Event Type: Kid Friendly

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Saturday 22 – 30 April 2023
Daily Opening Times:  11AM -5PM
Variations: Not open Anzac day (Tue, April 25 )

Crossing is an immersive interactive installation, negotiating ever-shifting waters and exploring your relationship to the sea and the act of cross

Experience the mesmerising journey of Crossing, an immersive installation that explores the themes of being close to the sea and the act of crossing. As you enter the space, you are greeted by wooden pathways and screens that cover the gallery floor; these are evocative of pathways, bridges or stepping stones. With each step, you are transported deeper into the experience, surrounded by fluid animations and immersive sounds that evoke the sensation of water and waves.

Drawing on Petterd’s personal connection to water, the installation invites you to experience the sensation of being on a beach and stepping over stones, creating a dialogue with the ever-shifting waters around you.

Engage with the installation through your movement and become part of the experience,  The installation draws you into a mesmerising dialogue with the ever-shifting elements of the space, encouraging reflection and contemplation. With pathways guiding your journey, you are invited to move between, to be in transition, and to arrive at a deeper understanding of your relationship to water and the sea.    

Robin Petterd is a digital media artist based in lutruwita/Tasmania, Australia. He completed a practice-based PhD in digital media from the University of Tasmania and has exhibited his work in events across Australia, the USA, and Europe. Petterd has curated international touring exhibitions and taken part in residencies in Japan and the Netherlands.    

Friday 31 March – Monday 24 April 2023
Mon – Fri 9am – 5pm
Sat – 9am – 3pm
Sun CLOSED

Rivulets and tarns define pathways in landscapes that we can trace.

Rivers, tarns, rivulets and lakes define pathways in country that we can trace.
Vital information for maps, natural waterways are integral to  human  experience of ‘landscape’.
They are co-opted to become highlights on bushwalks, playgrounds for paddlers.
Our natural waterways are capillaries of ecosystems providing for all life.  So much so, that the metaphor of living waters transcends different cultures. Do we cherish them? Water, ‘pure’  water is a sacred thing. It is a dynamic landscape that we seek to carry our woes away. These oil paintings celebrate waterways  in Tasmania/Lutruwita.

“It’s always 5 o’clock somewhere…”

A tiny soiree of elegant new works inspired by the glamour and fun of Happy Hour. Inspired by Tasmanian native flora, this custom set of handmade cocktail picks ornately reference the delicate and fragile nature of the plants they are inspired by in Emily’s signature botanical style.     

They are functional objects, perfectly suited to the most fabulous of occasions. A beautifully decadent garnish for your glass – after all “it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere”.

Emily is a multi-award winning Tasmanian studio Jeweller & SAC resident artist.

Opening event: Thursday 30 March 2023, 5.30pm

An exhibition of paintings by Robyn Harman. Her artistic practice reflects the striking imagery of coastal landforms around Tasmania. Everything changes in time, the light, the wind on the water and the rock that is exposed to the eroding forces of the sea.

Robyn Harman continues her exploration of rock formations around the coastline of Tasmania. She is interested in the way landscape is viewed; as ancient and tracked with memories and myths, as terrain refracted by abstraction and digitisation. These paintings bring to mind the geological history of the island, the amount of thermal energy needed to create these mineral monoliths, the stretch of time that weathered and hewed them into their present state isolated from the shore. This understanding of time is contrasted with the use of photography and the capture of the briefest moment when the sea and the light fall upon the rock in a certain way. One fraction of a moment in an inestimable span – a freeze frame in geological time chronicled with the materiality of paint. The rock stands mute and resolute in steadfast solitude.

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“Thresholds” is a free Sound Event by Matt Warren and future in nature (Dave Kendal) performed once to coincide and accompany the exhibition “Restless” on Sunday 5th March from 3pm – 5pm.

Alongside and amongst the paintings by Linda Veska, Matt Warren and future in nature (Dave Kendal) will each perform solo sets as well as an improvised collaborative set, responding to the word “Restless”, the works of Veska and informed by each other’s responses.

Matt Warren is a lutruwita/Tasmanian electronic media artist, musician, curator and writer, based in nipaluna/Hobart. The works investigate memory, transcendence, liminal space and the suspension of disbelief. His music and sound practice have a basis in both composition and improvisation. He performs and records electro-acoustic and drone works, solo and collaborates with others under several monikers. https://www.mattwarrenartist.com/

future in nature (Dave) We need a future in nature – biodiverse, inclusive, resilient. Our culture needs to reintegrate nature, we need to dwell in nature. Nature informs the music of future in nature – driving aleatoric arrangements, capturing raw sonic landscapes, and providing inspo for bass loops and analog tones.

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Opening Event
Friday 3 March 2023
5.30pm – 7.30PM
Exhibition to be opened by Joe Bugden, CEO SAC and Dr Niklavs Rubenis, UTAS

Sitting on chairs in liminal spaces and looking through doorways to another place or time

I acknowledge the Tasmanian Aboriginals, the first owners of lutruwita/Tasmania who never ceded sovereignty yet looked after this island so well. I pay respect to their elders – past, present and emerging.

