Since its inception more than 50 years ago, the vision for the Curtin University Art Collection has been to provide students and staff on campus with a valuable educational and cultural resource, and one that would contribute to the enrichment of the wider community. This vision lives on through curators past and present as they share and showcase the Collection’s vast examples of contemporary art practice.
This amazing collection of over 3,200 objects integrates art into everyday experiences, and features more than 36 public artworks across the Bentley campus. Sharing these artworks ensures that art becomes a part of students’ everyday life, providing points for discussion, contemplation, reflection and learning. From the library to offices and communal spaces these original artworks provoke curiosity, spark conversations and share important stories.
Drawn from the Curtin University Art Collection, these two new exhibitions at the John Curtin Gallery include artworks dating across the history of the University to the present day. Curated by Lia McKnight Dirt Feeling features ceramic works from the Collection, while Everyday, Myths and Legends, curated by Director A/Prof Susanna Castleden, presents works by Curtin alumni. Both exhibitions put the Collection into a rich new context, showcasing a diverse range of artistic practices.
The Collection continues to grow each year through strategic acquisitions, public art commissions and gifts and it is exciting to see several recent acquisitions and donations feature in both these exhibitions. This includes new ceramic artworks by First Nations artists shown for the first time in Dirt Feeling. Identified as a strategic and important investment these new acquisitions strengthen our significant commitment to acquiring and sharing First Nations artworks. Two artworks featured in Everyday, Myths and Legends were recent purchases from the Curtin Fine Art Degree Show exhibition, an annual event celebrating the dedication and creativity of graduating Fine Art students.
These two exhibitions are a testament to the foresight and vision that underpins the Curtin University Art Collection, and I congratulate the John Curtin Gallery team for continuing to share this valuable Collection.
Professor Harlene Hayne CNZM, Vice-Chancellor, Curtin University
EVERYDAY, MYTHS AND LEGENDS
The Atrium space is watched over by two golden sentinels that appear to welcome, or perhaps guard, the space as we enter. Tarryn Gill’s Guardian (Gold Sphinx) (2017) is a feline-like form that could be a distant cousin of a concrete lion perched above a suburban letterbox. Yet this form is warm, velvety and shimmering, with human hands and feet poised in gentle, eyes-closed contemplation. Opposite, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s Everything is true (2012) leans toward us in a parallel gesture of engagement. Its presence is so much larger than the coveted Schleich dinosaurs of childhood, but so much smaller that the imagination might allow in an encounter with a real one.
Everyday, Myths and Legends brings together artworks by Curtin alumni that weave through ideas of suburbia, childhood memories, heroes, family, and storytelling. Each work offers a sense of familiarity and ordinariness while suggesting a subtle shift or transformation, providing a generous insight into the rich diversity of the Curtin University Art Collection.
Richard Giblett’s cibachrome print Freeway Circle (1989) explores urban landscapes through his interest in geometric networks and the built environment. As the earliest work in the exhibition – acquired from the graduating Fine Art cohort of 1990 – it highlights the University’s ongoing commitment to supporting graduates. Two of the newest acquisitions are by graduates from 2024, Mim Kowner and Grace Yong, who went on to be selected in this year’s prestigious Hatched National Graduate Show at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA). Kowner’s Untitled (night game) (2024) features the gloved hands of an Australian women’s national football player, sourced from television footage from their Paris Olympic campaign. The work reflects on the Matildas’ profound influence on Australia’s contemporary sporting identity. Yong’s video work her name, an anthology (2024) explores tensions between family histories and language within a mixed-culture identity. Recently awarded the Dr Harold Schenberg Prize, the work recounts her greatgrandmother’s name change, offering insight into cultural and generational transitions.
Laurel Nannup’s woodcut tells the story of her Uncle Lionel taking her and her siblings on a journey to see a tree that appeared to magically grow lollies. Depicting a fond childhood memory that sits in contrast with many of Nannup’s other prints, this work provides an insight into family connections and resilience.
Themes of family, friendship and portraiture link the works of Ilona McGuire, Chloe Tupper, Mary Moore and Zoe Chong Seng, each highlighting the closeness of connection between artist and their subjects. McGuire’s screenprint is developed from a photograph of her grandfather and references the stolen wages era in Western Australia (1936 to 1972) when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were paid little or nothing for their labour. She recounts how her Pop, Walter McGuire Snr, worked tirelessly without compensation through much of his life. Chloe Tupper’s delicately painted, Lyn, collections, II (2009) depicts what looks like an everyday scene.
