EXHIBITING over the next two months at the City Art Gallery is an exhibition by four South Australian artists who spent the past two years travelling to and drawing inspiration from the natural and manmade landscape and environment of Broken Hill.
Kathryn Hill, Robyn Zerna-Russell, Barbara Palmer and Ray Meandering regularly engage in artist residencies in regional towns, where they create work informed by their location.
Their residency with the Broken Hill Art Exchange over the past two years has culminated in their current exhibition Journey 7: Journey in Human Landscape in Broken Hill.
The group have been a part of six trips before Broken Hill, and this is the first time they’ve journeyed out of South Australia to make work.
“We go to different places and Broken Hill was one that came up in a series of places we looked at,” Palmer said.
“So we go and research and live for a moment of time and come up with an exhibition based on that area.”
Meandering already had connections with Broken Hill, having been affiliated with the Broken Hill Art Exchange prior to the group making the trip.
Zerna-Russell said the group first visited to begin their project in 2023.
“We’ve done a number of different regions in South Australia and this is the first one interstate,” she said.
“We go to the area, stay a week or two weeks at a time.
“We stayed at the Broken Hill Art Exchange and tried to immerse ourselves in the area and find out as much information, experiment, paint, draw and photograph.”
Meandering said the group come into a new location without any preconceived ideas about the work that will result from their residency.
“The environment has a voice, and we listen to that voice and follow its thinking, and ideas come and we find something to connect to,” she said.
Hill said all four artists have their own individual arts practices, though they all look to push the boundaries of what they know and experiment with new mediums.
“I think we all look to find a way of expressing our ideas so we’re not always painting, using photography, using the same method,” she said.
“We come fairly open-minded as to what we might find within the space to relate to, and then go away and think about how to represent those ideas.”
Zerna-Russell said that no place the group has visited is alike, and Broken Hill was no exception.
“Every place we go to has her own essence that is very different to the previous,” she said.
“I would say one of the interesting things about Broken Hill is the sense of the human story of the city.
“The disparity in some ways between the fairly simple dwellings that a lot of people live in, corrugated iron and similar materials, juxtaposed against the wealth of some of the older buildings.”
Each artist has created work based on their individual experience of Broken Hill, and their exhibition can be seen at the Broken Hill City Art Gallery until July 6.
