Today I met with the wonderful locally-based painter Angus Nivison, as well as Arts North West director Caroline Downer, New England Regional Art Museum Director Rachael Parsons and NERAM exhibition director Belinda Hungerford, to plan the final stages for a wonderful collaborative exhibition that Angus and I are creating. Called Angel Time, it will open on July 1 at NERAM and will go till August 28. It is something that grew out of an Arts North West workshop last year called Looking Both Ways, where artists and writers were paired together to create joint works. Angus and I led that workshop and part of it was that he and I would then create works for an exhibition this year. Angus had recently read my book The Ghost Squad and to my delight he loved it so much that he decided to use it as the basis for a series of paintings, based on certain elements of the book and its themes and allusions. Then, based on my seeing these paintings, in my turn I created some new pieces for several of his artworks: poems, prose, song lyrics and more…As well, for several of the paintings directly inspired by incidents or moments in the book, I’ve recorded short readings from The Ghost Squad.
It’s been such an inspiring and exciting process–and today, with both painting and word-based works created, it was all at the stage where we could sit down with the NERAM directors and talk about how it will all be shown in the physical space of the gallery. It’s going to be just amazing, I can’t wait!
Feathers of the Firebird 
Fantastic, Sophie! I would so love to see this exhibition. You might inspire us to make a road trip in August…
Takes me back to 1984 when I wrote a play performed in NERAM called Mirrors, about womenâs attitudes to their bodies, in collaboration with Uralla artist Fay Porter and Ann Ghandar, the distinguished local composer, embedded within an exhibition of paintings about women curated by NERAM.
So exciting working collaboratively with people from different art forms…
Enjoy it…
Wendy Blaxland
writer
https://wendyblaxlandwriter.com
19 Lisa Valley Close Wahroonga NSW 2076 AUSTRALIA
ph +61 02 9489 4955, m 0411 071 273
I watched a white bird fly away
till it vanished into the blue sky.
My spirit returned,
calm from its flight.
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Thank you, Wendy! Hope you can indeed make it to the exhibition. It’s going to be great!
That sounds like a wonderful collaboration you were involved in at NERAM too–it is indeed so exciting to be working with people from other art forms, so inspiring…
all the very best, Sophie
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What a fun project Sophie!! Looks great.. hope the artwork and exhibition go brilliantly..
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Thanks very much!
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