Left: Laurel Nannup, ...they thought it just wonderful that their uncle should find a lolly tree..., 2001, woodcut, chine collé on BFK paper, 57.8 x 57.8 cm, purchased from the Curtin University Art Degree Show, 2002.
Tupper describes the work as a portrait of a generous-spirited individual who found harmony in her garden and animals. Mary Moore’s painting study and maquettes for portrait of Elizabeth Jolley (2003) depicts the acclaimed author with the tender, materially astute painting skills Moore has become so well recognised for. The artwork that was developed from this study is held in the National Portrait Gallery collection, a testament to the standing Moore has as one of Australia’s best regarded portrait painters. Chong Seng’s work Deep Breath – let it out (2011) was painted while living in Perth, far from her home in the Seychelles. This work captures both the physical absence and emotional presence of the figure, evoking a tender connection to both.
The idea of an affective atmosphere - the ability to capture a feeling of a place - can prompt reflection on what might seem like a quotidian or unremarkable moment. A suburban puddle or a grey petrol station scene, when rendered in paint, might shift our urban consciousness toward a new way of encountering and experiencing places. Oil paintings by Gina Moore and Nicole Slatter, along with Leah Chidlow’s suspended mixed media work, gesture towards this atmospheric turn, each skilfully capturing moments of everyday scenes, prompting new ways of seeing familiar urban spaces.
Tom Mùller and Bruce Slatter’s objects are synonymous with travel and movement, both practical, functional and effective. Passports and pocketknives could also indicate ruptures to seamless travel, where they might become signifiers of impasse or even delinquency. It is the creative transformation in Slatter’s oversized pocketknife and Mùller’s World Passport (2000) that makes us consider these objects anew.
The most recent addition to the Curtin University Art Collection is Emma Buswell’s Reflections and Revelations (2025) a stitched work constructed using a domestic knitting machine. Part of Buswell’s ongoing series critically engaging with mythology, political systems, and class, the work draws from the myth of Narcissus and Echo. Buswell reveals how early examples of moral storytelling, ethics and mythology frame the ways in which our current day political systems and environments have been established, particularly in the western context.
Through works that span decades, this exhibition presents a small insight into the diverse range of alumni artworks held in the Curtin University Art Collection. Together, the works in Everyday, Myths and Legends invite us to reconsider the familiar - whether through memory, myth, or material. They speak to the power of storytelling in shaping identity, place, and history, and they remind us that the everyday is never truly ordinary.
Associate Professor Susanna Castleden Director, John Curtin Gallery
Left to right: Leah Chidlow, Green slip/Blue slip, 2019, mixed media on masonite, 59.5 x 91.4 x 3 cm (double sided), purchased from the Curtin University Art Degree Show, 2020. Emma Buswell, Reflections and Revelations, 2025, wool, cotton and lurex yarn, 153.2 x 114.5 x 5.7 cm, commissioned 2024. Penny Evans, Grandmother’s Mark Wall Plaque, 2023, white stoneware, black slip, underglaze, red iron oxide, clear glaze, sgraffito, purchased 2025. Next page: Eileen Keys, Bush painting, c1967, stoneware, glaze, mixed minerals and dusting uranium fired three times, 5 x 32.8 x 24.3 cm, gift of the Christensen Fund, 1994, photo by Sharon Baker. Erik Magnussen, Teapot, 1966, stoneware, 13.5 x 20 x 16.5 cm, purchased 1969, photo by Sharon Baker. All artworks Curtin University Art Collection, and courtesy of the artists and artist’s estates.
DIRT FEELING
. . . attending to the physicality of things has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to your own physicality. It represents a way of felt experience, of being known and knowing the world through the corporeal.
Mud being excrement, jewels being money, both are pure waste . . . and ecstatic transactions in loss ii
The greatest irony of a ceramics exhibition is that we must look but not touch. The forms call out to our fingertips, to the sweep of our palms; they want to be held, caressed or put to purpose. In the alchemy of vitrification, soft becomes rigid, dirt becomes decadence. When we look upon (or touch) a ceramic object, we feel the reality of both states. Where clay speaks to us through play and touch – a nostalgic reminder of when dirt and mud were acceptable amusements –ceramic objects of art and design intrigue through decoration, function, form, surface and scale. Both enliven pleasure, they speak to intimacy (in the making and the using) and draw us back to our bodies through the senses. When our human ancestors first discovered ceramics, they put it to use in service of the body. In literal application, they made vessels for food or water and to house the remains of the dead. Symbolically, objects were employed to assist with cycles of birth and death. Over millennia, our relationship with ceramic objects has expanded in complex ways. They continue to proliferate our lives as valued treasures, and conversely, are overlooked but vital utilities, serving our most intimate bodily functions. While we must disallow audiences from touching the enticing array of objects in this exhibition, it is heartening to know we each have the opportunity to use and admire the ceramic objects that fill our homes.
