XX, curated by Bundaberg Regional Galleries Director Rebecca McDuff, is a celebration of contemporary female ceramicists and the power of the female touch in shaping this medium as a vessel for self-expression.

Featuring work by Juz Kitson, Bonnie Hislop, Mary-Lou Hogarth, Kara Wood, Avi Amesbury, the Hermannsburg Potters, and emerging First Nations potters, this exhibition offers new perspectives on this traditional art form.

Ceramics are often the under-sung hero in the arts world, known for their functionality rather than their creativity. XX challenges these traditional notions, with works that are as artistic as their creators, and that lead the viewer on a storytelling journey.

With never before seen pieces, commissioned specifically for this exhibition, XX promises to be as enigmatic and enticing as its title suggests.

Image: Juz Kitson, You are stronger than you think, You are more than you know, 2022, stoneware, raku, oxides, multiple glazes.

Award winning duo The Ironing Maidens (Patty Preece and Melania Jack) are invigorating The Vault with their latest installation Mother Controller.

In this interactive work, using a mixture of projected visuals, lighting, music, and props, the gestures of the audience affect the projected image - they can make the character iron, but also make her break free from the traditional, monotonous gestures of ironing left to right.

Raising the questions of how do we wrestle back control from gendered socialisation?  How do we get back our bodies and our time?  Who is controlling us? Who are we controlling?

The Ironing Maidens are known for breaking new ground in music technology and have featured at Germany's famous Fusion Festival, the Performing Arts Festival Berlin, Byron Bay's Falls Festival, and Woodford Folk Festival, and have won Innovation awards at the Adelaide Fringe Festival and New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) Mexico.

Image: Installation View Mother Controller

Always soft, Always strong is an exhibition by Meeanjin-based, multidisciplinary artist Dr Karike Ashworth.

This gently provocative exhibition addresses the often contradictory experience of being a woman in a supposedly post-feminist society. The work in the exhibition covers a selection of works the artist made between 2015 and 2023, many of which developed in response to Dr Ashworth’s previous touring exhibition "Lamentation", as well as her experiences navigating IVF and the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition combines the unassuming intimacy of ‘the domestic’ together with instances of bemusing hyper-performance.

Image: Karike Ashworth, Who Gives a Crap, 2022, sculptural installation.

Transformed through community and school workshops, the anonymous letters from our former Message in a Bottle project have been reimagined as an installation experience Creating Contrast.

We invite participants to create contrast using hand crafted recycled paper, printed with cyanotype, to form a unique box that will contribute to an organically evolving installation.

Audiences will be invited into playful, sublime, poetic, and cautionary explorations of contemporary works and installations by nationally significant artists including those based in North Queensland.

Drawing on the detritus of the human epoch, these worlds have their own internal iconographies and languages existing in alternate time and space.

The exhibition engages with contemporary discourse in object-oriented ontology, vegetal thinking, and the post-Anthropocene. New fictions rendered in the past, present, and future provide alternate perspectives on the environment, gender, and capitalist hegemony.

POSTWORLD is co-curated by Kate O’Hara and Daniel Qualischefski of Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts and commissioned by NAFA.

Image: Rhonda Stevens, Reflections at the Touchstone, 2022, Polystyrene, cement, resin and mirror. Photo credit: Amanda Galea. (image detail).

Contemplate is the latest solo exhibition by Queensland artist, Kym Barrett.

Extending on her abstract landscape painting practice, this exhibition presents new experimental work that responds directly to her home landscape, more specifically the creek at the rear of her property. For over 30 years, this creek, lush with rainforest, has offered Barrett a natural, nourishing and refreshing place to breathe deeply, always gifting her with rich visual imagery to embed into her memory. In Contemplate the artist has created a similar contemplative space for the viewer, bringing her distinctive practice to bear in creating the installation and soundscape.

Image: Kym Barrett, Dad's Heart, 2023, photograph (image detail).

These artists highlight the diversity of voices and experiences within the queer community, and the multitude of ways LGBTIQ+ people learn to survive and thrive in the face of ultra conservative tenets and suppression.

Spanning generations and diverse media including video, sculpture, textile, photography and painting, the exhibition spotlights early and mid-career artists alongside established figures from Australia's art canon to give an intergenerational overview of the discrimination and lack of understanding that continues to exist in contemporary society.

The Closet presents artworks that are critical, celebratory, political and personal, but within each work is a call for better understanding and empathy, and recognition of their indefatigable resilience.

