This awards exhibition is a joint project of the Australian Migrant Resource Centre and Adelaide Festival centre. It is supported and assisted by the SA Ministers for Education and Multicultural Affairs and both the South Australian and federal governments.

Blanket and body ecologies: fragile bodies and difficult questions begun ‘on the sheep’s back’.

Deborah Prior is an Adelaide-based textile and performance artist whose Feminist practice explores themes including bodily agency, chronic illness, climate justice and the personal and social histories of domestic work. She meticulously knits, stiches and unpicks threads to address the deeply anxious state of attempting to live well on an unwell planet.

Woollen blankets are a recurring material and motif within Prior’s practice. On The Third Day is a body of blanket-works that share an intimate relationship with the (artist’s) body – alluding to the vulnerable states of illness and sleep.

In a country said to have ‘begun on the sheep’s back’, Prior’s work also addresses our urgent ecological and social crises, while interrogating the painful realities of (ongoing) colonisation in Australia.

These works are the outcomes of Prior’s three-week residency in the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park, having been awarded Country Arts SA’s annual Grindell’s Hut artist-in-residence in 2021.

This iteration of On The Third Day includes new works since its original presentation at JamFactory Seppeltsfield in 2022.

In 2020, Prior commenced work on a long-form climate focused project. Then a global pandemic began. In the same year she suffered multiple injuries after a cycling accident. As Prior found herself immobilised with her injuries – much of the world was also resigned to a similar state of lockdowns, isolations and infections. Prior’s work is embedded with empathy for those who are immobile, unable to escape the physical impacts of disasters and conditions of poverty, famine and conflict exacerbated by climate change. On the Third Day continues the artist’s reflections on body fragility within fragile landscapes. Rebecca Freezer 2022, JamFactory

CLICK HERE to download a copy of the exhibition booklet.

First solo exhibition by expert local ceramicist whose artworks express the constant change and unpredictability of the land and give a sensitive impression of a place and time.

Rose Walker has been working with ceramics for over two decades, forging her own signature style and vision.

Growing up in Penneshaw on Kangaroo Island surrounded by water, with endless views of the ocean and its magnificent rugged and ever changing coastline, it was inevitable that I would choose this landscape as an inspiration for my passion. I pursued painting and drawing before ceramics and have always gravitated towards landscape impressionism which has been my main source of inspiration - in transferring this to clay.

Walker’s wheel-thrown forms provide a quiet surface with a combination of glazes that reflect the vastness of her landscapes. She employs the process of glaze-on-glaze to “create a materialised reflection of personal meaning, making and memory”.

Her most recent endeavours include porcelain slip-casting with a combination of intaglio printing and monotype techniques, as well as exploring Japanese Nerikomi that uses slabs of different coloured clays, stacked, folded, pressed into logs, sliced and arranged to form patterns.

My two dreams for my ceramics practice have always been to supply restaurants with tableware and to have a solo exhibition.

In addition and in contrast to her art object practice, Walker’s handmade ceramics business RAW creates “simple, handmade, nature-inspired tableware and homewares that are designed to be used as part of a family celebrating life’s daily pleasures of coming together at mealtimes.” RAW has completed numerous commissions for cafes, restaurants and wineries Commissions — RAW Ceramics (rosewalker.com.au)

Rose began her art research with a Certificate 4 in Art & Design at Mt. Barker TAFE in 2001. After graduating in 2003, she studied a Distant Ceramics Undergraduate Course at the Australian National University’s School of Art & Design, which included a visit to the major ceramics workshop Jingdezhen in China, as part of a four-week training residency. She currently teaches Ceramics in wheel-throwing, hand-building and glaze techniques at Henley and Grange Arts Society, as well as in her Murray Bridge Studio.

A school-led art project to help educate and encourage students to express their own thoughts and feelings about Domestic and Family Violence.

There has never been a more important time to change the discourse around DFV and today’s generation of young people have the greatest potential to make a difference!

Project Creative Courage provides a platform for students to think and learn about Domestic and Family Violence in a safe, creative and thought-provoking way. It supports them to consider the harmful long-term impacts of DFV on the community, families and individuals. 

Murray Bridge High School and Unity College students took up the challenge to make art in response to the question: “What does a loving community look like?”

