2025
Piers Laverty
2 December - 20 December 2025
Denese Oates
4 October - 29 October 2025
Denese Oates’ sculpture has for many years been inspired by biology, botany and the many intriguing forms nature creates. Still working with her favourite medium of copper, here she combines the botanical forms with ideas around the relationship between semaphores and leaves.
Leaves, with their fleeting natural beauty and their symbolic significance across cultures, have also provided artists with endless inspiration throughout the ages. They are the signs of the eternal cycles that shape the world.
Here she is treating leaves as nature’s semaphores, pointing the way, sharing news, heralding alarms, whispering secrets, gently pacifying or sometimes howling warnings. Perhaps they're humming sweet nothings or singing solutions and probably much more for those attuned to the natural world.
Angela Glessen-White
7 October - 1 November 2025
Sing To Me is a celebration of the joy of music through prints and sculptures.
Sing To Me is what I ask of my woodblocks as they run through the press, the final stage of a long journey beginning with an idea followed by a drawing which is then transferred to a woodblock before carving and inking and finally, the magical, hopefully, process of running the block through the press.
A note on the paper sculptures, The Singing Trees.
Using offcuts of recycled, museum grade mount board I make sheets of paper wrapping them around fallen branches from our garden and local parks. The multiple layers of handmade paper (just water & pulp) create a thick, sturdy structure which is sealed with a moisture protecting, matte finish. During this process the branches are removed leaving the paper shell.
Spray paint was used for the coloured sculptures and the white sculptures are the natural raw material of the handmade paper.
The Singing Trees have been on a journey of cyclical metamorphosis beginning their life as living trees, transformed into mount board, recycled into handmade sheets of paper sculpted into trees. They have come full circle and sing once more.
Judith White
9 September - 4 October 2025
In the 1980's I was struck by images of the Harbour, the Bridge and the Opera House becoming potent symbols of Australia.
The marketing of Australia as a tourist destination was loaded with these images, often embodying elemental notions of a national character.
They became icons.
The outback was still considered a daunting, even dangerous destination.
All the drawings formed the basis of much larger paintings and were completed in situ.
Mobile phones hadn't been invented.
In some drawings the juxtaposition of an interior space with an outside world was a construct, taking on a psychological rather than political. Part of this was the deliberate absence of the human figure, with a sense of someone having just moved out of frame. In other drawings, the presence of the Bridge or the Opera House acts as a visual force; a dominant, strident or hovering presence.
I was invited into office complexes and private homes with harbour views. Business and private residence could claim superior cultural significances and implied wealth 'their Harbour view'. This was the era of David Williamson's Emerald city
Annabel Butler
5 August - 6 September 2025
"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths…the blue at the horizon…is the blue of distance…and the deeper the water, the deeper the blue.”
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
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The works in this exhibition are based on observing and painting the constantly changing blues of three different bodies of water; the Georges River, Sydney Harbour and The Great Lake in Tasmania, and were produced during two Artist Residencies.
During 2024 I was a recipient of a Georges River Council Artist Residency at Carss Park Artist’s Cottage overlooking the Georges River, close to Botany Bay. I am currently a North Sydney Council 2025 Artist in Residence at Primrose Park Artist Studios, situated at the end of Willoughby Bay in Middle Harbour.
Having back-to-back studios located on the water provided an unparalleled opportunity to immerse myself in two urban locations dominated by water and sky. This led to an obsession with painting the natural elements of water, clouds and reflections as well as objects that suggest human presence, such as racing yachts or a yellow canoe breaking the surface at dawn.
The third body of water featured in this exhibition is The Great Lake in the Central Highlands of Tasmania, where I spent time between the Residencies. Unlike the Georges River and Sydney Harbour there was no human presence on or around this vast expanse of blue, particularly when it froze over in winter. My full focus fell on dramatic cloud formations, reflections and swiftly changing colours on the surface of the lake, particularly at twilight, also known as the blue hour.
Regardless of the location, looking at water, particularly when still and reflecting back like the surface of a mirror, invited contemplation and self-reflection. The deeper the blue, the longer I felt inclined to pause, to breathe, to reflect.
I would like to thank the North Sydney and Georges River Councils for their Artist in Residence Programs and to acknowledge and thank all the staff who administer them.
© Annabel Butler 2025
Edward Inchbold I Wistera Lemonade
8 July - 2 August 2025
I work a picture very hard and for a long time, sometimes a very long time — years. For me it isn’t about seeing a thing and painting it. It is about finding that thing in the active paint and seeing it in the work with total, sudden clarity, likely in surprise and desperation. This thing must be real — and it must be new and alive, with some actual living quality and intelligence. If it is a picture of a human being then the paint must take on flesh. All this is fleeting and momentary. It is like finding and losing and finding again a single grain of sand in your mouth with your tongue, over the course of maybe a year. And so it has all become very impure and nothing to do with any independence from reality and more to do with finding it. It is a kind of search and in it and amongst the uneven bracken of months of paint eventually forms or associations give rise to figuration, all out of impurity and all that material. Sometimes the clarity is frightening. You have to go a long way for any of this but eventually these braids of paint and these horrible twisted knots — they either start to hold in them objects and they become something or they are elusive, even recalcitrant in their refusal to commit to matter. If you can call that a process, that is mine. Painting hard at this object until things appear in the muck and then pushing that right to its furthest possible extremity until it is an image.