While by no means intended as a comprehensive survey of ceramic arts, the works in this exhibition represent a broad spectrum of application in this most fascinating medium. The exhibition draws from the Curtin University Art Collection and from the beginnings of its development in the late 1960s, ceramic objects were collected in significant numbers. Some of the earliest acquisitions were objects exemplifying Scandinavian design, collected with the intention that they support teaching and learning within the School of Art and Design. This educational purpose and an interest in establishing crosscultural understandings underpinned the acquisition of other significant international works in subsequent years, including a collection of works from Papua New Guinea’s Sepik River region in 1974.iii
A tradition going back several thousands of years, pottery was still being produced in the 1970s in large quantities across Melanesia for practical and spiritual use, while highly decorative forms were unique to several geographically isolated villages in the Sepik River region.
Ceramic objects continued to be collected across the 1970s and 80s, reflecting the broader arts and crafts revival both in Australia and internationally. In these early years of the Collection, women artists were broadly acquired, many renowned, including Sandra Black, Joan Campbell and Eileen Keys. We are fortunate to hold a large number of Keys’ works, 22 of which are included in this exhibition, dating from 1962-1988. These works demonstrate a progressive move into experimentation and a drive to represent the Western Australian landscape through collected clays, rocks and tree ash. Keys’ later works are strange and exquisite forms that benefit from the employment of Raku firing, discovered initially alongside Joan Campbell in 1966 with subsequent training in Japan. Presented next to Keys is recent Curtin graduate Erin Ginty, whose works express a comparable fascination. Interested in speculative ecologies and the entanglements between nature and industry, Ginty’s works describe a more contemporary outlook with a focus on climate anxiety and approaching catastrophe.
The 1990s – 2000s saw a drop in the acquisition of ceramics, a time when new technology was a primary focus. A significant new media work by Carol Rudyard, Still life with taps (1981), was purchased in 1999 and is shown here for the first time since 2003. Engaging with seminal feminist theory of the time, Rudyard explored themes of the domestic, consumerism, and the gaze. Rudyard’s innovative use of installation led her to gain a national profile, shown in this early work that includes both imagery of bathroom fixtures, and the porcelain fixtures themselves. Rudyard was interested in modern art movements and, no doubt, reference to Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ was knowingly employed. Including this work is a nod to the ways industrial ceramic objects have informed both our domestic lives, and developments in art practice and museum theory.
Over the last 15 years, acquisitions of ceramics have again increased, supported by major donations from leading WA artists who have an exhibitions history with the John Curtin Gallery including Pippin Drysdale, Warrick Palmateer and Stewart Scambler. We have further strengthened the Collection through the purchase of contemporary works by exemplary Australian artists Glenn Barkley, Mai Nguyen-Long and Angela Valamanesh. These are complemented by acquisitions of new works by emerging artists. Gratifyingly, the trend of acquiring women artists has continued throughout the Collection and 64% of works in this exhibition are by women.
The Sepik pots included in Dirt Feeling were purchased from an exhibition in Perth at a time when cultural objects from Melanesia were highly regarded in Europe and Australia, yet our own First Nations visual culture was overlooked. Thankfully this trend changed in the 1980s and the Collection has been actively acquiring a broad range of First Nations work since this time, however in my research for Dirt Feeling, I discovered this did not translate to our ceramics collection. We have begun to address this by acquiring works by three outstanding contemporary artists, Penny Evans (Gamilaraay), Josina Pumani (Pitjantjatjara) and Judith Pungarta Inkamala (Western Aranda). In distinctly different ways, each of these artists powerfully celebrate the cultural heritage of their ancestors and connection to country, while interweaving references to the impacts of colonisation. In her work, titled Maralinga (2025) Pumani addresses British atomic bomb testing in South Australia and the lasting impacts on Anangu people through her powerful use of colour, form and texture. Her arresting palette of red and black underglazes refer to smoke and toxic winds, with surface inscriptions depicting flora from her family’s homeland outside Mimili.
