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
Seniors Week | Artist: Lily Cummins
Saturday 8 March | 1 PM - 3 PM
Sunday 9 March | 1 PM - 3P M
Monday 10 March | 10 AM - 12 PM
FREE PROGRAM FOR SENIORS AND FAMILIES
Join artist Lily Cummins for an exciting project during Seniors Week! Engage in a dynamic mixed-media journey where you'll have the opportunity to create a series of works exploring your personal symbology. Delve deep into your life experiences and express yourself through art!
This project will be documented on video and displayed in Ngununggula’s Entry Pavilion.
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.
Upcoming in 2025
Stay tuned for more information!
YOUTH WEEK | Artist: Liam Benson
9 April - 17 April 2025
Partner: Community Links
NAIDOC WEEK | Artist: Melissa Wiya
6 July - 13 July 2025
2024 Artist Projects
Seniors Week | Artist: Liam Benson
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!
Friday 22 March | 10 am - 1 pm
Saturday 23 March | 10 am - 1 pm
Sunday 24 March | 10 am - 1 pm
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
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.
We have 6 FREE workshops available during the school holidays:
SUNDAY 14 APRIL: 10am - 12pm or 1pm - 3pm
MONDAY 15 APRIL: 10am - 12pm or 1pm - 3pm
TUESDAY 16 APRIL: 10am - 12pm or 1pm - 3pm
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.