The word “Restless” sums up contradictory feelings of desiring escape, hesitation, and nomadic life, not always voluntary. In a matter of weeks, I move to the big island, so this is a post lockdown moment of physical, personal and artistic expression of a preference for constancy of change in one’s life over routine predictability.

Last year I began painting chairs focusing initially on the flimsiest of chairs, a foldable camping chair and expanded this to include a campervan. I became influenced by visiting family in the Czech Republic last year for the first time to look at dissident and refugee chairs. Through research into Cold War mid-century design of furniture and interiors, I became intrigued by the way that decoration and design applied to what we sit on has bearings on history and politics. Thrones and seating for the rich was highly ornamental and associated with culture and art. Simpler, more streamlined and mass-produced furniture became part of the East/West political competition between capitalism and communism. Hand-made avant-garde furniture appears symbolic of dissidence and rebellion. My painting of the banana lounges used by Ukrainian refugees in February 2022 suggests the connection between dissidents, refugees and the fine line that now exists between homelessness and recreational camping.

Doorways and chairs represent alternative pathways and choice. The historic doorways of the Salamanca Arts Centre have been an inspiration for me during my residency.

I invite you to examine the surface membranes of these paintings of old buildings which began as factories or palaces. Layers conceal and reveal the past as another world, long gone, yet still alive in different forms, and often repeating itself with the constant looping of refugees, gentrification of old buildings and the ironic relationship between travel, invasion and escape.

Artists across Tasmania present their own interpretation of the broad theme of water in any medium.

As an island we are surrounded by water so there is ample opportunity to capture its mood and beauty.

The Water Ways exhibition has artwork across all styles and media including painting, sculptures and photography. The works range from representational and abstraction to environmental commentary.

Art is for everyone.  All artists create in an individual way and viewers will connect with a work for a very personal reason. Reflecting this unique but valid bond the major prize of $2000 will be decided not by judges, but by people’s choice vote. We invite visitors to engage with the art by voting for their favourite art work.

Prominent members of our community are asked to select their favourite artwork and give a reason for their choice. The diversity of choices is interesting to see.

Opening Event
Friday 20 January 2023
6:00pm – 7:30pm
Opening address by Dr Toby Juliff, Lecturer in Art at the School of Creative Arts and Media, UTAS

Chaos and order are two fundamental elements of lived experience, the two most basic subdivisions of the Self. The spaces between these elements are where life exists and where identity rests. 

Experiences of Being is a group exhibition by Romany Best, Donna Bergshoeff and Skye Mescall exploring the concepts of order and chaos as they are linked with the creative identity. Through the mediums of painting and photography Best, Bergshoeff and Mescall explore how three different artists represent order and chaos within their work.

Best utilises her studio as a manifestation of her inner chaos, bursting with abandoned paintings, half-finished projects and canvases all in states of preparation. Her life, overflowing with unmanaged baggage, is represented by the anarchy of her studio.

Mescall works with stacks and files of images, lists and notes hoarded over years, layered and replicated, trying to find small glimpses of beauty in mess, order in chaos, finding how her creative identity exists within the liminal spaces.

Bergshoeff utilises photographic diptychs to play with the viewers’ way of seeing and our natural proclivity to create order out of chaos. She finds scenes where images of chaos exist next to scenes of order and plays with the spaces between asking the viewer to examine one state, then the other and finally the two as one image. Together these works explore how it is to inhabit shifting liminal spaces between order and chaos.

Opening Event
Thursday 2 March 2023
6:00pm – 8:00pm

Oceans, lakes, pools, rivers.
Shallow, deep, still, flowing.
Blue, green, brown, golden, grey and white.

Waterforms is a series that investigates natural design. The paintings are impressionistic interpretations of segments of water views from Tasmanian places visited by emerging artist, Lynn Kelly.

Natural elements interact to control energy and atmosphere. Conditions can change quickly. Our environmental experiences are affected by times of day, weather and our points of view.

Likewise, in a painting the visual components are combined and arranged to express mood and movement.

These works are sections from water views removed from their scenic contexts. They are square in format, making them somewhat ambiguous.

Rather than making pictures the aim was to explore how colours and  shapes can be composed to evoke a feeling and create the impression of a place.

Opening Event
Thursday 16 March 2023
5:30pm – 7:30pm

An exhibition of contemporary mosaic works by Rachel Bremner, created to encourage the viewer to find personal meaning that resonates emotionally, without prompts, like listening to songs without words.

“From early childhood leading up to my life as a visual artist, I trained and performed as a professional violinist. I continue to be fascinated by the similarities, and the differences between the two forms of artistic expression. 

I had never conceived of music as an art form that needed words to provide background or convey what I meant to express.

Expressing myself in words has never come easily to me, I can rarely find the right ones for my purpose, music was always a perfect medium for my intense sense of privacy. In music performance I could present my inner world to the audience, all my thoughts, reactions, emotions without having to describe the background story. 

When I started to put my mosaic work out into the world, in contrast to music-making I struggled with the obligation in the art world to use words when presenting to an audience. I felt a growing conflict with the wordless immediacy with which I wanted to engage and how much words can interfere with that engagement.

I present this exhibition as an offering to the audience to pause, observe each work and examine emotional reactions in their own terms, with no titles, no accompanying prompts.”
– Rachel Bremner