A creative outlet can be especially important for those students who may have been exposed to DFV in their own lives. Hand in hand with this challenge is education. Here are the key DFV stats in Australia:

• 1 woman each week is killed by domestic homicide

• 1 child each fortnight is killed by a parent

• 17 women a day are hospitalised from domestic and family violence

• Almost 700 reports of domestic violence are reported to the police every day in Australia

This project is an initiative of Spirit of Woman, a not-for-profit organisation seeking to end the silence and raise awareness about the impact of Domestic and Family Violence.

First solo exhibition by a rising regional-based artist drawn to nature and its geometry and determined to only use recycled materials.

“Amidst the ruins of a once thriving civilisation, the opportunistic genus tetnesteii slowly reclaims the decimated landscape, utilising the waste of a long-gone destructive species. With soils teeming with pollution from this brief yet devastating period, the tetnesteiis have opted for a more toxic diet than their plant-based ancestors. They care not for the numerous mistakes of that species’ past; they simply want to just get on with it.” Sam Mulcahy exhibition statement 2023

Samuel Mulcahy seeks to transmute junk into art, to give value to the undervalued and to revive abandoned refuse. He combines materials of different origins to represent the leaves, branches, and trunks of unknowable plants. Discarded copper, brass, plastic, reinforcing rods, steel, spent ammunition casings, guttering and old hot water systems have come to a bizarre and beautiful kind of life. Rust, stains, burn marks, oxidisation and paint colour these works.

What lessons can be drawn from our wasting of natural resources? Can nature be reflected in the way waste materials show us natural beauty and human ugliness? By reinterpreting the function of common objects, Sam’s ingenious sculptures tell us how art, nature, refuse and humour can reinterpret what we see. Leonard Cohen Dip. T BA, October 2023

Mulcahy is based in Clayton Bay, South Australia and was mentored by the celebrated Annabelle Collett. His practice has included mural painting, mosaics, sculpture and ephemeral installations, as well as constructing painting machines and performing live with them.

Murray Bridge Regional Gallery is pleased to simultaneously present Botanical Armour with Annabelle Collett’s exhibition ReDress.

CLICK HERE to download a copy of the exhibition booklet.

Celebrating the last 15 years of an inimitable artist and change-maker, with a selection of her fantastic plastics and fabulous fabrics!

Curated by Fulvia Mantelli and Samuel Mulcahy

Annabelle Collett (1955-2019) was a significant figure in the development of Adelaide’s art and fashion scenes, as well as interior designs of iconic cafés and clubs.

Driven by social politics and community engagement, Collett was a trailblazer, provocateur and innovator. Her conceptual and creative influences on audiences, her contemporaries and emerging artists, continue to resonate in her wake.

ReDress presents works spanning the range of Collett’s studio-based art practice, to re-address, re-examine and reaffirm her position as an important contemporary artist.

From the early 1990s, Annabelle concentrated on making sculptural art pieces about the human form and its coverings, looking at the function and cultural meaning of attire with reference to ideas about gender, the body and sexuality. In more recent years Collett also investigated notions of camouflage, disguise, pattern and the affect of disruptions to pattern. She is also known for a series of works with recycled and found plastics that focussed on repurposing waste and challenged the widespread adoption of single-use plastics. Excerpt from Annabelle Collett: Creator and Catalyst, by Kathie Muir, published by Wakefield Press an available at the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery shop for $49.95.

Murray Bridge Regional Gallery is pleased to simultaneously present ReDress with Botanical Armour, the first solo exhibition by Samuel Mulcahy, a rising regional artist mentored by Annabelle Collett for many years.

Many thanks to: Kathie Muir, a long-time Annabelle friend and liaison to her Estate and family, for making it possible for galleries to have continued exhibiting Annabelle’s work since her passing; and Leah Grace, an Annabelle friend, colleague and collaborator, for offering this poignant exhibition title and contributing to its description.

 ReDress is the final opportunity for the foreseeable future to acquire works from an Annabelle Collett exhibition.

CLICK HERE to download a copy of the exhibition booklet.

Presenting pivotal works from across a decade of Makeda Duong’s provocative practice exploring aspects of her lived experience with perceptions of race, gender, sexuality and mental health.

These textile-based artworks are unlike anything you’ve seen before!

“My practice is informed by the history of textiles in the western world, and how the materiality of the medium can be used to convey deeply personal experiences.

I create artworks as antidotes to personal challenges within my life, in order to bring attention to these particular issues. Some of these challenges include mental illness, struggles with racial identity, belonging and the social friction that comes with them.

I represent my lived experience to move beyond stereotypes and shallow misconceptions. If something bothers me or plagues me, I am driven to make work about it.