Group Show: Liss Finney, Di Holdsworth, Justina Legoe
10 June - 5 July 2025
Artist Statement – Justina Legoe
Justina Legoe has always been captivated by the magic of fairy tales and the quiet poetry of nature. Beginning art classes at a young age, Legoe developed a deep affinity for visual storytelling through printmaking, ink illustration, and painting. Largely self-taught, Legoe’s work takes inspiration from mythology, nature, outsider art and botanical illustrations.
Legoe explores the delicate balance between imagination and ecology, probing into themes of species scarcity, environmental fragility and the tension between the natural world and urban expansion. Her pieces invite viewers into curious, dreamlike worlds—where threatened species take centre stage, and each line tells a story of wonder, resilience, and quiet urgency.
In Maligned, the focus is on Australia's native species that have been cast aside, misunderstood, or labelled as pests. Through detailed printmaking, ink illustration, and painting, she reclaims the narratives of animals like the Grey-Headed Flying Fox, the Australian White Ibis, the Crested Pigeon, and the Brushtail Possum—creatures that once thrived but are now vilified, displaced, or quietly disappearing.
This body of work challenges viewers to reconsider the language and judgments we place on wildlife, especially those forced to coexist with sprawling urban landscapes. Legoe invites us into an evocative and often whimsical world where these maligned beings are restored with dignity, reverence, and storybook wonder.
Arthur Wicks I The Disposable Body
6 May - 7 June 2025
Fields of Change – Premonitions of the Disposable Body
In 1989 an exhibition of works on paper and wooden sculptures toured Eastern Australia as Transformer – Fields of Change. The collection of 12 works on view in this show contains many of those works on paper together with several that were started at that time but only recently developed and completed.
Shortly before his death, David Hanson sent me a postcard saying he was happy to hear that the armoured car was now, at his suggestion, in the collection of the Australian War Memorial. He urged me to propagate the work that I had been doing with robotics and body substitutes. "Wicks, push that barrow". He recognised in this oeuvre a germinal stage of interest in Artificial Intelligence; identified by him even 40 years ago.
In this exhibition, Tent and Compass, Rooftop Berlin 1986, provides a link to a satellite exhibition at the Slot Gallery Window, 38 Botany Rd Alexandria, where Notes from the Solstice Voyeur series is on view.
Many of the works on paper are constructed collages and relate directly to sculptures from Transformers: Fields of Change and can be viewed in tandem by clicking HERE:
David Hansen’s Essay on Three Legs was published in the booklet accompanying Transformer – Fields of Change and is quoted HERE
It seems as relevant today as it did then.
Jenny Orchard I The Multicreature and the Monster
1 April - 3 May 2025
My ceramic Multicreatures and inkbrush drawings are a call to arms, a complex multiplication of life forms, they express a spirit of determination to bring peace and healing to the world.
In Western Medieval times the monster was often depicted as a hybrid creature. Saints and knights in armour defeated strange dragons and demons, the “other” was clearly identified. Today our ecosystem, and our individual identities are being challenged by Artificial intelligence, conflict, wars, and environmental destruction
Monsters take a completely different form and meaning.
Creating identities by hand, from the conception of an idea, to their final release from the heat of the kiln these creatures are made of earth, chemical and fire, now existing in both the physical world and the digital realm
Roslyn Kean | Ground Lines
4 March - 29 March 2025
Previously a ground line was simply following the elevations of the surface, common language to architects and those in the building trade.
At ground line there is so much at play in the environment. Water meets earth, sky meets earth, we engage with the ground line on a daily basis. We are constantly changing the ground line with invasive machines and grand ideas.
At ground level there are exotic grasses that become invasive weeds in another location, surfaces are manicured in an attempt to rearrange nature, from thoughtfully placed steppingstones to raked stone gardens and fence lines. Trees and plants positioned against a backdrop of concrete to try and bring the natural ground line into a new perspective.
When walking a natural bush trail, we embrace the beauty of the irregular unfolding journey and it ever changing seasonal differences along a ground line.
Taking the time to view what is at the edge or hidden just beneath the surface, the reflections, the foundations of what now pushes the skyline into greater heights. Without the ground line we lose our reference and how to care for our environment.
Summer 25 - Jane Alexander, Annabel Butler, Jill Dunkerton, Junko Hagiwara, Rod Holdaway, Ian Marr and Yvonne Boag
4 February - 1 March 2025
Paintings and sculpture that convey the feeling of summer.
