Address: Top Gallery

Earth and Land presents lutruwita/Tasmania’s natural beauty, captured within the clay of Angela Reiher’s sculptural forms and Caitlin Love’s canvas.

Opening Event
Friday 30 September 2022
5:30pm – 7:30pm
Top Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre

Emerging artists Angela Reiher and Caitlin Love met in 2020 after taking ceramics classes together. They soon realised their shared ambition to produce a body of work to exhibit. Angela and Caitlin’s interest in the natural landscape and obsession with the Tasmanian wilderness was the subject of many conversations which lead the pair to recognise the many ways their works speak to each other. Angela collects wild clay from different locations in lutruwita/Tasmania, to use within her work. Caitlin represents the natural environment in her paintings, including some of locations where Angela has sourced her clay from. Their work embodies the landscape in more ways than one.

Angela and Caitlin have nurtured a strong friendship over the last couple of years, consistently supporting and encouraging one another to follow their motivations as artists. Together, the pair launched their work for Earth and Land with a trip to Tasmania’s wild and captivating West Coast, early in 2022. This is the first time that Angela and Caitlin have exhibited their work.

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Angela Reiher

Angela Reiher is an artist based in nipaluna/Hobart. Angela was born in Warragul, Victoria and moved to lutruwita/Tasmania in 2018. She came on a holiday to Tasmania in 2017 and fell in love with the amazing and diverse landscape as she travelled around the state. She has recently retired from a life of teaching to release her dreams and passion for the arts.

Angela has a deep-rooted connection with the natural world and her works reflect this. Angela’s work is inspired by what she sees around her, or literally includes elements from the environment. In her ceramic work, she uses items such as rocks for tools in shaping, trimming, carving and finishing work. Angela uses shells, rocks and leaves and other found items as inspiration and to emulate colours in glazes and in the finishing effects. Her handbuilding reflects the organic shapes in the environment and incorporates aspects of natural elements such as wild clay.

Angela loves connecting to the earth by collecting and hand processing clay found in the wild. Everything is done by hand until the final firing stage, including collecting the clay, picking up or digging out the clay with a small handheld shovel or shell. Clay is broken down and squished by hand, from large lumps into a smooth mix. Angela then pushes it through a sieve and dries it out to a usable degree, wedges it and makes it ready to use. Angela uses wild clays as finishing effects on ceramic pieces that she has either handbuilt or wheel-thrown. Angela likes her artwork to ‘create itself’. She begins with an idea but has learnt to have no boundaries. She likes the work to take on its own form and, in a way, to create itself.

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Caitlin Love

Caitlin Love was born in Ngunnawal country/Canberra and she studied Art History and Curatorship at The Australian National University. She moved to lutruwita/Tasmania in 2015 and based herself in nipaluna/Hobart to further her study at the School of Creative Arts, completing her master’s degree.  Caitlin currently works as an art teacher.

Painting has been a lifelong passion of Caitlin’s. In this exhibition, Caitlin captures the essence and life of Tasmania’s diverse and pristine wilderness through her exploration of the colours and vistas that have captivated her during hiking and camping trips. These paintings reflect her personal connection to Tasmanian landscapes and the profound nourishment she receives from being in nature. There is a welcoming sense of solitude and peace that can be found in Tasmania’s unique landscape, which offers Caitlin both a sense of belonging and a feeling of remoteness.

The debut solo exhibition by emerging Tasmanian artist Nick Hills.

Breathe pushes the themes of life and decay in the natural world to a new level. It’s a menagerie of characters and emotional states, everything from spiders tangled upon melting limbs to whimsically psychedelic animal portraits.

Originally inspired by a need to break through some mental health barriers, Nick’s work is a great insight into the artists mind and the 3-year journey involved in coming out of a difficult time and building up a whole new perspective on life.

Coming from a background in mountain biking and a love of hard metal music (the pieces are named after lyrics from Nick’s favorite bands and musicians), Nick’s unique style is both dark and brightly energetic.