While these works tend to be introspective, they aren't devoid of humour. They invite the viewer to examine their own social assumptions and biases, or possibly to commiserate in a shared experience.” Makeda Duong, June 2023

CLICK HERE to download a copy of the exhibition booklet, including a deeply insightful essay by Yusuf Hayat, Visual Arts and Community Engagement Lead, Nexus Arts 

Exploring contemporary jewellery as a gesture of greeting.

ARTSTS: Liv Boyle, Michelle Cangiano, Jess Dare, Anna Davern, Nicky Hepburn, Kath Inglis, Manon van Kouswijk, Sim Luttin, Vicki Mason, Belinda Newick, Lauren Simeoni, Melinda Young

CURATOR: Belinda Newick

Inspired by welcome neck garlands, or leis, found in many traditional island cultures, these Australian jewellers have each made a neckpiece interpreting the theme of welcome and in response to current Australian immigration and refugee policies.

Using a diversity of materials – including but not limited to seaweed, paper, an Australia flag, shells, metal, clay, used thongs – the exhibition highlights the insights and intrinsic material specificity that each artist brings to the making process, informed by years of tacit knowledge and technical mastery.

These artists position adornment as a vehicle for political discourse, empathy and shared humanity.

Many of the garlands express ideas that address how current immigration policies misrepresent the humanist values of welcome and acceptance that continue to be expressed in popular rhetoric of Australian values. The artists use the narrative potential of each distinct garland to encapsulate a complex visual language and to express the emotions felt by the maker during the process.

Via this gentle activist enactment, the artists present their gestures of welcome, thereby contributing to the topic's political, social, and cultural currency.

The regional South Australian tour of Island Welcome is presented by Country Arts SA and curated by Belinda Newick.

Celebrating diverse artistic talents between the ages of 12 and 25, our annual Youth Art Prize aims to empower young people to pursue their creative aspirations.

The Youth Art Prize is a platform for young people to express their views about collective and personal experiences. Since its humble beginnings co-initiated by The Station well over a decade ago, it now offers a total prize pool valued at over $4,500, including cash and vouchers that will support the recipients ongoing engagement with the arts.

AGE CATEGORIES 12-14 | 15-17 | 18-20 | 21-25

PRIZES: Overall Winner $1,000 PLUS in EACH of the 4 age categories + People’s Choice: Winners $400; 2nd Places $100 art materials voucher from Art to Art + $100 art books voucher from Wakefield Press; 3rd Places $100 art materials voucher from Art to Art. Best Compassionate Depiction of an Animal $150 from Murraylands Animal Welfare Watch.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO + ENTRY FORM

2023 PRIZE JUDGE: MONTE MASI, leading SA artist and Academic Director and Lecturer, Contemporary Studio Practice, Adelaide Central School of Art.

Karen Eckermann and Ruby Eckermann, Co-founders and Patrons of Murraylands Animal Welfare Watch will judge the prize for the Best Compassionate Depiction of an Animal.

Gallery Visitors will vote for their favourite artworks for the People’s Choice awards.

Proudly supported by the Rotary Clubs of Murray Bridge and Mobilong since 2012.

In Adolescent Wonderland Naomi Hobson presents the colourful daily life in her community of Coen on Cape York Peninsula and tells the real-life stories of young Aboriginal people in remote Australia.

“Today photography needs to push the boundary. I feel it doesn’t need to be picture perfect and as a fine art – I’m using the medium to tell real stories that I feel don’t get told or haven’t been told. I want people to see who our youth really are: fun, playful, smart, savvy, proud, adventurous and witty.” – Naomi Hobson

Naomi Hobson is a Southern Kaantju/Umpila woman who lives in Coen, a small town of 360 people in the centre of Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland. A multidisciplinary artist, she regularly works across the mediums of painting, ceramics and photography. Inspired by her immediate environment, Hobson’s works express her ongoing connection to Country and her ancestors’ ties and relationships with their traditional lands.

Through her work, she references her family’s political and social engagements as well as her own personal engagement with her Country and community. In Hobson’s photographic series Adolescent Wonderland, she is working to empower young people in her community, to encourage them to be themselves and to celebrate their uniqueness.

Adolescent Wonderland is a series of photographs that tell the real-life stories of young Aboriginal people in remote Australia. The title of this series was inspired by the classic children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Themes of youth, playfulness and childhood memories are evident in Hobson’s photographs. The brightly coloured figures and their props lure the viewer into a dream-like reality, much like the way Alice follows the white rabbit.

