Turning lockdown into art

COLLABORATIVE exhibition Mutual Realities recently opened at the Art Gallery of Ballarat and it’s showcasing a selection of locally made works coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Led by Gallery curator Julie McLaren and supported by both the teams at the Art Gallery of Ballarat and Ballarat Arts and Culture, the project incorporated eight local artists in pairs who created new works.

“We really wanted to provide artists with opportunities in a year that a lot of artists lost opportunities,” Ms McLaren said.

“Artists had been working in isolation, they often do anyway, so we thought it would be interesting to pair some artists together from different practices knowing they would create something interesting together.

“I couldn’t be happier with the outcome, what has delighted me most about this project is that artists have developed friendships and found a common ground to work on.”

While in isolation, the commissions allowed the various artists a creative outlet to process their environments and examine their feelings about the pandemic.

All regionally based, the four pairs of artists include songwriter Stan Woodhouse with illustrator Dillon Naylor; ceramicist Neville French with visual artist Rhonda Baum; sound artist Sarah Barclay with Yorta Yorta weaver Donna Blackall and poet Nathan Curnow with artist Kim Anderson.

With the exhibition finally completed, Barclay said it’s awesome to have created and now display her own soundtrack to the pandemic alongside Blackall’s weaving work.

“We wanted to do something that was about healing and being calm during a time of crises because we found looking at the media was so overwhelming,” Barclay said.

“I created three pieces and they all form a bit of a wave, I put bird noises all through it which interlocks with Donna’s visuals of Bunjil and Waa.”

Not only did the project provide opportunity for creative collaboration over a time of isolation, Neville French and Rhonda Baum said it offered them a chance to form new friendships as well.

“We worked in our studios in parallel and shared information throughout the journey, the connections were there,” French said.

“It’s been very rewarding, so it’s pretty good during the difficult year to find a friend and especially somebody locally that has a sensibility that I connect with to put this work together is fantastic.

“It’s a record of a very strange year and it’s resulted in very different work that I have done before, tilting things and creating forms that evoke feelings of containment, really bringing out those feelings of last year.”

Braun added, “It was a year of reflection, we were noticing smaller things and the change in light because people were more aware of the day and the weather and that was translated in our work.”