In Bridge Merri Creek, Katherine Hattam continues her exploration of local waterways and their locations. This work on plywood depicts the bridge over Merri Creek on High Street, Northcote with accompanying trees and powerlines and the much ignored cyclists dismount sign. It is surrounded by a repertoire of recurring domestic motifs significant to the artist including chairs, clocks and a shopping basket, creating a psychological layering of memory via personally symbolic objects.

DIM Furniture, Thomastown (Industryscapes 34) is a precise and detailed industrial landscape presented to the viewer from an eye-level street perspective: a factory located in Thomastown, a northern suburb of Melbourne, comprising silos and heavy equipment together with a jumble of accumulated debris. Employing a flatness of form and colour, Senior’s watercolour palette is deliberately subtle using many colours with similar tonal values to construct a composition that reflects our understanding of a stereotypical Melbourne industrial site.

"Empty Avenues (Best of Season 1) reimagines the daily life of the artist through the formal languages of television sitcoms and YouTube ‘Best of’ compilations. By doing so the work engages the concept of narrative identity; questioning the extent to which identity is shaped through media influence, and our potential to reformulate understandings of self through narrative reconstruction. What emerges is an absurd, Existential sitcom that explores themes of meaninglessness, isolation, domesticity, and despair. Extended statement: The concept of narrative identity In other words, our understanding of ourselves, the values and goals that we possess, and our place within society can only be grasped within the context of a self-generated historical narrative. However, to what extent is our formulation of narrative identity shaped by pre-existing narrative structures? And how can the implementation of alternative narrative structures potentially reformulate our understanding of ourselves? Empty Avenues (Best of Season 1) explores these ideas by reimagining the narrative identity of the artist through the conventions of traditional TV sitcoms and YouTube ‘Best of’ compilations. Interactions, responsibilities, and leisure activities are taken from O’Brien’s daily life and restaged as scenes within a constructed domestic environment. Through the process of restaging, the work engages uncanniness as a way of generating critical distance and estrangement towards daily life. This process also allows the work to be instilled with a greater sense of subjectivity; utilizing mise-en-scène to externalise the experience of somebody struggling with Existential concerns. This blending of factuality and subjectivity emerges as a magical realist take on a traditional sitcom premise: the Odd Couple scenario. This cliché premise is depicted in Empty Avenues as the relationship between a man and a materialisation of ‘the void’ – a universal nothingness that permeates everything. In these terms, the relationship between the characters can be understood as an embodiment of the conditions that generate the Absurd. In terms of narrative structure, Empty Avenues is presented as a ‘Best of’ compilation instead of a traditionally chronological, cohesive narrative. Such compilations, typically assembled by fans and amateur video editors, feature fragments of scenes that have been removed from their original contexts and reassembled in ways that distort the sequence of events. By presenting Empty Avenues in this way, the work disrupts the temporal conditions of narrative identity that allow for the construction of meaning. As such, scenes are instilled with a greater sense of absurdity and meaninglessness, allowing the audience to share in the Existential perspective of the main character. As a result, both the character and the audience are confronted with a narrative world that is constantly on the brink of both creation and destruction, and are faced with the question of whether they can continue to engage with such a world. At it’s core, Empty Avenues (Best of Season 1) explores the enduring question: how do we find meaningful relationships and pursuits in an immutably meaningless world? "

"AN UNCANNY LIKENESS It’s difficult to escape the flight of the imagination in Lynda Draper’s new work. Set within a dream-like milieu, an anthology of wondrous and majestic objects float and bob in space. Referencing kings and queens, and the flamboyance of the French Baroque, these large filigree works are woven from clay, and while not explicitly figurative, possess familiar facial markers which bring into play the metaphysical qualities attributed to inanimate objects by human memory and experience. Draper spent the European winter near Versailles, where marble sculptures set among the gardens are shrouded in the winter months to prevent frost from taking its toll on precarious limbs. And while the influence from her residency is certainly evident, rather than stimulating work of this nature, it has merely activated and amplified elements of her recent practice. From smaller ‘tiaras’ in 2016, her work has evolved into sizeable ‘crowned portraits’ of clay. Hovering somewhere between the real and the unreal, these works are architectural and figurative, formed and formless, literal and fictional. They bewitch and amuse, revealing multiple characters and personalities only after careful observation. The medium of clay is so exquisitely anomalous in Draper’s work that it becomes, to the viewer, an afterthought rather than a dialogue prompt for works that are traditionally contextualised by their medium. And this is how it should be. Clay has undergone a renaissance in the past decade or so; no longer is it in the domain of craft. With a strong conceptual narrative and by pushing the medium beyond its natural limits, ceramicists like Draper can be counted among Australia’s significant artists who contribution is gaining ground in contemporary art discourse. And yet, it is the use of clay which makes Draper’s work so utterly extraordinary. Ambitious in scale, virtuosic in composition, she has the ability to make the unmakeable. Drawing from a conventional practice of coiling and handbuilding, the maker’s hand is evident on every square inch of her work. The uneven coils are shaped by the impressions of her grip on the responsive nature of the material. But Draper somehow dispenses with the inherent limitations of the soft clay medium, manipulating it in a way which defies physics and logic. Her award-winning installation for the Sidney Myer Australian Ceramic Award in 2019 is testament to an artist whose practice has consolidated. Her ambition, robust conceptual thinking and technical understanding of materials have reached a zenith which has been rewarded her with one of the most prestigious prizes in Australian art"

The Hole Index is a series of sixty slashes, gashes, fissures, rips and tears. Images are transferred onto canvas by a process of spray painting through muslin. The index forms a menu of different holes for an imaginary computer programme. Working with the index I, enlarged, cropped, coloured and elongated to form individual works of which this is one.

