Creative Connections 2025

If you love Ekphrastic Poetry as much as we at the Shipping News do, you won’t want to miss this exhibition!

The annual Creative Connections exhibition is on again, providing a wonderful opportunity for artists with complex needs to present their work alongside poems by local WA poets responding to them.

In the process, the exhibition challenges the notion that creativity must languish in the background behind economic achievement, the bustle and thrust of everyday life and the complex threads of politics, and declares that creativity is important to humanity and is valued highly in our community.

Creative Connections began in 2005 with Maureen Sexton, a poet with a daughter in a Disability Services Commission hostel, and DSC worker Sandra Foster. Sandra had been to a Spring Poetry Festival exhibition run by WA Poets Inc, of which Maureen was a founding member, and was impressed with the community atmosphere. From that discussion, the idea surfaced to organise an art and poetry exhibition.

When complete, each image of an artist’s artwork is offered to two poets who respond to the piece from their personal perspective. This kind of poetry is known as Ekphrastic, a vivid written description of a work of art. Here are a couple examples of the images in the Exhibition to which the poets have responded. You’ll find around 50 at the exhibition, and two poems for each!

Ekphrastic poetry is not only a very creative process, but a whole lot of fun too.

DETAILS OF THE EXHIBITION

The launch: Creative Connections 2025 will be launched this Saturday, 22 November from 1 – 3pm.

Venue: Hamilton Hill Memorial Hall, corner Carrington Street & Rockingham Road, Hamilton Hill

Exhibition times: only Sunday, 23 November, Wednesday, 26 November, and Saturday, 30 November, between 10 am and 4 pm

THE ANTHOLOGY

You will also be interested to learn that Creative Connections generates an anthology of the artwork and poetry each year that can be purchased at the exhibition.