Past Events › Exhibitions

Local legend Frank Oakes invites you into a world of wizardry, wonder and fairy tales created through the ancient art of puppetry.

For Suzanne Archer, travel has been one of the most powerful challenges and enriching source of artistic expansion. From travelling with camera, sketchbook and notebook in hand, Archer has amassed a collection of travel journals that have recently begun transforming into artist books. Her journeys have taken her to Europe, Africa, Thailand, China, Bali, USA, and domestically throughout Australia, with this exhibition including a variety of media collected from and in response to the idea of Travel and Self. Suzanne…

Nola comes from a long standing tradition of painting en plein air, artwork created ‘in the moment’, painted and worked on in situ. Nola can often be working in her magnificent home garden or out in the field during her many trips overseas. Nola’s subjects are often domestic or people enjoying themselves in a café in the sun. But there are glimpse of grandeur here in Italy, France or in her own backyard.

This exhibition invites current members of the Maitland Region Society of Artists to create a new work of art which celebrates what Maitland means to them. As part of the process each artist will contribute to a poem which will be written and displayed as their gift to Maitland.

Showcasing the hauntingly beautiful collaboration between acclaimed artist Del Kathryn Barton, celebrated director Brendan Fletcher and award-winning visual effects house Method Studios, this milestone exhibition traces the interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s 19th century classic through a sophisticated artistic lens. A shining example of multidisciplinary partnerships across the creative arts, Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose has its genesis in a commission by ArtAnd Foundation (previously Art&Australia), who asked Del Kathryn Barton in 2010 to reimagine a timeless fairytale. Layered…

Stories from Wonnarua Country is a series of artworks made by students from seven local schools who have been exploring what it means to be living on Wonnarua Country today.
The artists have been led by their student colleagues who are the leaders of  their school -based Junior Aboriginal Education Consultative Group.

Operation Art is an exhibition of 50 selected artworks by students from schools across New South Wales who have been invited to create uplifting works for other children. The exhibition is an initiative of The Children’s Hospital at Westmead in association with the NSW Department of Education and will include artworks by students from Hunter and the Central Coast schools.

In 2003 and at the height of his career, Australian art critic and broadcaster, Bruce James, left Sydney and returned to his home town of Ayr in the Burdekin delta in Queensland and became the painter Cutler Footway. My North features both the expansive landscapes of the artist’s home and still life studies in a rich palette of colour. As a satellite story to this exhibition, MRAG will present Cutler Footway’s inspirations, through the work of Grace Cossington Smith and…

The building of a cubby in the bush is easily overlooked as childish and insignificant. However the interaction between a person and their environment is far from trivial. By being in and interacting with the ecosystems around them, a child is given the opportunity to take on a knowledge of the natural world and develop a bond to the environment in which their life takes place. This bond is the foundation of a person’s environmentally ethical decision-making in adulthood. Through…

David Griggs explores the darker undercurrents of human existence. His work, predominately portraiture, focuses on the human condition; drawing on political imagery, underground media, local histories and personal experience. Famous for his bold anarchistic approach, Griggs takes the everyday and flips it to expose the cracks, exhuming the raw undercurrent of a society. He documents intimate chance moments and the deliberate actions of his friends, and strangers, within an unidentifiable Manila. His work is often collaborative, engaging directly with communities…

Lucas Davidson has created the site specific exhibition Casual Forces for the two levels of the Art Factory exhibition space. Using mirrored surfaces, geometric shapes, repetition and scale Casual Forces aims to challenge viewer perception, questioning the identification and interpretation of the work and the surrounding environment. Casual Forces invites a slower kind of looking that places emphasis on viewer attention and the present moment.

As a part of Artastique, local artist James Rhodes will be exhibiting his work Tangled Up, from his Fond Illusion series in the Gallery's front window. "This site-specific work explores the changing nature of emotional states due to the amount of information given to us. Through the materiality of the work, and the space it is viewed in, the way in which the image is experienced by an audience change as the light of the day changes. The amount of natural…