Central Belonging Art Award is an art prize exhibition that represents the rich diversity of the artistic communities around and within the Central West region. The Award returns for its second year. It showcases established and emerging artists that are local to Cowra Shire and the surrounding areas. Artists from the following local government areas are part of the finalist exhibition: Bathurst, Bland, Blayney, Cabonne, Cowra, Forbes, Hilltops, [...]

COLLECT returns to The Lock-Up for its ninth year, this time bringing together 126 artists—from early career to established—in a bold, energetic snapshot of Newcastle and the Hunter’s creative ecology. A much-loved annual fundraising exhibition, COLLECT champions the region’s artistic talent while raising vital funds for The Lock-Up’s ongoing program as a not-for-profit, independent contemporary art space. This year, COLLECT includes nationally significant artists such as Michael Bell, Lottie Consalvo, James Drinkwater, Locust Jones, [...]

‘Some memory cannot be documented. Some memory lives in the body.’ — Dr Natalie Harkin, Archival-Poetics (Vagabond Press, 2019) My Blood Sings Old Songs gathers artists who capture what is not always said—but deeply felt. The works in this exhibition resonate over time, unraveling layers of the body and the quiet weight of being seen, where movement becomes a vessel for remembrance. Hovering between an ending and a beginning, each gesture [...]

Positioning themselves within the frame, these artists craft memories and autobiographical narratives to explore truth, identity, culture, ancestry, and politics. Through deeply personal cultural and familial histories, the works reflect on lived experience while highlighting the ongoing impacts of Australia’s colonial past on First Nations peoples. Featured artists include Hayley Millar Baker, Michael Cook, Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis, Damien Shen, Dr Christian Thompson AO, and Keemon Willams.

MARS presents Chun Yin Rainbow Chan’s inaugural exhibition, Continuum. Continuum brings together a selection of works that reimagine the bridal laments of Hong Kong’s 圍頭/Weitou women, to whom Chan has deep ancestral ties. Through silk paintings, experimental calligraphy and audiovisual works, she translates these culturally endangered songs into contemporary forms that preserve their subversive feminist voices while reflecting on loss, resilience and solidarity.

We all have an instinct to seek guidance and ask questions of the future, especially during periods of uncertainty. Throughout history, people have looked upward, outward, and inward for signs of what lies ahead. A GREAT AND WONDROUS SIGN inhabits that same space of questioning. Searching for answers and holding tension between hope and apprehension, faith and doubt. This is mirrored in materiality, combining the longevity and certainty of [...]

“The worlds are busy and carefully laid out, take a look around,” shares David Booth about the works in his latest exhibition Rearranging the Universe. Extending on his practice of world building, Booth has created a library of stamps which reshape, move and rearrange with each print and reconfiguration. About this new body of work, he shares: “I’ve been building a new practice of play and experimentation in the studio; [...]

Kerry McInnis has been painting and drawing the River for many decades. The focus of her renditions of a waterway, wet or dry, has always been to represent the interconnectedness between the river and the earth that shapes it – to investigate the rhythms of liquid and solid form, to layer in paint the inconstancy of the river in both its power and vulnerability. Moving away from [...]

Artists from throughout Australia bring a lens on the concept of ‘earth’: our home, the environment, soil, land, fragility, strength or purpose; the need for its safe keeping and preservation, inclusive of all that lives within. This open exhibition has invited works to provoke awareness, dialogue, political activism, experimentation, thoughtfulness, playfulness, or deep contemplation.

Barbara Dawson’s work is a contemplation of senescence — ageing seen not as decline, but as a layered experience shaped by growth, memory, and renewal. Using the life cycles of plants as metaphor, she explores the human journey: its fragility, quiet strength, and continual transformation. These works trace the parallel landscapes of inner and outer worlds, finding beauty in both blossoming and fading, in change, endurance, and [...]

In Abstract Connotations, Hincksman explores human nature and our interactions with the natural environment., in the face of rapid changes due to the advancement of technology and social change. Hicksman’s practice allows the simplicity of everyday thoughts and experiences to inspire the paintings. The process can be quite dynamic between contemplation and the use of colour, form and tone, along with the fluidity of paint with various forms [...]

Focussing on line rather than tone, this exhibition features drawings on paper in a variety of media including pencil, crayons, ink, and watercolour. These are not necessarily drawings of things; they are abstract works but may evoke subjects. As clay dries, it hardens, and each stage creates a different engagement with the drawing process. Roper says, “Line drawing has been much on my mind of late as [...]

