Heritage Backsides | Childers Art Gallery

With their strange mix of architecture and building materials, the buildings situated in the regional town of Childers, Queensland, show a side of the towns heritage, seldom viewed by tourists or even locals.

Using drawing, painting and sculpture, Heritage Backsides depicts tiny deserted alleys and broken back doors, giving viewers a very different view of the beautiful heritage buildings located in this township.

Bunker

14,000 clothes pegs to make a stack of plumbing pipes from the back of a builders truck; 5,500 wooden school rulers to make a dingy for convicts and refugees: 5,000 pairs of chopsticks to make three tyres. Glen Clarke was the winner of the last National Sculpture Prize in 2006, and since then he has exhibited widely throughout Australia and overseas. For the last few years Glen has been hard at work clearing land mines in Vietnam, and his latest body of work, Bunker makes reference to his experiences.

Remains to be Seen

Remains to be Seen, is an exhibition of illustrations, silk panels, prints and pottery depicting portions of the amazing fossil record of ancient Gondwana - our land as it was. No-one knows what colour an Ammonite's animal may have been, so artists can speculate and, within reason, be creative. We do know that they did not survive the last major extinction 65 million years ago when a meteorite changed life on the planet and sent it in many different directions, one culminating in us. Perhaps we are in for another extinction and if so, will there be remains to be seen....and who will do the seeing?

Drums

A band of drummers. One artist. A 1920’s bank vault, and one very interesting installation. The drum kit has been a focus of artist Lauren Brincat’s over the last few years. Her concern with the drum kit has allowed her to take the objects into many various forms within her work. It has been treated as a shrine, a corpse, a costume and a target. Each time it readdresses the objects individual orientations. Drums, is an installation as a result of a performance created by the Brincat, together with the assistance of several drummers. The only evidence that this spectacle ever took place, will be a few drums, epaulettes, some audio, a photo and anecdotal history of how the band came to inspire this most unusual work.

Emerge 2010

The Emerge exhibition is an annual event by the Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery, showcasing selected artworks from secondary school students throughout the Bundaberg region, as well as the range of visual arts programs being taught in schools in the area.

STATE of the ART quilt 10 | Childers Art Gallery

The exciting, innovative quilts on display highlight the wide range of techniques and subject matter our art quilters are exploring today. Quilters have taken inspiration from the Outback landscape & nature to the more intimate setting of their home environment & reinterpret the everyday. Painted, hand dyed, stitched, felted fabrics convey meaning beyond mere words & transport the viewer beyond the everyday.

Gathering these things to remind me of home

In BRAG's Vault space in December Melbourne artist Penelope Aitken will present an ethereal rock garden made of wire, light and air. The project alludes to the intersections of nature and culture found in art and landscape design, craft and cultivation.

Beginning with a curiosity about the fashion for naturalistic 'native' rock gardens constructed in the Australian suburbs in the 1970s, the project has expanded to include an interest in rocks that have been moved by natural forces as well as by the hard manual labour of convicts and indentured workers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

"Imagining all of these moved rocks as immigrants or travellers I add patterns to their surfaces that suggest culture and traditions carried from other times and places. In the place of lichen and moss, these rocks wear homely handicrafts."

Under low lighting these objects are isolated in space, further disconnecting the rocks from their imagined sources. And lacking the solidity of stone, Aitken's rocks also suggest the impermanence of civilization if viewed over a geological timeframe.

Morphology

Morphology: exploring the fascinating surfaces and forms of fungi and lichen through contemporary textile practices. Morphology sees award-winning textile artists Carol Wilkes (Maleny) and Svenja (Brisbane) inspiring collection of wearable art, wall panels and installations, as a result of studying fungi and lichen. Contemporary felt making, dyeing, shibori techniques, free-motion embroidery and mixed-media have all been used to explore the micro-forms living in our environment. The inspirational foundation of Morphology was the artists’ own digital images of fungi and lichen, taken largely around suburban and sub-tropical environs of Brisbane and Maleny, Cairns and New Zealand. Each artist worked from their own photography, often manipulating the images to enhance pattern and form before making the creative transition to textiles.

Summers Past: Golden Days in the Sun 1950 – 1970

This stunning showcase of photographs from the National Archives taken in the 1950s and 1960s vividly remind us of our enduring love affair with the sun and the sea. These images originally from the Australian News and Information Bureau stir memories of idyllic summers spent at the beach. For those who grew up in Australia during this time, these photographs should gently stir memories of idyllic summers spent at the beach.Memorable images of summers spent outdoors: visits to the seaside, a nearby river lake or the local swimming pool to bake and play in the sun; the many fashion statements that could be made by wearing a favourite pair of cossies, togs or bathers; caravan holidays; tennis lessons and cricket matches or just hanging around with mates. During this time, the government photographers reeled off hundreds of thousands of candid snaps of people, activities and events, mainly to help promote Australia overseas. The images showcased in Summers Past were all selected from the Archives' vast photographic collection, mainly from the store of Australian News and Information Bureau images – half a million photographs dating from the late 1940s to the early 1990s.

Cross Culture: Creating on Country | Childers Art Gallery

During the last week in November this year 10 Maori artists and 10 Central Queensland Aboriginal artists will work together at the Thornhill property of the Gidarjil Development Corporation. They will share stories, songs and skills as they explore the themes of cultural identity and connection with country. The artists will participate in workshops in artform and business development. In the process they will create works for exhibition and bring them to you so you can enter into the spirit of their journey together.