A little video of what happens when the art arrives from it’s remote location! And when you’ve had two missed deliveries, you have to go to the airport warehouse to pick the freight up… these all the way from Fregon in the Pitjantjatjara Lands…
I won’t go through all our close to eighty exhibitions since our first one, just the extra significant ones! Named DESERT DREAMINGS it was held at the beautiful Old George Gallery in Duke Street, East Fremantle – a great artists’ studios and exhibition space (alas, no more). It was very exciting, the art was very new to many and we would get huge attendances at these exhibitions. A big effort and in those days, we only ran the shows for ten days! Enough time for a good response however and the beginning of a whole new world of art and culture, not just for the audience, but for us too! Many now very well known artists were exhibited in that show – sadly, some have passed, others are still here, still painting.
The first remote community we visited was in the Utopia region in the late 1990’s – and the multiple outstations at which the Utopian artists painted. Utopia is approx 270km north east of Alice Springs, along the Sandover Highway. When the former pastoral lease was returned to its Indigenous owners in 1979, members of the community turned to art. The art was in its infancy at the time and only starting to gain critical appreciation when Robert and Janet Holmes à Court bought the entire collection of silk batik’s made by 88 artists which were the result of a 1988 project working towards an exhibition titled Utopia, a Picture Story. The project was documented in a book of the same name, published by the Holmes à Court’s and on one of our visits some years later, we took the book with us to show the
It all began in 1998 when a friend who had worked in the Alice (Alice Springs in the Northern Territory) was nostalgic for both her friends and the beautiful country. She was thinking of a visit back and I immediately said “I’ve never been to Alice Springs – I’ll come!” I hadn’t been invited, but hey – now it was a plan. Since that time, I have stopped counting at over fifty visits to the centre, either directly to The Alice or on the way to visit a remote community art centre and make valuable and onngoing connections with such. I loved it. I loved the country, I loved the people and as my friend went back to visit her friends involved in the Aboriginal art world – I was on cloud nine – beautiful country, beautiful art – a whole new world. It was
