Drylands The physical matter of land is always shifting and changing, impacted to varying degrees by weather events, changes in climate, human events and by the plants and animals that reside upon and within it. Art can tell this story. As artists are observers of the land, they can interpret what is happening to it, within their historical moment and place. This runs parallel to the reality of the land drying and the known devastating impacts of salinity. The problem of salinity has long been discussed – but its real consequences on our future in this place are slow to be clearly considered or understood; “The fact that we continue to believe, despite strong evidence to the contrary, that parts of the earth will remain magically beyond the
Andy Quilty with Western Australian high school students Happy Meals and Scooter Skids: art from the outer suburbs
ambit of capitalist production is what allows us to proceed with such reckless abandon.”¹ Through landscape painting, sculpture and installation, this exhibition presents eight artistic responses to the idea of dry lands. The artists respond to this theme in relation to the land in and around Lake Grace (Jo Darbyshire), Wellstead (Valdene Diprose and Molly Ryan), Walpole (Elizabeth Edmonds), Kwolyin (Lindsay Harris), Kojonup (Clare McFarlane), Lake Grace again (Tania Spencer), Grass Valley (Kate Turner) and Bridgetown (Tony Windberg). Together, they offer insights into the morphology of the land and the various impacts it is sustaining.
Happy Meals and Scooter Skids is a collaboration between Rockingham-based artist and educator Andy Quilty and students from Youth Futures Community School Midland, Armadale Senior High School and Warnbro Community High School. The project showcases outcomes from a series of workshops facilitated by Andy for the students throughout 2024.
‘I wanted to situate the project within outer suburbs impacted by socio-economic disadvantage. Public high school students in these areas experience disparity around access to equitable education and opportunities compared to private or inner-city public schools. This doesn't reflect the efforts of the schools or their students' potential; rather, it is indicative of our society's failure to respond to systemic issues facing these communities. Initially focusing on fundamental drawing skills, I quickly pivoted to a less prescriptive approach, giving the students access to different drawing and printmaking methods and materials, inviting them to improvise. We used found and low-cost materials and techniques connected with outer-suburban experience, such as drypoint prints made by scratching into a sheet of tin retrieved from a skip bin, or oil graffiti pen monotypes using fast food packaging as a print plate. In the print studio at Midland Junction Arts Centre (MJAC) we made large-scale collaborative monotypes with their big etching press. Other outer metropolitan suburbs in Perth don't have an arts centre with the facilities and breadth of public programming MJAC offers. I wanted the students to feel welcome in an arts institution and know that these community spaces belong to them. The monochromatic look of the final works was both a conceptual and pedagogical choice. I connect black with the outer suburban culture I grew up around in Rockingham – black jeans and metal t-shirts, black desert boots, black skid marks on bitumen, black HSVs and Ford XR8s, black oil pen scrawls on public walls, and of course AC/DC's Back in Black. Keeping colour options monochromatic directs the student's focus to the action and possibilities of mark-making and counteracts unintended limitations that colour can offer as a shorthand solution for sprucing up an image. It places the gesture I describe as “drawing from the guts rather than the head” and the essential content of the image in the forefront of the audience's attention.’
Presented with Holmes à Court Gallery @ no.10
¹Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, “The Cybernetic Wheatbelt: John Kinsella's Divine Comedy” in Angelaki, Journal of Theoretical Humanities , Vol.26, no.2, 2021, p.52.
de-centre re-centre de-centre re-centre explores the survival and connectedness
minimised within mainstream culture, although it does not presume to speak for all.
of communities despite the marginalising forces that seek to erase or diminish them. The artists in this exhibition employ photographic media in a variety of ways, but they share common threads – a deep engagement with place, identity and belonging, and the use of photography to challenge dynamics of visibility and power. The title of the exhibition alludes to the ‘centre’ and ‘peripheries’ of culture, where so-called ‘middle Australia’ denotes a middle-class, white, heterosexual and metropolitan majority. This is the default audience/consumer addressed diversify representation to better reflect the lived realities of the population. This exhibition decentres this default viewpoint to highlight some perspectives that are in popular media and shown on screens, despite efforts to
Crucially, de-centre re-centre examines photography as a medium with complex legacies, but one that can be used as a powerful tool for self-representation and advocacy. Artists deploy and disrupt photographic conventions such as genre, composition, surface and series to affirm the presence and agency of the subject, while reflecting on strategies for survival, bearing witness, care and resistance in First Nations, diasporic and queer contexts. Viewers are invited to reconsider not only the subjects within the frame but also their own position within the act of looking. Presented with Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery and Perth Centre for Photography
– Andy Quilty, 2025
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Presented with FORM Building a State of Creativity at FORM Gallery and Midland Junction Arts Centre
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