LIBRE: the art of being: curated by Samantha Lawrence

14 February - 22 March 2025

  • Opening

    6-8pm

    Friday 14 February, 2024

    LIBRE: the art of being reflects on a world where exploring your sense of self is profoundly personal and intimate, while at the same time, LGBTQIA+ expression and freedoms are constantly debated within mainstream discourse. Each artist has approached the idea of what is feels to be free from their own perspective. Whether that it is honouring the past, challenging stereotypes and cultural norms, claiming back language, exploring the physicality of the body or exploring the deepest thoughts of the mind. The exhibition brings together diverse stories across place, time and experience, manifesting in different forms that collectively challenge, celebrate and embrace who we are.

  • Artists
    Christine Dean
    Scott Elk
    David Elliot
    Alun Rhys Jones
    Deborah Kelly
    Charlotte Hughes Martin
    Francis Meow
    Elnaz Nourizadeh
    Anna Parsons
    Janice Raynor
    Alison Smiles
    Nick Stathopoulos
    Lynnea Stewart
    Tom Summers
    Jayanto Tan
    Emily Valentine
     
    View all works

  • Alun RHYS JONES (B.1970)

    The "Agenda" series of fine art prints are imagined as a response to the question, "What if LGBTQIA+ identities really were lifestyle choices?" and posits this assumption with how marketing, branding and advertising would be used to actively promote these identities, appeal to new audiences and attract new consumers to take up their mantras.

  • Deborah Kelly, Mermaids in Space, 2024

    Deborah Kelly (B.1962)

     

    "For over 4 decades I have worked in various modes of cultural production. My first works were as a teenage feminist cartoonist, then a DJ in the queer club (with free childcare) that my friends and I ran for ten years. I worked in publishing, mainly for trade unions and for womens' and queer publications, for centuries. Somehow I became a contemporary artist, an enduring surprise to me. All these labours express the same preoccupations: representation, politics, collectivity and transformation; sex, gender, justice, pleasure. Many of my works emerge from the practice of collage, in very various manifestations.  Since 2019 I've been making a collaborative multi-artform project in the form of a queer insurrectionary science fiction climate change religion called CREATION. Some of the material presented in this exhibition is physical traces of CREATION and some is its ancestral lineage."

  • Elnaz Nourizadeh (B.1985)

    "I create and play with shapes and forms to understand my complex being. I dove into my feelings and emotions, and I watch my thoughts. They are showing me my true self under the pail of lines, shapes of meaning, and descriptions the culture and society give me.  Tomorrow is another day; I break through every day, every second, step by step; what matters is the form I am now. I'll learn to face more of the masks I didn't even know I had until now. I'm strong as I choose to carry the sky, which is honest and pure, whether it is stormy, cloudy or a beautiful sunny day."
     

  • Emily Valentine (B.1952)

    “I have made new work in my popular Dog Flu series where I have introduced jewellery showing how we pamper our pets. The platypus broach reflects the declining state of the Australian habitat causing the threatened state of many of our birds, plants, animals and insects. I wish to stimulate the viewer, and to question our callous treatment of birds, and ask how we sub consciously classify animals – pet or pest, valued or worthless, beautiful or plain and why.”

     
  • Anna Parsons (B.1973) CLAY RECEIVES ME WEAVING INSTINCTIVELY BOUNCING OFF MY INNER PSYCHOLOGY MATERIALITY...CHEMISTRY...BODILY I CAST SHADOWS 'There is a...

    Anna Parsons (B.1973)

    CLAY RECEIVES ME

    WEAVING INSTINCTIVELY

    BOUNCING OFF MY INNER PSYCHOLOGY

    MATERIALITY...CHEMISTRY...BODILY

    I CAST SHADOWS


    "There is a respect for the material in my work. I am not alone, the clay has a memory and an intelligence. As I give to it, it gives to me, a friendly medium, an easy opening - drawing me in physically and revealing what is inside. "

     

  • Janice Raynor (B.1953)

    This exhibition, "LIBRE: the art of being ..." with its focus on freedom, inspired "LIBERTY Leading the MARDI GALAHS" which whimsically references Eugene Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People," commemorating the July Revolution in Paris in 1830. The traditional French TRICOLOUR now references the TRANS Flag and their fight for acceptance, while the Mardi Galah figures acknowledge the multi-talented Performance artists, innovative couturiers, and activists for Queer Rights, Koala protection and freedom of artistic expression, the fabulous HUXLEYS!

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