triptych

I live in an area of Darebin where creeks and lagoons are surrounded by sprawling brick houses and light industry perches on the tops of bluffs. It's where suburbia encroaches uneasily on the natural environment. I comment on this situation but also try to create a poignant narrative from it.

preston town hall

tryptich

There are many stories about the Hairy Beka, many of them lost. The story I know is about the creature who lived in the bush. It was very tall and was covered in long white hair and had a strong foul odour. When it walked, its bones made a cracking sound, and it would come around at night and watch when the children were sitting around the campfire. It was known to put the children in its dilly bag. but it would chant a song before grabbing the children and taking them away. (Deewin (this one) Gomendaa (you there) Womigawin (and you) Womingenda and you as well. The Hairy Beka is a well-known story, an old legend amongst the Yorta-Yorta people, to teach children respect, and not to wander too far from camp and to respect fire. This story was passed on by my grandmother (Kooka) Yarmuk, of the Ulupna Clan to her grandchildren. - Aunty Zeta Thomson Artist Bio Aunty Zeta is a well-regarded Woi-wurrung Wurundjeri and Yorta Yorta Traditional Owner, Knowledge Holder, Keeper of Language and Elder who has strong links to her ancestral lands. Aunty Zeta was honoured with a solo exhibition of her original works to commemorate the opening of Birrarung Gallery, Bunjilaka, Melbourne Museum in November 2000. Other exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Burrinja Gallery in 1999, and Deadly Arts, Arts Victoria, 2001. She has also exhibited at Parliament House in Sydney, Federation Estate in Ringwood, North Melbourne Town Hall, Prahran Town Hall and in New Zealand. Aunty Zeta was honoured by the Victorian Aboriginal Honour Roll in 2019 and in 2020, had her work ‘Mookies Around the Waterhole’ laminated to one of Melbourne’s iconic trams. She is also the recipient of the Regional Champion Award for the Eastern Metropolitan Region Aboriginal Community Justice Awards in 2021, and the Certificate of Appreciation for Wominjeka Parkville, Monash University. In 2022, Aunty Zeta was the recipient of the Dr Alf Bamblett Memorial Award for the Victorian Aboriginal Community Justice Awards and currently sits on the Koorie Court as a respected Elder, along with the Board of Directors for The Torch.

Heidi Schoenheimer is a painter that captures everyday scenes from her day-to-day. Preston Market Flowers depicts a flower stand at the Preston Markets in 2023, capturing the market at a time that its future was uncertain. The market is an important community resource and gathering place with a rich history. Opened in 1970, the space was designed to be adaptable over time, and featured large open walkways and natural light. The flower stand features flowers typically sold in Melbourne, and reflects the brightness and diversity of Preston Market.

This painting is a tribute to a country that has slowly revealed itself over many years of my life. In the last 3 years I have made strong connections to my country through a very special elder, my cousin, Uncle John. He has shown me old Ngarigo cultural belongings, taken me to some sacred sites, and told me many stories about my people, the Ngarigo, the snow people. The stories have been happy and many very sad, and much of it has taken me time to process, including the destruction of sacred places and past massacres. Commissioned for the Merri-bek Art Collection 2017

Racist Paintings is a series of works that seek to unpack art history, eugenics, language, and colonialism through the use of hard-edge painting, colonial ethnography and orientalist ideologies. The works seek to do this by combining French colonial postcards from and of Vietnam, lines relating to key colonial structures, and the use of a limited Dulux colour pallet consisting of the colours ‘Pale Oriental’, ‘Oriental Bay’, ‘Oriental Rose’, ‘Oriental Princess’, ‘Oriental Blush’, ‘Oriental Blush Half’, and ‘Oriental Blush Quarter’. Artist Bio Phuong Ngo is an artist living and working in Melbourne, Australia. His practice is concerned with the interpretation of history, memory, and place, and how it impacts the individual and collective identity of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through an archival process rooted in a conceptual practice, he seeks to find linkages between culture, politics, oral histories, and historic events, which in turn dictates the materiality of his artistic output. Ngo’s work has been curated into seminal institutional exhibitions including recently Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 2022; Asia Pacific Triennial (APT10), QAGOMA 2021; (SLIPPAGE) Ballarat Foto Biennale, Ballarat 2021; Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art; Monash Gallery of Art; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria; RMIT Gallery, Melbourne; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne and Cheah Kongsi Obscura Festival, Penang, Malaysia. His solo exhibition Nostalgia For A Time That Never Was, was recently on at The Substation, Melbourne. In 2022 Ngo was named winner of the Banyule Award for Works on Paper and a finalist in the Bowness Photography Prize and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award. Ngo also practices in collaboration with Hwafern Quach under the name SLIPPAGE. SLIPPAGE examines the cycles of history in conjunction with current geopolitical and economic issues through the lens of vernacular cultures, artifacts, and language.

