May 29, 2018
The Wondai Regional Art Gallery will be hosting a travelling art exhibition in June, and hopes to make travelling exhibitions a part of its annual offerings in the future.
At the opening of May’s monthly exhibition, Gallery curator Elaine Madill told the audience travelling exhibitions normally cost about $3000 to host.
This was a big impost on the Gallery’s budget, but she felt the benefits of bringing outstanding art to the South Burnett outweighed all other considerations.
“Our artists get better by seeing better art, and our visitors develop their appreciation of art by seeing different things,” Elaine said.
“The standard of our region’s art has improved dramatically over the past decade due to training, workshops and visiting exhibitions, and if we want to keep improving we need to commit to keep doing that.”
Elaine said she’d been very fortunate to secure this year’s travelling exhibition without the usual costs, thanks to the help of long-standing Gallery benefactor Brian Tucker.
Brian is a charted accountant who has specialised in assisting artists, arts organisations and Indigenous arts centres, during which time he has built a very large, high quality art collection that has already been exhibited at a number of Queensland galleries from Cairns to Brisbane.
In June, he will be bringing 60 selected works from this collection to Wondai at his own expense, and donating 30 per cent of any sales to the Gallery.
“We can’t thank Brian enough for supporting our travelling exhibition concept,” Elaine said.
“I’d encourage everyone to come and see it – many of these works are outstanding and not often seen.
“We will also be having a display of recent Barambah Pottery works from the Yidding Artists Collective in June, along with acrylic paintings by Rocko Langton and Maurice Mickelo that is worth seeing in its own right.”
The new exhibitions will open at 6:00pm this Friday night (June 1) and will remain on display at the Gallery from 10:00am to 4:00pm daily until the end of the month.
* * *
The May exhibition, which will conclude this Thursday, May 31, features works by Roza Lear in the front gallery; paper tole works by South Burnett master craftswoman Rosemarie Matthews-Frederick and several of her students in the main gallery; and works by mother and daughter Judy and Nadine Gray in the rear gallery.
Roza, from Murgon, has been painting in acrylics for 10 years and has a fondness for landscapes and flowers.
She had her first exhibition in 2015 where she won the People’s Choice award, and went on to win the South Burnett Acquisitive in 2016 along with the $3000 first prize.
Rosemarie, meanwhile, has been pursuing paper tole art – or decoupage, as it’s sometimes known – for more than a decade and is acknowledged as the region’s outstanding expert in this painstaking craft, which constructs three-dimensional images from two-dimensional prints.
She has exhibited her work in the USA and has had many exhibitions at the Kingaroy and Wondai regional art galleries, as well as the former Winds Of Change gallery in Nanango.
And Nadine and Judy Gray specialise in textiles, jewellery and photography, creating unique works that blur the lines between mediums.
