IMAGE – COUNTRY OUTSIDE OF UMOONA COMMUNITY/COOBER PEDY. PIC COURTESY OF UMOONA COMMUNITY ARTS

WE ARE DELIGHTED TO PRESENT OUR LATEST EXHIBITION, A GROUP SHOW OR NEW WORK FROM THE UMOONA COMMUNITY ARTS CENTRE.

TITLED NEW BEGINNINGS – THIS PRESENTATION OF WORK, FROM FIVE STRONG FEMALE ARTISTS, CELEBRATES A NEW CHAPTER, AS THE ARTISTS ACKNOWLEDGE A SUCCESSFUL FIRST YEAR IN THE COOBER PEDY BASED STUDIO.

‘Umoona Community Art Centre (UCAC) approaches the twelve-month anniversary of our Art Centre building. If we take the studio’s physical architecture as the body and the artists as it heart and blood, one can allude to corporeal systems of growth and renewal seen as both monumental pivots and granular shifts, but always new beginnings. A lot can happen in a year, and a lot has. 

The selected artists have each entered new phases relative to their practice, specifically repetition in line and form. It is these subtle yet at times dramatic formal progressions that unite them in their visual language depicting Country as patterned multiples.

NEW BEGINNINGS marks the first public exhibition of emerging artist Maureen Young whose depiction of bush fruits marries abstract line drawings with the graphic pictograms of the touristic genre. Myra Kumantjara continues to explore and innovate her visual style inherited from Mother Jeannie Minunga and Aunty Kay Finn. For NEW BEGINNINGS she lets loose in her dual-colour gradations that move across the canvas like the wind over sand dunes. Pearl Austin, fresh from her commission with Country Road Australia, redresses three pieces that she first began in November 2024 and left aside to focus on other paintings. Her works on display are layered with time – new beginnings over the palimpsest of her signature drips and flicks. Pauline Lewis Parrott continues her linear explorations. Jillian Williams revisits her foliate forms first painted at the opening of the studio, she takes from her visual archive to reinvest it with her current thematic concerns around layers of community and genealogies.’

UMOONA COMMUNITY ART CENTRE

EXHIBITION OPENS FRIDAY 31ST OCTOBER 2025

THANK YOU TO THE ARTISTS AND UMOONA FOR THE OPPORTUNITY TO PRESENT THESE WORKS.

ENQUIRIES

E – TOBY.OSMOND@AES.ORG.AU

P – +61 2 6794 3280