Li Bai (701-762) is the greatest romantic poet in Tang Dynasty of China. He was given a post at the Hanlin Academy, which served to provide a source of scholarly expertise for the emperor.He was dismissed for an unknown indiscretion, and was sent into exile to the south-west by the Emperor. There after he wandered throughout China for the rest of his life. His creative inspiration emerged while drinking alcohol. His remaining 1,100 poetic creations reflect his unrestricted, romantic spirit.

This work is about the 'Buffalo Boy and the Seventh Fairy' from Chinese folklore. The Emperor of Heaven’s seventh daughter loved the buffalo boy. She left heaven and went down to the earth and married him. She became a weaver to make a living, while he tended buffalos. Their life was very happy and they had a daughter and a son. But the Emperor got angry. He sent heaven’s military to bring her back. He would allow them to meet at the other side of the Milky Way on the night of the seventh of July every year. Fortunately there were many birds who gathered to form a bridge. Every year they had a family reunion on the “bridge of birds’.

"Aunty Marlene Gilson is a proud Wadawaurrung traditional owner and Elder. Her multi-figure paintings work to overturn colonial narratives by re-contextualising the representation of historical events. Learning Wathaurung history from her grandmother, Marlene began painting in 2008 as a form of therapy, while recovering from an illness. She has received considerable accolades and most recently exhibited a series of works in the Sydney Biennale (2018). The artist’s meticulously rendered works display a narrative richness and theatrical quality akin to the traditional genre of history painting. Marlene has developed an extensive body of work which relates to her ancestral lands which covers Ballarat, Werribee, Geelong, Skipton and the Otway Ranges in Victoria. Marlene was invited to create a new work for the Darebin Art Collection that either related to the City of Darebin or her traditional lands. She chose the subject of Bundoora Homestead for this new commission and has included First Nations people alongside colonial settlers and members of the Smith Family enabling an opportunity to reflect on the incredible history of Bundoora Homestead and its surrounds. This painting brings Aboriginal people and Colonialists into the one space living harmoniously and in doing so reminds us that reconciliation may be a possibility. ""We visited Bundoora Homestead and farm, what an amazing place. In my research I found that Mr Smith built a stone hut for the Aboriginal people to stay when they visited. They bred cattle and horses, Wallace being the greatest sire in Australia and is buried on the property. They had three gardeners and four children, which I have painted in the garden with Mr and Mrs Smith seated watching the children play. Thank you for allowing me to look into the history of John and Helen Smith. I hope I have captured their life and amazing Homestead and surrounds. 31.8.18"""

Preston Market, Saturday late is part of a series of paintings and sketches that were included in Mary Hammond’s solo exhibition, Coming and Going, held at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre in 2010. The exhibition, a major retrospective of Hammond’s work from the mid-1970s-2009, focussed on her everyday depiction of people in Northcote and Preston, particularly along High Street, Northcote where she had a studio for a few years, and the Preston Market, primarily during the 1980s and 1990s.

Preston Market, Saturday late is part of a series of paintings and sketches that were included in Mary Hammond’s solo exhibition, Coming and Going, held at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre in 2010. The exhibition, a major retrospective of Hammond’s work from the mid-1970s-2009, focussed on her everyday depiction of people in Northcote and Preston, particularly along High Street, Northcote where she had a studio for a few years, and the Preston Market, primarily during the 1980s and 1990s.

Preston Market, Saturday late is part of a series of paintings and sketches that were included in Mary Hammond’s solo exhibition, Coming and Going, held at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre in 2010. The exhibition, a major retrospective of Hammond’s work from the mid-1970s-2009, focussed on her everyday depiction of people in Northcote and Preston, particularly along High Street, Northcote where she had a studio for a few years, and the Preston Market, primarily during the 1980s and 1990s.

Preston Market, Saturday late is part of a series of paintings and sketches that were included in Mary Hammond’s solo exhibition, Coming and Going, held at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre in 2010. The exhibition, a major retrospective of Hammond’s work from the mid-1970s-2009, focussed on her everyday depiction of people in Northcote and Preston, particularly along High Street, Northcote where she had a studio for a few years, and the Preston Market, primarily during the 1980s and 1990s.

Preston Market, Saturday late is part of a series of paintings and sketches that were included in Mary Hammond’s solo exhibition, Coming and Going, held at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre in 2010. The exhibition, a major retrospective of Hammond’s work from the mid-1970s-2009, focussed on her everyday depiction of people in Northcote and Preston, particularly along High Street, Northcote where she had a studio for a few years, and the Preston Market, primarily during the 1980s and 1990s.