This exhibition includes a small number of key loans to ensure significant movements and artists are represented. Master storytellers, Hermannsburg Potters have been documenting country, tradition and contemporary life in their distinctive visual style for over 30 years. Adding to our recent acquisition by senior artist Judith Pungarta Inkamala, a beautiful depiction of her community, are works that render country through flora and fauna endemic to Western Aranda. Two 1987 works by influential artist Dr Gloria Fletcher James Thancoupie AO, widely credited as the founder of the Indigenous ceramics movement in Australia, display her characteristic use of spheres with
incised decoration. Other incised works from the same time represent the significant but short lived Marribank art and design movement that emerged post the closure of the Aboriginal Settlement (formerly Carrolup Native Settlement). A triumph of craftsmanship and scathing satire, Gabrielle Hansen’s, America’s Cup (1987) holds space as one of the most captivating objects in the exhibition.
Interconnections permeate this exhibition. Numerous artists represented in Dirt Feeling have had far reaching impact on their peers, communities and succeeding generations. From the late 1960s, exposure to artworks from Japan and the United Kingdom was highly impactful, with the expanding influence of renowned practitioners felt through travel and educative networks. These connective trends continue through ongoing practices of collaboration, mentorship, teaching and artist collectives. The physicality of clay (wet, heavy, plastic) demands a physicality in the maker who must enter a collaborative negotiation with their medium. This further includes an embracing of chance and chaos in the firing. From beginning to end, these processes require an open responsiveness and ability to cope with or even embrace failure, which in turn breeds humility and an enthusiasm for constant learning. This may help elucidate why amongst practitioners, knowledge is not hoarded but shared eagerly through the exchange of skills and ideas. This field is sustained by a generosity of spirit, and one that translates to the works themselves that collectively offer a cacophonous gift to the senses.
Lia McKnight Curator, John Curtin Gallery
Natasha Daintry, 2007, “The essential vessel” in Z. Hanaor (Ed.), Breaking the mould: New approaches to ceramics. Black Dog Publishing, London
ii Ingrid Schaffner, 2009, “On Dirt” in G. Adamson (Ed.), Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
iii Ann Schilo, 2004, “A Continuing Dialogue” in Writing the Collection exhibition catalogue, John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, Perth
3 October - 7 December 2025
Publication copyright ©2025 John Curtin Gallery
Text copyright © individual authors
All rights reserved. This catalogue is protected by copyright under the Copyright Act 1968. Apart from any use permitted under the Act, including fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.
ISBN: 978-1-7640702-1-8
From left to right: Josina Pumani, Maralinga, 2025, hand-built stoneware, underglaze, 47 x 43 cm. Curtin University Art Collection, purchased 2025. Courtesy of the artist and APY Galleries. Image courtesy of JamFactory, Adelaide. Photo by Conner Patterson. Glenn Barkley, YouveGotEverythingNow Amphora, 2023, glazed earthenware, 37 x 14 x 6.5 cm. Curtin University Art Collection, purchased 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf
Below: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Everything is true, 2012, resin, enamel, timber plinth, 154 x 120 x 46 cm Curtin University Art Collection, donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, 2021. Photo by Sharon Baker.
Our sincere gratitude to the Janet Holmes à Court Collection and Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art at the University of Western Australia for supporting the Dirt Feeling exhibition with the loan of artwork. Thank you to the team of people who were instrumental in ensuring that Carol Rudyard’s Still life with taps was able to be shared with audiences through a digitised version that we hope is as close as possible to the original: Willow Armitstead, John BarrettLennard, Carlie Germs and Joseph Landro.
Thank you to JCG intern Nisha Nishat who provided research assistance for Everyday, Myths and Legends, and to the artists who generously provided updated information on their artistic careers. Special thanks to the Tupper family, Sherri Staltari, Laura Kiely and Jacquelin Low.
Thank you to the team at the John Curtin Gallery who have worked tirelessly to generate another impeccably produced assembly of experiences for our visitors. The staff’s collective dedication and teamwork allow us to meet every challenge and continue to deliver exhibitions to the highest standard.
Associate
Professor Susanna Castleden Director, John Curtin Gallery
JOHN CURTIN GALLERY
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@johncurtingallery gallery@curtin.edu.au 08 9266 4155
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Cover: Judith Pungarta Inkamala, Namatjira family picnic at Impurtna, earthenware and underglazes, 40 x 34.5 cm. Curtin University Art Collection, purchased 2025. Courtesy of the artist, Hermannsburg Potters and Sabbia Gallery