Exhibiting artists: James Barth, Troy-Anthony Baylis, Jorge M. Brito, Courtney Coombs, Easton Dunne, James Gleeson, Aaron Hoffman, Patrick Lester, Peter Waples-Crowe, William Yang

Image Credit: Patrick Lester, Bundy R. Bear, 2018, digital print on paper

The exhibition comprises 47 works by finalists selected from a national field of entries, reflecting the distinctive vision of Australia's aspiring and professional portrait photographers and the unique nature of their subjects.

Established by the National Portrait Gallery to support and celebrate photographic portraiture in Australia, the NPPP was first awarded in 2007 and has since become a highlight of the National Portrait Gallery's annual calendar, attracting thousands of entries each year.

Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Bree Pickering said "The NPPP is a beloved national prize that supports the Australian photographic community and enlarges our collective experience of the Australian people, from the well-known and celebrated to local heroes and identities. It is a pillar of the gallery's traveling exhibition program, which sees many rich and varied examples of photographic portraiture shared with audiences across the country."

This exhibition is supported by the National Collecting Institutions Touring and Outreach Program, an Australian Government Initiative, aiming to improve access to the national collections for all Australians.

Image credit: Heidi Margocsy, Brave New World, 2022, Digital Photograph (image detail).

Children and families can take part in a range of fun art-making activities by contemporary Australian artist Natalya Hughes when ‘The Castle of Tarragindi on Tour’ comes to Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery.

Developed in collaboration with the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), ‘The Castle of Tarragindi on Tour’ invites audiences to create their own digital hybrid creature, decorate and assemble a 3D object, make elaborate patterns using printed paper, and take part in self-portrait drawing activities.

Hughes creates paintings, textiles, sculptures and installations informed by decorative and ornamental traditions. In ‘The Castle of Tarragindi’, the artist has chosen to explore ‘grotesque’ design, a specific tradition of ornament known for its hybridity.

‘The Castle of Tarragindi on Tour’ features a striking blue and white palette inspired by a grotesque castle interior by French designer, architect, and engraver Jean Bérain (1640–1711). Hughes has also included imagery of things that are important to her in the activity materials – such as the Australian flora and fauna found close to her home in the Brisbane suburb of Tarragindi. As part of the project, visitors will be able to view an introductory video where Hughes shares her thoughts on the inspiration and concepts behind ’The Castle of Tarragindi’.

Image: Natalya Hughes: The Castle of Tarragindi, Children's Art Centre, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, September 2023. Photograph: C Callistemon/ copyright QAGOMA.

Soft Pressing by Brisbane based artist, Simon Degroot, is an exhibition that investigates and encourages interaction with surfaces that make up our everyday environments.

Using the process of frottage, whereby paper is pressed to a wall, footpath, or other surface and rubbed with graphite or charcoal, the artist has captured mediated surfaces that connect us to the places we live. Inspired by the built environment within the Bundaberg region, as well as other buildings and textured structures in Queensland, Degroot has used his recordings of surfaces to inspire drawing and printed interventions through his studio practice.

This is the first iteration of a regional touring exhibition which will develop across five venues, including Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery, Shoalhaven Art Gallery, The Condensery, Redland Art Gallery, and Dogwood Crossing.

Image: Simon Degroot, Caerula Vinea, 2023, oil on linen (image detail).

What does a week in the life of a farm worker look like?

This exhibition captures the everyday rhythms of seasonal work, as photographed by the people who migrate to Australia to do much needed farming labour: people from the Pacific Islands and Timor-Leste, or the backpackers doing a “working holiday” – they are a vital part of the history of Childers and regional Queensland. Photographs taken by seasonal workers on disposable film cameras show their typical daily life while in Australia: toiling in the fields, on shuttle busses to and from the farms, living in shared dormitories, and enjoying their well-deserved days off.

Seasonal is collated by artist and researcher Dr Kaya Barry, as part of a three-year project investigating the value and contribution of seasonal migrants to Queensland’s horticultural communities.

Kaya Barry is an installation and photographic artist, based in Meanjin Brisbane. Her works pay close attention to the mundane and material aspects of daily life for migrants, tourists, and people whose lives are constantly on the move. She has exhibited at galleries in Australia and internationally, and is currently working on a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council on the contribution of seasonal migration to Queensland’s horticultural communities. Kaya is a Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Griffith University.

Image: Kaya Barry, Seasonal Exhibition Promotional Image, 2022, photograph (image detail).

Individually esteemed for their notable contributions to the realm of art and community, they also played a pivotal role in the advancement of the Bundaberg Art Society, being active members for over five decades.

Charles + Sheena shines a light on this incredible artistic duo and their artworks that form part of the Bundaberg Regional Galleries Collection. It also includes rare items, such as an early 1946 artwork by Charles Hazzard, and letters sent home by Charles during his army deployment during World War II.

Image: Sheena Hazzard, Banksia, 1992, watercolour on paper (image detail).