Contemporary artists are invited to develop engaging workshop programs centred around significant national celebrations. These free initiatives are designed to involve all community members. The outcomes of these projects will culminate in a three-channel video artwork created by local filmmaker Brian Rapsey, showcased in the gallery's entry foyer.
2025 Artist Projects
NAIDOC WEEK
The Next Generation: Strength, Vision & Legacy
ARTISTIC LEAD: MELISSA WIYA
6 July - 12 July 2025
Join us for a NAIDOC Week 2025 celebration! This year’s powerful theme, "The Next Generation: Strength, Vision & Legacy," highlights the importance of our young ones. Ngununggula is proud to partner with Melissa Wiya Cultural Connections to bring you an engaging school holiday workshop program led by our vibrant First Nations Community, complemented by a NAIDOC Celebration Market Day.
NAIDOC School Holiday Workshops
Dates: Monday 7 July - Friday 11 July
Time: 10 AM - 12 PM (daily)
NAIDOC Celebration Market Day
Date: Saturday 12 July
Time: 10 AM - 2 PM
Experience the richness of our local First Nations culture! Discover an array of talented makers, artists, delicious food stalls, and dances. Don’t miss the opportunity to enjoy a live performance by the Djaarmbi Band throughout the day. A heartfelt thank you to Melissa Wiya and the community for their dedication in organising this year's program.
Mark your calendars and join us in celebrating our heritage and embracing our future! We can’t wait to see you there!
YOUTH WEEK
WE ARE THE FUTURE AND THE FUTURE IS NOW
Artist: Liam Benson
Partner: Community Links
14 April - 16 April 2025
Join artist Liam Benson for a series of FREE Workshop Programs for Youth Week!
These workshops drew intuitively from queer cultural practice, that hold stories of friendship and shared community experience at their core. Participants experimented with materials and develop their ideas into a creative expression of identity, specific to the local queer community.
Liam Benson is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice incorporates performance, photography, video and textiles. His work is informed by working collaboratively with diverse communities through an ongoing conversation about how culture, sub-culture and identity interrelate and evolve.
Community Links Wellbeing provides information and referral to a diverse range of community members; builds the capacity of community members through groups, activities and skills development and provides projects and events that connect community members to their local communities. The organisation is supported by information and resources gathered over 30 years of service provision, expertise and knowledge.
Seniors Week
TIME TO SHINE
Artist: Lily Cummins
8 - 10 March 2025
Facilitated by artist Lily Cummins, we invited an artist to design an engaging workshop program for seniors, focusing on the theme of personal symbology. Participants were encouraged to reflect on their lived histories and create artworks that best express who they are. This video captures the stories shared during the workshops. We express our heartfelt gratitude to all participants for their invaluable contributions to this project.
About the artist
Lily Cummins is a tactile artist living and working on Gundungurra land in Mittagong, NSW. Cummins graduated from the National Art School in 2017 with a Masters in Drawing. Her practice explores her-self, her memories, and the emotive bonds and attachments people develop to place. Cummins’ work is highly process-driven; conversations are created between repeated forms and structures. Investigative mark-making explores the disintegration of memory and the inevitable passage of time, exclusively mining her own experience of remembrance, absence, and loss.
A recent expansion into Still Life explores the relationship between darkness and light, for one cannot exist without the other. The stillness of the flowers speaks to absence and presence, to family, love, to grief and the soft twilight of memory. There is a tension that exists within Cummins’ work; a pervasive melancholia hiding under saturated colour permeates her scenes of familiar domesticity and dreamscapes. The results are a strange universe of at once familiar scenes combined with the uncanny.
2024 Artist Projects
Seniors Week | Artist: Liam Benson
22 - 24 March 2024
NSW Seniors Festival celebrates the role and contributions of older adults to our local communities. It's the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere, with over 500,000 people attending each year. The NSW Seniors Festival will run from 11-24 March 2024. The theme of the festival is Reach Beyond!
About the artist
Liam Benson is a performance artist who documents his work through embroidery, photography, video and new media. Benson’s work deconstructs the social perceptions of gender, race, culture, sexuality and identity by cross-referencing art, popular culture and media language. His work celebrates the evolution of these social archetypes and explores the possibilities within the cross-influence of socially entrenched identities and cultural and sub-cultural amalgamation.
YOUTH WEEK 2024 | Artist: Jodie Whalen
14 - 15 April 2024
Artist Jodie Whalen invites young people to engage with the site of Ngununggula, connect, and experience the world in a new way. Participants will take part in an interactive process led by their personal experiences to create a new portal for alternative ways of seeing and responding to our constantly changing environment.
The unique program will explore nature, objects, colour, form, shapes and symbols inspired by Jodie’s artistic practice and our current exhibition, Ross & Rothwell: in the same boat. Participants will create portable frames, lenses and banners to explore their unique inner worlds using drawing, sculpture and textiles in experimental ways.
About the Artist
Jodie Whalen is a multi-disciplinary artist who appropriates her personal history and popular Western culture into emotionally fuelled, symbolically dense, sublime environments filled with personal rituals and moments of transition. She lives and works on Gadigal and Darug Lands and has shown her work in galleries across Australia including Carriageworks, Artspace, Museum of Contemporary Art, Performance Space, Campbelltown Arts Centre and Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art.
NAIDOC WEEK 2024 | Artist: Billy Bain
To celebrate NAIDOC week 2024 Ngununggula is offering a series of FREE artmaking workshops to our local young people. The workshops will be facilitated by contemporary Indigenous artist Billy Bain whose work spans ceramic sculpture, painting, etching and installation.
Billy will lead participants in the creation of terracotta sculptures and colourful banners. These artworks will contribute to a larger collaborative protest artwork to be installed in the Ngununggula Entry Foyer for the duration of NAIDOC Week. Participants are invited to Ngununggula on Friday 12 July, 5 pm - 7 pm for a community celebration with live music and to view the installation.
About the Artist
Billy Bain is a contemporary Indigenous Australian artist of Darug descent, the traditional Aboriginal people of Greater Western Sydney. Bain creates new narratives that discuss a contemporary idea of what it means to be a young Indigenous person in Australia today.