All works are archival inkjet printed on 100% cotton rag museum grade paper by Papermill Printhouse (Melbourne) and Full Gamut (Hobart) and are all framed by Hobart’s finest Wagner Framemakers.
All prints are available for purchase.
Merchandise, stickers and other accessories are also available for sale down in Spacebar Gallery.

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This event is part of Winter Light 2022 and is presented by Salamanca Arts Centre

A Warm Glow to Remember is a body of work that physically manifests Yumemi’s personal relationship to her Japanese heritage. It is her transitional journey in reconciling her place as a resident within cultural gaps while accepting the importance of letting go.

3 – 28 August 2022
Opening Event
Friday 5 August 2022
6 – 8pm with performance happening at 7pm
RSVP 

Gallery hours
9am – 5pm weekdays
10am – 5pm weekends

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Artist

Whilst the wearing of masks is not mandatory it is recommended in certain situations by Tasmanian Public Health. Masks will be available upon entering our venues for those patrons who would like one.  

If you’re unwell, it is recommended that you stay at home, and we look forward to welcoming you at Salamanca Arts Centre another time.

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Opening Event
Friday 1 July 2022, 5:30pm – 7:30pm

late for tomorrow, by emerging artist Sevé de Angelis, is a series about love and time, care and frustration. The water, the sky, the wood and the rock.

This is a series of process-based entries that have evolved through the alchemical properties of paint.

A process of morphology gives faces, figure and landscape an ability to rise.

Musings on our environment as an extension of ourselves, John Michell’s book Simulacra; a familiarity of human likeness in nature, and Daevid Allen’s Garden Song with its brief passage on us being an extension of the dreaming planet were the ideas for this series.

At the core, they are about love and time, care and frustration; about living with the water and sky, and the rocks and trees with voices and memories.

Sevé de Angelis is a Tasmanian visual artist. He is from Launceston and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2018 from the University of Tasmania. He lives in Hobart.

Elsewhere is an investigation by Megan Fae of the layers within herself that she didn’t know existed : the Neurodivergent Mother

In this exploration of the Neurodivergent Mother, emerging artist Megan Fae delves into the layers and the shadows behind single parenting.

Beneath the exhaustion and the daily disassociation.

Hidden inner layers are always there, aching in your gut and screaming out to you – if you’re listening.

This is also an ode to the years of nourishing little ones, through trauma and self discovery.

Through the mindful creation of soft sculptures, these layers will be explored and put forth in this collection known as Elsewhere.

Dedicated to exhibiting the works of Emerging Artists, the Top Gallery is an intimate exhibition space infused with heritage character.

The Top Gallery is part of Salamanca Art Centre’s subsidised Access Galleries Program and is offered to Emerging Artists who are Salamanca Arts Centre Associate Members on the acceptance of an exhibition proposal. This heavily subsidised gallery space enables Emerging Artists to exhibit, often for the first time as a solo artist, for month-long periods. 

The Top Gallery is located on Level 2, nestled beneath the Terrapin Puppet Theatre Workshop in the attic of Salamanca Arts Centre at the top of the stairs. The rough-cast, limewashed stone walls, exposed beams and wooden flooring offer a counter-point in form and texture to many types of work. 

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Venue Hire Rates

Exhibitions
Emerging Artists | Salamanca Arts Centre Associate Members
$175 per Month

All prices are inclusive of GST and are effective from 1 January 2024.

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Applying for the Top Gallery : 2024 Calendar

Salamanca Arts Centre assesses applications for the Top Gallery twice annually, with application rounds occurring in April and September each year.

Salamanca Arts Centre is currently seeking applications for inclusion in the Top Gallery 2024 Calendar. This round is for remaining dates only; not all dates within 2024 are available, but Salamanca Arts Centre shall endeavour to offer applicants’ preferred dates where we can.