“I think young people are getting crazy adventurous with all the apps and photo settings in their mobile phones. This is certainly highlighting their personal characters. They’re just really connecting with how they want to share their story ... Young people are so advanced in using technology and they also love getting their photos taken, but let them show you their story, their way; that’s what Adolescent Wonderland is all about.” – Naomi Hobson

Visitors to the exhibition are encouraged to participate in the Where’s Your Wonderland? Photography Competition. Click here for more information.

This regional South Australian tour is presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of South Australia and Country Arts SA.

The current, expanded exhibition was created for Tarnanthi, presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia with Principal Partner BHP and support from the Government of South Australia.

NEARLY 230 WORKS BY OVER 90 ARTISTS - INCLUDING SEASONED FAVOURITES AND FIRST-TIME ENTRANTS!

Jointly hosted by the Rotary Clubs of Mobilong & Murray Bridge for over thirty years, this popular annual community-driven exhibition presents a broad diversity of artworks by emerging, seasoned and hobbyist artists from the Murraylands region and beyond. The event provides an opportunity for entrants to exhibit and sell their work, as well as be in the running to win a prize in the categories of 2D, 3D and Photography. Mediums range from oil and acrylic paintings, ceramics, metal and found objects sculptures, mixed media assemblages, photographs and works on paper.

The 2023 Rotary Art Show Judge will be DEBBIE PRYOR, an artist, curator, writer and producer based on Kaurna land in Adelaide. Debbie was recently the Artistic Programs Manager at Guildhouse, until recently taking up the position of CEO at The Australian Ceramics Association. Debbie has led galleries and programs at some of Australia’s leading visual arts, craft and design institutions, including Guildhouse and JamFactory in Adelaide, Australian Design Centre, Powerhouse Museum and Firstdraft in Sydney, and Craft Victoria in Melbourne. Her advocacy for Australian artists and makers is evident through her curatorial and programming practice, which creates innovative and accessible outcomes for artists and audiences.

CATEGORIES: 3D Prize Category | 2D Prize Category* | Andrew Hay Memorial Photography Prize

*Rotary are proud to announce that the First prize in the 2D category will be named the Jean Sims Art Prize, sponsored by The Antel Family Trust. Jean Sims was instrumental in assisting the Rotary Clubs of Murray Bridge to establish the Rotary Art Show.

PRIZES
In each of the 3 categories: 1st Place $1000, 2nd Place $250, 3rd Place $100.
Best Compassionate Depiction of an Animal: $200
People’s Choice: $100

2023 WINNERS

2D Prize: First Place / Jean Sims Art Prize Sarah Roberts, Beauty in bloom, acrylic painting; Second Place Lynette Anstey, Rising river, oil painting; Third Place Brenda Holden, Crimson Rosella, acrylic painting.

Andrew Hay Memorial Photography Prize: First Place Stephanie Evans, Mum's country kitchen, Second Place Daniel Cazzolato, Elephant layers, Third Place Cecily Graetz, Misty Princess

3D Prize: First Place Rosemary Walker, Layers, ceramic; Second Place Jenny Georgi, Van the man, recycled metals; Third Place Belinda Martin, Life’s a circus, ceramic.

Best Compassionate Depiction of an Animal: Winner Kim Plachy, Wistful, acrylic painting.

A Flinders University Museum of Art touring exhibition presented in collaboration with Country Arts SA.

Bee-stung lips surveys Barbara Hanrahan’s prolific 30-year printmaking career that was set in motion in 1960 and ended with her untimely death at the age of 52. 

Characterised by playfully complex narratives that draw on both personal experience and fantasy, her works are fearlessly direct and unashamedly decorative in style. 

Featuring 74 works made in her town of birth, Adelaide, as well as London and Melbourne, the exhibition considers several overarching themes that emerge from the artist’s oeuvre: sex, beauty and the stage; domestic comforts and anxieties; becoming plant, becoming animal; and celestial bodies and the afterlife. Here, mystical and earthly realms collide with concepts of time and mortality.  Hanrahan connects sexuality and desire with dreaming and spirituality, and links the farthest star to the humblest garden bee to make works that speak of the fragility of human existence.

This exhibition exemplifies Hanrahan’s mastery and innovation across the print medium including woodcuts, linocuts, screenprints, lithographs, etchings and drypoint, and celebrates her singular and uncompromising practice.  It is accompanied by a full colour catalogue published by Wakefield Press.

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