‘Post Preston, After the Bushfires, Our Country, Plants and Animals Need Healing’, is Deanne Gilson’s response to Margaret Preston’s culturally appropriative works. With this painting, Deanne interrogates a complex field of inquiry regarding the objectified colonialist gaze, inappropriate commodification of cultural material and a reclaiming of lost knowledge. This work also speaks to the complicated history of the Bundoora Homestead site and challenges historical truth narratives from the settler perspective and works as an excellent companion to her mother Marlene Gilson’s ‘The Life and Times of Bundoora Homestead’ artwork, commissioned for the Darebin Art Collection in 2018. ‘Post Preston, After the Bushfires, Our Country, Plants and Animals Need Healing’ was a winning work in the 2021 Koorie Art Show. Artist Bio Dr Deanne Gilson is a proud Wadawurrung woman and an award-winning visual artist living and creating from her ancestral home of Ballarat in Victoria. Her multidisciplinary art practice interrogates the colonial disruption of her family and explores ways in which contemporary art can create a platform towards healing, acceptance and reclaiming cultural identity, often drawing upon traditional knowledges of her ancestors. The Victorian bush where Gilson grew up features predominantly in all of her paintings, alongside many Indigenous plants, trees and birds from her Creation Story. Gilson draws upon layers of tangible and intangible knowledge, she talks about the presence of the intangible as spiritual connections to Country and her ancestors, while the tangible knowledge reflects artefacts and other objects of daily Wadawurrung life. Her works portray a rich cultural history that continues to thrive and grow today despite the restrictions placed on her family by settlement. Gilson’s practice defines Aboriginal women’s business past and present through contemporary art. Traditional marks alongside contemporary marks, link her to the practices of Indigenous mark-making, especially that on her body when in ceremony. Stating that “all of my artworks are an extension of my women’s business and draw on ochre sourced from Wadawurrung Dja (Country)”. The white is used in traditional ceremonies, while the charcoal is a direct link to Gilson’s matriarchal line of her mother’s business. Gilson’s mother, Marlene Gilson, also an artist, gathers charcoal from her daily fire, passing this onto her daughter, extending upon the old and the new ways of sharing knowledge and connection to Country.

Manik’s referential language maintains a fundamental connection to derided or “low-brow” sources, spanning popular and visual culture sources such as graffiti, google image searches or YouTube clips. In this work, Manik aestheticises a conspicuously framed police photograph, reproducing the sensationalist image with a considered painterly quality. Attending to the ways in which wide dissemination leads to a clouding and blurring of meaning, Manik challenges conventional ideas of authenticity, circulation, and so-called high/low modes of production. Artist Bio Gian Manik is a Naarm-based artist whose dextrous approach to image-making is characterised by an irreverence for genre and driven by a compulsion to paint. Interested in undermining the colonial properties arming the buttresses of historical painting, Manik ambiguates tradition through the representation of multivalent or tangential subjects. Informed by a childhood spent voraciously copying reproductions of old master paintings, a subsequent indifference to the polarities of high and low culture has rendered his work resistant to traditional stylistic categorisation. Instead, Manik’s practice can be read as an ongoing investigation into the boundaries of representation which often sprawls into the modalities and enviornments of fashion, music and performance. His compositions interweave both carefully distilled and intensely gestural passages, forming a layered palimpsest that references and registers the quotidian fabric of his social and cultural surroundings. Distinguished by an interminable mix of nostalgia and desire, drama and tragedy, his work reverberates an uncertainty of meaning. Strategies such as repetition and mimicry blur the intended resonance or ‘truth’ attributed to each object, place, scene or character. As a result, Manik’s paintings often function as parafictions, interpolating personal experience within constricted frameworks of historical narrative. Gian Manik (b. 1985 in Perth/Boorloo) received a BFA (Honours) from Curtin University in 2011. After relocating to Naarm/Melbourne, the artist completed a Master of Fine Art (Honours) at Monash University in 2012. Since then, he has exhibited widely across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand in institutional and commercial contexts. He has received institutional commissions by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2022) and the Perth Institute for Contemporary Art (2024). Additionally, his work has been featured in significant exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth/Boorloo and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

‘Market Days’ reflects a period in time when Preston Market faced increasing uncertainty due to plans for redevelopment. The unusual presence of the fox symbolises these concerns, echoing the looming threat posed by the development to the market's cultural significance within the community. This scene evokes an element of nostalgia and illustrates the tension between the old and new in our society. Artist Bio Holly Hunt is a Melbourne-based artist, working across painting and printmaking. Her work is influenced by her everyday environment and experiences living in the northern suburbs of Melbourne — an area defined by its rich multiculturalism and working-class history. Her work captures and conveys fleeting moments of everyday life, and the diverse neighbourhoods and people that inhabit them.preston market

View of bluestone building with false columns decorating front of central structure. The building is situated on the side of a road, with red sand/gravel in front and low-lying greenery behind. Mounted in cream matt and framed in a wooden frame.Front: Old Town Hall, Portland (1863) Pauling Grayling 1983 (Black Ink) Back: Old Town Hall/Portland - $100 (Pauline Grayling/42 Greenwood Ave/Ringwood 870 7649 (black felt tip pen on sticker, upper right).

“Although acknowledgements of country are very necessary, there is something so painful about hearing people in power acknowledge Aboriginal country whilst at the same time doing nothing to support Aboriginal people or land in meaningful ways. The amount of CEOS, politicians, and people in power who acknowledge country whilst actively benefitting from Aboriginal Land is sickening. Words can only do so much. What we really want is our land back.” – Mia Boe Artist Bio Mia Boe is a painter from Brisbane with Butchulla and Burmese ancestry. The inheritance and disinheritance of both cultures is the focus of her practice. Boe’s paintings respond, sometimes obliquely, to historical and contemporary acts of violence perpetrated on the people and lands of Burma and Australia. Boe received a Bachelor of Art, majoring in Art History from the University of Queensland in 2020. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship from the Art Gallery of New South Wales and in 2024 she was the Fiona Foley Residency recipient, where she undertook a residency on K’gari and Hervey Bay in Queensland. She was a Gertrude Contemporary Studio Artist between 2022 and 2024, and has undertaken further residencies in Mexico City and Sydney.

Pastel drawing of a black and white dogs head, glass covered gold inner frame and light brown wooden outer frame with mottled effect. Unnamed.Sticker 38 Pencil writing on back "Ölsen No.1"pastel, art, olsen