Applications are sought from Arts Organisations and solo artists for exhibitions.

Applications can be submitted via the link below.

Applications close Monday 2^nd October 2023.

Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their application in November 2023. 

A story of sex and society, as told by the self portrait paintings
of Malachi Quinn.

“Sex is the unspoken god of society. Sex, gender identity and sexuality dictate both the social realm, and individual conscious experience in numerous ways. Explicitly there is the overtly outdated gender roles, but on a more subtle level there is a philosophical assumption underlying traditional views on sex and gender: that people are their bodies. This argument posits that mind and the body are one (as opposed to dualism: mind with a body) by extension no different than an animal or a complex biological computer. There is no soul, no free will, rather we are machinery fulfilling out the urge to procreate until we die.

Problematic. Treating people as merely their bodies is an argument long used to justify discrimination. For social change to occur across the board we must change the underlying philosophy and begin to see people as beings rather than bodies. If we see a person, a being, we look past labels and connect authentically. Discrimination becomes a foolish concept because fundamentally we are all the same.

​This exhibition features two years’ worth of self-portraiture, and a life time of self-exploration and philosophical inquiry into the nature of identity and existence. It began as a documentation of change over time and turned into an immortalisation of aspects of myself. In the paintings I depict myself nude in various settings. Clothing is a label: man, woman, rich, poor, formal or casual, when taking away this label we see the being as it truly is. Furthermore, the normalisation of nudity in non-sexualised settings perpetuates the notion that bodies in and of themselves are not sexual objects. Everyone has a body, and for some reason it has become a controversial thing to see or even discuss. We often only see nudity in sexual contexts, in porn, in sexualised music videos, in advertisements using sex for profit, this misappropriation of the human figure subconsciously internalizes the idea that the function of the body is limited to sex, and thus it becomes an object of shame and secrecy. To counter this, I paint myself enjoying beautiful moments, a sunset, an art session, a bubble bath, a walk, all non-sexualised depictions of nudity. In this raw and real way, I hope to be seen for who I am, a being, not a body.

This painting series reflects my own journey of realising I am more than my body. Initially inspired by the recognition of ones own mortality following grief, the paintings follow my own journey of gender confusion and exploration. I began to go by he/him pronouns as I felt they better reflected who I was on the inside. Eventually I came to understand is that it is never our physicality that defines who we are, and gender expression is no different: people are more than their bodies. This transformation of ideology and physicality is shown chronologically in my paintings, with the 2020 works featuring my feminine side, cartoon, colourful with a cute style, which gradually become more fluid, dark and abstract, culminating in the 2021’s emotive expression of masculine figures.

​The paintings are filled with symbology which I have created to tell a more nuanced story. Each painting is a chapter, and the exhibition is the book. The images are the words and the symbols provide the key to reading them. The presence of the armour costumes and sculptures is to create a sharp contrast to the 2D nudity, as reminder that in theory it easy to think we are our authentic selves in the privacy of our own minds, but in the 3D world, the pressures of society have us guarded. The juxtaposition between 2D nudes and 3D armour is to illustrate this difference between who we are to ourselves, vs what costumes (or what ‘face’) we wear into the world and share with others. It is my hope that beginning to see people as beings, rather than bodies, will mitigate the need for such defences. The world I hope to see built is open and encouraging of expression and diversity. I believe this world begins with a subtle but powerful shift in perspective: recognising oneself and others as more than their bodies.

​Treating people as more than their bodies is a call to celebrate diversity and encourage open exploration of these ideologies. As sex and sexuality is such a fundamental facet of the human experience, squishing it into acceptable categories and punishing any deviation is not the way forward. Instead, we should celebrate all expressions of ourselves, accept others and aim to see people for who they truly are. Human beings are capable of so much more than fulfilling labels. Humans are beautiful and our bodies are not label makers. Fundamentally, we are so much more than our bodies. Lets celebrate ourselves and each other as human beings.”
– Malachi Quinn