Bringing fauna to life

Art Gallery to unveil two exhibitions

Highly detailed drawings of animals and birds will pair with imaginative textile art showcasing recycling and sustainability in two new upcoming exhibitions at the Naracoorte Regional Art Gallery. The featured artist in the main gallery is Meagan Lonsdale, who is well known to the Naracoorte community and has been an Ibis Award winner (2018 winning entry pictured) on several occasions. Meagan, from Edenhope, grew up in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne. Her exhibition is entitled Thorough Fauna.

She has nurtured a passion for visual art since she could hold a pencil and is largely self-taught. After gained a Bachelor of Environmental Science she relocated to a small farm at Edenhope. She has combined her love of painting, photography and nature to establish a career as a self- supporting visual artist and illustrator. Meagan enjoys working in a variety of two-dimensional media and has recently been focussing on gouache which is opaque watercolour because of its flexibility of technique.

In the Bainger Gallery visitors can see Bec Hill’s first exhibition called Thrifted, Gifted, Dyed and Reborn. Bec, from Naracoorte, has recently discovered a passion for textile art, particularly natural dyeing, botanical printing and slow stitching. This medium fits well with her ethos of recycling as about 99 per cent of her art supplies have been saved from landfill or are second hand. Opening night for the two exhibitions is this Friday at 6pm and they will run until December 4. Children’s books illustrated by Meagan will also be on sale in the gallery – Kelpie Magic by Rebecca Bailey and The Foxes of Yallamatta Swamp by Rosemary Ruth Nolan will be on display.

The two exhibitions will be complemented by the work of the gallery’s Maker of the Month for November – Delphine Allert, from Kingston. She is working with acrylics and concentrating at present on native flora and fauna. Delphine will be in the gallery all day on Wednesday, November 9, and Wednesday, November 23, to meet visitors and discuss her work. Delphine describes her latest work for Maker of the Month as being about the relationships we have with our gardens, homes and the extended environment. “I am featuring an Australian native plant or an adopted native such as the protea, to represent and celebrate the alternative diversity of our native flora available to us and what we could be planting in our gardens,” Delphine said. Delphine is the final Maker of the Month for the Naracoorte Gallery in 2022, a highly successful and popular program which has featured artists from the Limestone Coast.

Each artist has provided small exhibitions of their work for sale and worked on a big variety of art forms in the gallery while meeting and speaking to visitors.