InsideOUT

When: December 2025

Artist Statement - Merry Blakmas

Installation made from found objects.

This work celebrates what Christmas means to me and my family, what it means to be a Blakfulla on a hot Christmas Day. I have many memories of Christmas (or Blakmas as some of us like to call it) surrounded by family joy and end of year celebration, passing out on the couch after a big feed, hanging up the puddings on the hills hoist and being so full of food and love that you forget what day it is. I think we have all secretly dreamt of creating our own Christmas window display, so here is my take on it!

Artist Statement - Pretty in Pink

Woven basket made from recycled materials.

When I'm weaving, I often think about my Elders and Ancestors, their innovation and commitment to cultural practices. For me, weaving is about resilience and resistance, a practice of connection, wellbeing and necessity. This practice, inherited from our Ancestors will continue to change over time, remaining just as culturally significant as it has always been.

Artist Biography

Nicola Ingram (she/her) is a Palawa and Wiradjuri artist based in Nipaluna, Lutruwita (Hobart, Tasmania). Coming from a rich background in the performing arts, she has continued to expand her artistic approach, exploring broader creative opportunities that sit outside the silos of western arts practices.

Her work is an extension of her culture, weaving inspiration from lived experience, reflecting on truths of the past and reimagining the future. Nicola won the 2021 Emerging Tasmanian Aboriginal Writers Award and has continued to develop original works as part of YIRRIAMBOI, Dark Mofo and the Theatre Royal's RAWspace residency.

Instagram: @nadi_yarns

When: July 2025

Artist Statement

When the first Western colonisers arrived in Tasmania, they couldn’t understand much of what they saw. When they first examined a platypus, the physiology was so far out of their experience that they assumed it had to be a prank. Once they figured out it was real, they could only describe it to themselves in terms of things they already knew, describing it as 'duck-like'. They could have asked the Traditional Owners of Lutruwita (Tasmania) its name, but this lack of understanding applied across cultures as well. Instead, scientists named it using a dead language from the other side of the world, in a taxonomy only understood by a limited number of scholars. Our understandings are always limited by our cultural perspective.

There's a number of interesting debates going on in science at the moment. Most importantly, many scientists have noticed the ongoing damage that human activities are causing to the world. There is clearly change happening to the global climate, and it's clear to anyone studying it that this change is being caused by humans. Unfortunately, we seem to be having real trouble adapting ourselves to that knowledge. The scale and urgency is something outside of what we understand. The science around it has become so aligned to certain political streams of thought that it means many people refuse to even believe in clear and defensible information. The changes that will be required are many and vast.

Artist Biography

David Campbell is a creative director, designer, and artist based in nipaluna/Hobart. He works on a bunch of different stuff: designing for cultural institutions such as Mona, ACMI, and the Melbourne Fringe Festival; lecturing and writing for VCA/University of Melbourne and SemiPermanent; advising on the development of a new regional cultural space; curating exhibitions, such as a recent retrospective of the design firm Futago; creating the Art From Mona publication series; making artworks for projects such as the HCC CityPilots; and engaging in commercial creative direction work. He has won numerous national and local design awards.

Instagram: @inksniffer

When: June 2025

Artist Statement

I was up late with my baby, reading my work-in-progress. I felt blocked, not only by self-doubt, but by being time and space poor, low on funds, and physically attached to my baby and, more worryingly, my phone. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, to be stuck in a box without distractions? Surely, I could finish my novel then!

WritersBLOCK / ReadersBLOCK explores 'blocks' to writing and reading fiction - personally, societally, and practically. This project also provides visibility and support for readers and writers of Hobart, removing some of those blocks. Finally, the project is a unique window into writing and reading in real time.

The 2022 National Survey of Australian Book Authors found writers are struggling to exist, earning significantly below the poverty line and frequently needing extra employment, while the European and International Book Federation found Australians buying and reading fewer books than other countries. Yet it's well documented that reading and writing shapes culture, and the book industry makes a significant contribution to the economy.

WritersBLOCK / ReadersBLOCK explores the conundrum of reading and writing – activities seen as beneficial, but which come with significant blocks.

How much do you value the activities in front of you?

Artist Biography

Lucy Christopher is an award-winning author for children, young adults and adults. She was the Course Director for the renowned Writing for Young People MA at Bath Spa University and is now Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at UTAS.

Lucy is using her time in the WritersBLOCK to develop her second novel for adults as well as seriously playing with her next picture book. Both projects are deeply influenced by wild places, and critically endangered animals, in Tasmania.

The main block Lucy faces to writing fiction is not having enough time.

Instagram: @christopher.lucy

When: February - April 2025

Artist Statement

The loom has its associations to computing through its punch-card programming, its adherence to patterns and the way it deconstructs information into bits or pixels. I think a lot about how our technological literacy waxes and wanes. How we have gone from understanding a physical thing because we can see how its parts interact, to being faced with microscopic circuitry which performs abstractions and presents them as almost-magic. To the point that when it fails, our only option seems to be a quick resuscitation, hoping, sometimes praying, for recovery.

