Arts Scene Diary Notes - A Tale of Two Galleries

Last Friday night, Gayle O’Leary, our Arts Editor, was out and about – as she reports here!

It’s Friday night and perfect for a stroll.

The Found and Sorted Gallery, on the corner of Wray Avenue and South Terrace, looks cosy and inviting from outside. We’re in for a treat because Canadian couple Don and Louise Pentz have just emigrated to Australia to join their son and inside is their New Arrivals exhibition.

After admiring the works on the walls and helping myself to a nice little wine and canapes, I took the opportunity to ask the artists all about it. They’re not too accustomed to speaking at length about themselves but I’m not the smoothest talker either, so we got along marvellously.

Don’s son is an archaeologist, and together they would travel into the West Australian landscape for work. He got into the habit of sketching what he saw, and felt compelled to reveal their hidden secrets. Australian scenery is stunning in its own right but looking at the surface doesn’t necessarily tell you what’s happening underneath, where the real magic lies. Seams of water, or even lava, flowing against rockface. Graduations and striations in stratum. The skull of a dinosaur, which I initially mistook for limestone. When you look closely, you’ll see snippets of texture and contrasting colour in the canvases bursting with vibrancy.

Louise practiced as a ceramicist for thirty years until she decided to try her hand at something new. Inspired by the experience of immigration, and the emotions leaving one’s home evokes, she scribbles impressions of script onto parchment, presses coins, and stitches patches of fabric together reminiscent of the homemade quilts relatives would gift their loved ones from recycled textiles including clothes and aprons. The rice husk paper and ink caught my eye, I asked if it’s challenging to work with but Louise loves it, both the rough and smooth sides, and her work shows it. Miraculously, she found a bundle of the paper in an antique shop in Guildford and got it for a steal.

New Arrivals is showing at Lost and Found until 30 July.

Louise:
I am a new arrival to Australia who wonders how to feel ‘Home’ now.
Immigrants bring not only their memories of home, family and culture, but also the valued fragments and swatches they have carried from those places – the handwritten letters, the photographs, the significant cloth, the heirloom. We treasure these tactile vessels which hold powerful connections for us to cherish from times, places and people who are no longer present.
The written words, in their orderly rows, are most powerful for me. Their content is personal so I leave their meaning up to the imagination of the viewer.
The quilt is a metaphor for “Home” as it is made slowly by hand to give shelter and comfort to the family.
Four squares represent stability and security; the quilt is a tangible symbol of warmth, protection and family history. It’s a labor of love and community, frequently made from previously owned family clothes.
I’ve used antique, handmade, Asian rice-husk paper to record the ‘written’ ink marks, and water stains from my new island home.
The repeated figure drawing is a sister, though I may never have met her.
This solitary poet has left her written marks recording her thoughts, of ‘Home’?
I want viewers to experience calm from the natural materials, the quiet watermarks, and the slow labor of the stitching. Each one may engage in their own imaginings of what the lines of the poems may hold.

Don:
I am a visual artist that responds to wild country – open space, woodlands, ocean shorelines, or rolling valleys.
I reinterpret what lsee and feel, and respond to it through abstracted shapes, colour, and texture.
I might have an over-all vision of design in mind, but I’m also willing to let intuition or “gut- reaction” dictate unexpected directions in the image’s development.
The eye and mind of the beholder complete the journey.
I moved to Australia in 2022 and abandoned my three-colour restriction (black, white, iron oxide) and began painting with a full range of acrylic stains and pigments. The ancient landscape of the Australian outback prompted a new connection with country; my focus went underground. My compositions now draw from a land stained by floods, melted by lava, wildfire scorched, and dried by sun; a landscape of compression and upheaval, pulled apart, textured and reshaped. I travel the Outback landscape sketching the seams and colours folded in the layering of rock and sediment. Returning to my studio, I try to give visual expression to what I see, feel, and encounter on my Walkabout experiences.

Next up, a quick kebab stop while heading through the Cappuccino Strip, a curious blend of crowds leaving the sauna and others entering a rave at Hybrid Warehouse on the corner of Quarry Street and Parry Street, and then a moment to admire the sight of a massive cargo ship in the harbour before heading to the next stop at the corner of Beach Street and James Street.

An entirely different scene.

Cheap Tongue Gallery shares a space with Case Frames and other makers. It’s also the current proud home of the Commonwealth of New Bayswater installation. Tonight, curated by Fault, it features the Cul de Sac exhibition, the works of 17 artists in various mediums all centralised on the magneticism of home, sometimes suburban life, and its pull on us even as we move away.

One installation evoked delicate East Asian ink painting with self-composed music, another hoisted three metal pails above a sandbed. One beautiful installation invited us to sit and listen to a deeply personal recording about grief, and asked “who don’t you have to perform for?” Another featured a mobile phone, described as a “vintage telephone” and reminded me I was indeed surrounded by people born this side of the 2000s.

Cul de sac exhibited from July 3 – 5

“Cul de Sac is a collaborative exhibition that takes its name from a piece of ordinary suburban infrastructure: a street closed at one end. You arrive, you turn around, and you leave the way you came. Not a wrong turn. Not a failure of navigation. Just a place that asks you to pause before moving on. A place that makes turning-back feel, for a moment, intentional.

The exhibition asks: what does it feel like to stand at the boundary of something: a relationship, a chapter, a version of yourself, and realise that only now, here, do you finally understand it? Each contributing work takes the Cul de Sac not as a failure of navigation, but as a natural feature of the landscape, an invitation to pause and to reckon. To make meaning out of what came before, even as life insists on moving forward.

17 artists spanning geographies with one shared human experience.

Reuben Black, Basim Boulos, Melody Crouch, Bianca De Ritis, Thomas Earnshaw, Joshua Foti, Sarah Hasselerharm, Heritier Kasanda, Jordan Nesic, Victoria Ondrusek-Roy, Ahmed Ragab, Yuxian Seow, Yuliang Seow, Tajevir Singh, Nikki Singh, Cedric Tang, and Lilybelle Tarr.”

* By Gayle O’Leary. If you’d like to catch up on more by Gayle here on Fremantle Shipping News, look right here!

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