PART 2
The exhibition has shown in Elliston Community Hall, Jamestown Belalie Art Gallery, Bordertown Civic Centre Walkway Gallery and will continue to Roxby Downs Regional Gallery and continues its tour well into 2010 throughout South Australia. I was able to visit the Riddoch Art Gallery in Mount Gambier with Rob Johnston and Katinka Gleim whilst installing another show Parallel at Mellicent Art Gallery, both towns located toward the Victoria Border in the South East of the State. The Riddoch Art Gallery is run by Lucia Pichler, SA South East Director and Lucia gave a tour of the gallery and the Gooch collection of Aboriginal art from Utopia (aboriginal country near Alice Springs). The collection consists of 2D and 3D work by, mainly, living and recent contemporary aboriginal artists and is a rich and diverse collection. The Riddoch also has a national collection of contemporary art making a comprehensive selection of Australian art with artists such as Ian Abdullah and Ann Newmarch. The photograph features Lucia Pichler and myself in front of a large triptych by John Beard (painter born Wales 1945) one of the paintings in the collection. Le Chéile will be touring to the Riddoch when it reopens after rebuilding later 2010.
With the touring programme organised by Country Arts SA Le Chéile is reaching a wide audience as it travels throughout South Australia. The exposure in this substantial exhibition form adds to the central theme of the project, that of distant communication through printmaking; ideas flow between art work and exhibition viewer as individual and cultural connections are discovered and reinvented. The exhibition has been reviewed in Imprint, December 2009 edition.
There are plenty of visitors to Port Adelaide throughout the week and at weekends, particularly during festivals. The Celtica festival has attracted a large audience over this weekend (5 and 6th December). Organised by Suzanne Laslett it showcases performers with Celtic heritage and association, musicians on two stages, numerous stalls, Scotland focus, Welsh and Irish language classes, food stalls, traditional dancing, demonstrations of musical instruments and an impressive line up of bands including Rickety Bridge and Bric a Brac, the Melbourne based band with strong Brittany connections. The visual art element of Celtica was comandingly inaugurated by bagpipes leading all from the Gaff gallery to the . The exhibitions include Wales and Ireland Le Chéile participants.
Thanks must go to Veronica Calarco for instigating the Australian participation in Le Chéile and putting together the proposal for exhibition; Rob Johnston and Katinka Gleim for selecting and organising the touring exhibition and Suzanne Laslett for organising the Celtica festival with visual art element (coordinated again by Veronica) creating a strong Wales/Ireland art presence in Port Adelaide at the moment.
There are numerous further adventures to report from my three week visit to Australia so please see more at http://energystations.blogspot.com/ to be loaded over the coming days.
Andrew Smith 6th (Adelaide) and 11th December (Sydney) 2009
We are beginning to get organised for our next exhibition: Rhyl Library Arts Centre. January 9th. to February 13th. 2010. We are planning to show work which will demonstrate the narrative inherent in a collaborative process, including sketchbooks, work in progress and collaborative drawings. The logistics of getting the work to Wales from Ireland may be interesting, given that the show is being hung in the first week of January. The logistics of getting the work to Rhyl from other parts of North Wales may also be interesting if it doesn’t stop raining soon.
http://www.denbighshire.gov.uk/en-gb/dnap-7ncfwr?o…
AC
Hi All,
I think the three attached works by Alison and I are still very much works in progress. As we are both Welsh artists it would be good to have some Irish input.
I can put them up on my mobileme site and send out the address where they can be downloaded from later on today.
If you have elements you want to add and don’t have the computer skills I can add them for you.
Titles are a major problem for me but that is the subject of another blog!
Talk soon, don
www.donbraisby.co.uk
Hi Pam and everyone
The website is looking great and it’s great to have it up and running.
Well, I thought I had better send an update on what is happening here. We have had three exhibitions in Elliston, Jamestown and Bordertown. We are getting really good reviews and four more galleries have approached Countryarts to have it there. Rob is currently working out dates and seeing whether it can fit in between other exhibitions, or be tacked on to the end. I will let you know. Sadly Roxby Downs – where it is meant to be now – postponed it. They got in a new coordinator who agreed to another exhibition without realising he was committed to ours and it was too late to organise another venue by the time the mistake was realised. But Rob is going to try to sort out another date with them also. Celtica is going full steam ahead with the program getting bigger by the day. The opening for Le Chéile is the 27 November and we have booked a band “Blind Mary” (celtic jigs etc) for the opening. Rob is organising the head of the UniSA print department to open it. There will also be exhibitions in the cafés and pubs as last year and also three other galleries are now having shows. One is a new gallery – Zelim which will have its opening on the 2/12 and for entertainment is having a guy playing bagpipes (Alison and Pam will be having work in that show). The next gallery is Gaff whose opening is on the 29 November. And lastly the Axis Gallery which is having its opening on the 9/12 and has a Pict dancing group doing a performance in a theatre which goes off from the gallery. This exhibition is works by Andrew Smith, Gareth Wyn Jones, Suzanne Laslett (Celtica organiser) and myself. Andrew Smith is coming out for all these festivities – and as the schedule gets fuller will then head back to Wales in total need of the long that nights you will be enjoying by then!
After a very unusual and cold winter it is finally warming up here – but we are not complaining as for the first time in six years are dams are full! – and so hopefully the weather will be great for the festival. I have also been in touch with a contact of Steffan’s in Perth, WA and we are looking at what might happen in the future, so we shall see where that might go.
Pob hwyl pawb
Veronica
Thanks Don – your digital images are a great improvement on my original!
I think your idea of a collaborative book is a good one. Here are my first efforts, (layered from a photograph of the dead brown bracken on the hillside, a monoprint of Welsh fields and your image).