Before the loom, weaving was a slow and laborious process. I undertook a residency at the Australian Tapestry Workshop last year where I learned the fundamental basics of weaving by hand. I like learning new things because you get to make mistakes. We're actively discouraged from doing that after a while, as we develop skills and perfect them. I'm not fond of perfection, to be honest, because it feels finite. There's nowhere left to go. So sometimes I make things that are illogical, like this stutterloom, which is a machine whose function is to weave, obviously, but under the duress of errors and glitches. Or maybe it's to actively make mistakes for a world that focusses exclusively on accelerating outcomes. Maybe it's a kind of protest. A strike.

Artist Biography

Tricky Walsh (they/them) is a non-binary artist working in New Norfolk, Tasmania, who works both collaboratively and in a solo capacity.

Their projects focus on both spatial and communication concerns in an increasingly speculative manner and while they use a diversity of media (architecture, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, sound, film, comics, radio) it is foremost the concept at hand that determines which form of material experimentation occurs within these broader themes.

Instagram: @trickywalsh

When: November 2024 - January 2025

Artist Statement

In today's digital age people are so used to just clicking a button to capture an image, then instantly looking at the back of the camera to see what they have taken, deleting it if they don't like what they have seen.

With Instantly Obscured Peter is trying to remind people that there is a lot more to photography than just the press of a button. Here he has set up a Camera Obscura (a large walk-in camera) which will give you a life size view of what it sees. Staying within the camera himself, Peter will be working with willing members of the public to capture their exact image coming through the lens onto the photographic paper. He will be processing the images inside the camera, giving an instant (well 20 minutes) negative image. These images will be displayed for the duration of the project, with new images being captured each time. Working inside the camera, Peter will be building a collection of the Hobart public.

Artist Biography

Peter is a photographic artist working with alternative analogue processes. His work revolves around the idea that the making of an image is just as important as the final works. He is currently building an off-grid darkroom which will use solar power and rainwater, as well as low toxic compostable chemicals he has made from the plants surrounding the darkroom.

When: September - October 2024

Artist Statement

Phenomenal Bodies brings elements of remote Tasmanian wilderness into the urban cityscape. The installation invites viewers to contemplate our relationship to the natural word, larger unseen forces and complex ecologies.

These sculptural forms were largely created from geological forms, cast on-site in the desert-like mountains surrounding Queenstown, on the West Coast of Tasmania. Adorning the rocky surfaces and threaded steel strands are small crystalline forms, created though magnetic forces, that obscure the line between the natural and technological. Levitating electromagnetic orbs, spinning continually through night and day, echo the constant motion of the planet and its molten core, massive gravitational forces that operate alongside relentless extractive technologies and continue to shape our planet.

Artist Biography

Alicia King is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Derwent Valley, Lutruwita/Tasmania. Her art practice is driven by a fascination with natural phenomena and the re-thinking and re-working of our relationship with the non-human world. Through an experimental approach to materials and processes, King creates new representations of the natural environment that explore the intersections of nature, technology and the sublime, ideas of deep ecological time and cultural mythologies of the future.

When: June - July 2024

Artist Statement

Hardwood frames, archival inkjet prints, single channel projection. The Dorney House - Fort Nelson c1978, by architect J.H. Esmond Dorney - is widely regarded as one of Australia's best houses. It is a humble modernist masterpiece. Significantly, the house was recently awarded international recognition by Doco MoMo, a body recognising important modernist architecture globally. In September 2023, Andy Hatton was commissioned by Paddy Dorney (son of Esmond) to begin documenting the house, it's light, energy and environment.

PRESENT documents the feeling of dawn through to sunrise, the fall of dusk as the full moon rises. Hatton explores a deep connection to the environment that envelops this house, with subtle moments of transition, when the outside comes in, finding poetry held in all of its expansive glass.

Each moment feels significant, while collectively hinting at a larger, more elusive vision.

Artist Biography

Andy is a Manchester-born Photographer, Director and Cinematographer, based in Lutruwita/Tasmania. With a background in fine art photography, he brings a cinematic approach to his visual storytelling. His personal style crosses genres, from documentary and travel, to editorial and portraiture. He finds magic in subtlety, creating atmospheric imagery with a focus on a poetic narrative. His diverse portfolio includes collaborations with Mercedes Benz, Olympus, National Geographic and Apple.

When: March - April 2024

Artist Statement

The now extinct, Cascade Funnel-Web was located on Muwinina land and Palawa people would have deeply understood the habitat and behaviour of this endemic arachnid. There is little documented evidence of the Cascade Funnel-Web. It was recorded by Vernon Victor Hickman in 1926 and has not been sighted since. Hickman found two spider burrows in the soft bank of a creek at Cascades. He sketched a spider, eggs and a silken funnel web.

In this family-friendly performance, watch the last remaining Cascade Funnel Web weave his home; hoping to catch food or perhaps it's a lonely attempt to attract a mate.

Artist biography

Matthew Stolp is an Arts Educator, Actor, Character Performer, Screenwriter, and Visual Artist with over thirty years' experience in the creative arts. He is a Senior Secondary Art and Drama teacher and Head of Faculty for the Arts at Guilford Young College. Matthew has worked professionally for Blue Cow Theatre, the Tasmanian Theatre company, MONA, SBS and the ABC. He is the recipient of several awards for his creative work including two Tasmanian Theatre Awards for performance and design.