular projects like those at WAR. Often, First Peoples' women are not at the core of such collections, yet WAR's extensive material is invaluable for connection and recognition.

Maiya Burnan Nyauwi (Winter Sunrise) includes a variety of new works created by Gail during her residency, across printmaking, photography, craft, and archival material. The essence of the exhibition centres around making and creating despite the constraints of distance and time. It is about prodigious change, and working/living across locations, and the sights seen travelling such as the brolgas in the wetlands on the way to see family.

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Sunrise – each day can bring memories as the sun (ngauwi) rises over Mother Earth, with the memories of what has happened before, both unwanted and cherished, all contributing to the feeling of being alive and acknowledging what we have experienced. Sunrise can inspire as a brief but stunning sight.

Sunrise can create a time to revisit feelings about grief and loss and the damage oppression and trauma inevitably does in seeping into our culture and ways. At the same time, it allows a time to heal and gather one’s thoughts and courage to work through the coming day. Sunrise is a time to refresh and recharge ready for trying again to achieve and create lasting change. I think about the impacts of linking into archival collections - down to photo-copied newspaper articles of First Peoples women artists that resonate, and all the visual prompts one sees in travelling through the day, and what blooms in one’s heart - whether it is ruby red colours, being visited by a black cockatoo, making women’s dance belts, carving out a lino for printing or thinking of a new way to photograph ways of seeing culture and self.

— Gail Harradine, 2024

Working (through) Scores is a two-part community workshop program for diverse working-class artists facilitated by composer James Hazel. Over two sessions, we will explore a series of listening and composition approaches to making experimental scores, drawing on everyday sounds and technologies.

The aim is to share skills and sonic practice for artists from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, regardless of musical/or sound ability. If this resonates, please send a short EOI via email (text or sound recording) with a little bit of info about why this workshop might be relevant for you.

Relaxed, non-academic atmosphere. Tea and biscuits provided!

Please send EOI, along with any questions to James by Friday 12 July → precarioustexts@gmail.com

Hot Compost Home Tour invites you to a 15 minute inspection of this market listed property. Located in the heart of Brunswick, this exquisite one-bedroom apartment is perfect for straight white working professionals with no children.

Expect to take advantage of the ultimate in modern living with a sleek design including Smeg appliances throughout. With guaranteed return in social and cultural capital, benefit from a neighbourhood of artists and join the hip inner North.

Don’t miss out on securing your very own apartment that comes with the unique opportunity to evict a renter. Our experienced agents will help you maximise the retention of their bond to use at one of the great local cafes!

Please register to attend all advertised 15 minute gallery inspections. If you would like to inspect this gallery please click “Register”. We will be in touch to send you a “Notice of Entry” which will confirm the day and time for the next inspection with at least 48 hours notice. Inspections may coincide with viewings by prospective home buyers.

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Open for Inspection is curated by Eric Jong, exhibited works by Emily Simek.

‘Hot Compost Home Tour’ is an off-site touring exhibition 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.

Photograph credit: www.domain.com.au

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The outlaw tradition, those who live ‘outside the law’, has a rich and vivid history. In Australia, such bandits are known as bushrangers, immortalised in popular culture, celebrated through folk tales and elevated to a legendary, even mythical status. Equal parts hero and villain, the Bushranger is heralded as a champion of freedom, generally a radical opponent to 19th-century British governance and the inequality of the early colonies, turning to violence and thievery to balance the scales. Often working in small gangs or as solitary rouges, the Bushranger lived on the periphery of society, banished to the harsh outback in isolation from the collective pulse of rapidly expanding cities. What first started as an investigation into the role these characters play within Australian culture quickly evolved into a more personal exploration of isolation and grief as I travelled Australia in search of the spirit of these long-lost but far-from-forgotten men.

Travelling to the far reaches of the Australian deserts and bush, to the opal mining towns of New South Wales and South Australia, this project undertook a radical shift as I tried to reconcile my own feelings and emotional responses to these remote and energised places. Living on the road for weeks on end, I began to imagine the isolation, the silence, and the spaciousness these outlawed convicts must have felt, exiled from regular life and condemned to survival by any means possible. At its core, Bushranger Blue makes no attempt to paint an accurate narrative of the history of the Australian Bushrangers; instead, it functions as an inquiry into more perennial themes of loneliness, isolation, and ideas around the concept of home. By tracking the spirit of the outcast ranger through historical regions and remote communities of the outback, the images speak of a yearning for deep connection in the face of isolation.

This project and exhibition was made possible through The Pool Grant. An initiative of The Pool Collective, The Pool Grant was launched in 2010 as a means to support the development of emerging talent in the region. Since then, it has provided funding to twelve individual artists, as well as the first joint project in 2019.

Making-do is the first exhibition in ‘Hot Compost Home Tour’, a home-based touring exhibition series curated by artists and gardeners in Naarm.

‍Curated by community gardener and textile practitioner Merri Cheyne, Making-do is an exhibition of a scrap quilt by Emily Simek, alongside Cheyne’s own domestic textiles in her lounge-room. The exhibition takes the format of a working group, where Cheyne invites friends to test out and further develop a pattern for a new blanket made from scrap materials. Pattern-testing is a group process where the design of the blanket, and home-based exhibition, is collectively tested out and reflected upon, through practices in making and doing.

‍The show explores how a home show might function in support of a household, ‘making-do’ in ways that are subsistent, frugal, and involve collective gestures of care. This reflects Cheyne’s approach to gardening and low impact living,

     …when I don’t have something, I’ve just got to adjust my expectations of what I need, I can just do without. You make-do with what you have, or you wait until the opportunity manifests itself – something on the street, in the op-shop, or someone gives it to you. Stuff does manifest, people do give you things you really really want, if you wait long enough, if you are patient. It’s about tamping down your desire for new stuff, thinking, is it really necessary? 

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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.