Jenny Topfer makes paintings that operate in a world of whispers and patient disclosure. Their communicative intent is held — undemonstrative. Such discretion remains rare but for Topfer, consideration and judgement have quietly accumulated over a long arc of time. There is simultaneously much more and much less at stake in these recent paintings. Made on either side of calamitous fires in Tasmania, fire that took many of [...]

Skin after Successive Skin is born of a story of feminine transformation, rebirth and embodiment; a story that led Elle Wickens to imagine how they felt language of the body can be recorded through material, how sensation can paint, and how painting itself speaks of, from and to the body. In this exhibition, Wickens creates an environment that echoes her own sensory tones, a space where interpretation is embodied, co-produced, [...]

Alcaston Gallery presents a significant private collection of paintings from 2003-2007 by the esteemed Tiwi artist Timothy Cook. This collection of historical significance and provenance exemplifies a moment in time when the collector focused on the emerging artist and his career development at Jilamara Arts and Crafts in Milikapiti on Melville Island, north of Darwin in the Arafura Sea. Timothy Cook’s art practice is now celebrated worldwide [...]

Barkindji artist, Kent Morris, creates a new series of works starring a very small yellow flower with an incredibly powerful story. For thousands of years, the tubers of the murnong (yam daisy) were a staple food for First Peoples throughout the southeast of Australia, cultivated and harvested in the millions from abundant yellow fields. Following the forced introduction of European farming practices, the murnong almost became extinct and [...]

Michelle Anderson‘s Kanpala, presented in association with Spinifex Arts Project, brings together a new suite of paintings that depict her grandmother’s Country at Kanpa. “The old people would walk from rockhole to rockhole, collecting wild foods on the way. They knew the bush plants that were good to eat, how to make flour by grinding the small millet seeds they collected and then baking bread on the fire. [...]

Explore ‘Fragments of Urban Essence’, where the vibrant pulse of city life is revealed through a striking collection of works painted on repurposed plaster walls sourced from the artist’s urban explorations. Transforming discarded materials into textured surfaces, this exhibition reflects the shifting nature of our urban environment, inviting viewers to uncover layered histories in familiar streets and consider their connection to the evolving urban landscape.

At The Centre brings together artists from Central and Western Desert Art Centres, sharing stories both old and new from the heart of Central Australia. Drawing on their surroundings, the works depict lush bush medicine plants, vast desert landscapes, playful scenes of contemporary Town Camp life, and powerful Tjukurpa. Together, they reflect enduring connections to Ngura—home, place, and Country. Even across great distances, these works invite audiences to [...]

“Lottie Consalvo’s exhibition, Of the Night, is an invitation to cross between worlds. It is in the night, where the air has a different texture, one Consalvo says she can touch, that the space between the world we inhabit day-to-day and the spiritual world blurs. Her paintings animate that precipice and what lives beyond it — the effigy you reach for in the dark, the blurred image that [...]

THIS IS NO FANTASY presents In Between Forms, the first solo exhibition by Ara Dolatian since joining the gallery. The exhibition explores unstable states between human, animal and the monstrous, drawing on Mesopotamian female deities, queens and poetic traditions — particularly the voice of Enheduanna and The Exaltation of Inanna. Through sculpture, Dolatian reimagines ancient acts of invocation as contemporary forms of transformation. Influenced by feminist and queer readings of Mesopotamian [...]

The National Art School (NAS) presents a major exhibition, The Neighbour at the Gate, curated by a guest curatorium led by Clothilde Bullen OAM (Wardandi Noongar and Badimaya Yamatji), with Micheal Do and Zali Morgan (Whadjuk Balladong and Wilman Noongar). Bringing together newly commissioned works by leading Australian artists Jacky Cheng, Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson, Dennis Golding (Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay), Jenna Mayilema Lee (Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman, KarraJarri), James Nguyen and James Tylor (Kaurna, Thura-Yura language region), the exhibition reckons with the echoes of immigration policies and the legacies [...]

Petal as Pixel draws on an enduring fascination with Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), reimagining its themes of seduction, excess, and latent violence through a contemporary lens. Comprising over 80 works, the exhibition centres on a large suspended mobile of mirrored surfaces, chains, and collaged imagery, precariously assembled in situ. As elements shift, reflections fragment and multiply, enveloping the viewer in a disorienting visual field.

A group exhibition that invites us to look toward the soaring skies above. While Western Australia is well known for its vast blue horizons, this exhibition turns to the darker moments – luminous clouds thickening, rain pending, storms breaking without warning. Across painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and video, the artists consider the unfolding drama of shifting weather patterns and the moods they carry with them.