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Making Her Mark: Selected Works from the Collection offers a new appraisal of the work of leading women artists held in the collection of TarraWarra Museum of Art. The exhibition explores the themes arising from works by women artists in the collection-such as memory, landscape and abstraction-and also includes a modest selection of works by male artists that amplify these images, ideas and styles.

In the form of unexpected pairings, the exhibition shows the ways in which women artists have pioneered certain ways of seeing the world. Making Her Mark provides the opportunity to make new comparisons across decades: Jenny Watson and Charles Blackman; Louise Hearman and Godfrey Miller; Kate Beynon and Howard Arkley. Rather than a dialogue about precedent and influence, this exhibition presents a nuanced conversation about image, composition and mark-making where women take centre-stage. In this way, art by women is not seen as a category, but rather as a catalyst.

Make your mark at TarraWarra Museum of Art''s Open Weekend on Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 March, with two days of free Museum entry, a major installation by artist Minna Gilligan, a free printmaking tote bag workshop with artist Bronwyn Ward, live music from Suneden and Carissa Nyalu, landscape sketching, food trucks, pop-up tours and more!

Open Weekend is a free, family-friendly event supported by Yarra Ranges Council. All welcome, all weekend; no bookings required. Stay tuned for our full schedule!

RSVP to the Facebook event here.

Now in its ninth year, the TarraWarra Festival at TarraWarra Museum of Art is a weekend of music, art, wine and some of the most breathtaking views in the Yarra Valley.

The 2020 program spans celebratory classics and contemporary masters, including works from Beethoven, Bach, Bryce Dessner, Arvo P?rt and more.

Festival packages include three concerts plus entry to an intimate ACO masterclass.

For an audience of just 200, you'll need to book early for this exclusive cultural weekend.

Festival packages are available now via Australian Chamber Orchestra.

As part of an international tour developed in partnership with acclaimed contemporary art venue Ikon (Birmingham, United Kingdom), exhibitions of new work by Australian artists Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce will premiere at Ikon over the coming weeks.

Curatorial adviser Hetti Perkins explains that the artists are concerned essentially with "Australia''s ''secret war'' - a battle fought on many fronts from colonial massacres to Stolen Generations to the Maralinga bomb tests. The seductive beauty of Watson's and Scarce''s works belies their powerful message about the sustained campaign of the destruction of country, culture and community in Aboriginal Australia". With the devastating evidence of climate change in Australia, manifest in apocalyptic wildfires and storms, these timely exhibitions deliver an urgent message.

The exhibition will tour to TarraWarra Museum of Art under the title Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce from 21 November 2020 - 8 March 2021.

In light of the rapidly evolving COVID-19 situation and with the safety of our staff and visitors in mind, TarraWarra Museum of Art will temporarily close to the public as of 5pm today Thursday 19 March, until further notice.

This closure means that all scheduled public programs, events, tours, school bookings and group bookings are cancelled, including the following public programs:
Open Weekend 2020 (21 & 22 March) 
Slow Art Day (4 April) 
TarraWarra Festival (18 & 19 April)

All ticketholders will be contacted shortly. For the time being, our friends at TarraWarra Estate remain open to the public, and we encourage you to support these and other businesses where it is safe for you to do so. Please check their websites for current information.

TarraWarra Museum of Art staff will continue to work behind the scenes during this period, updating our social media channels and website with further details as they come to hand. The best place to reach us for any urgent enquires is via museum@twma.com.au.

While our physical space is closed, we hope to connect with you online over the coming weeks, in recognition of the solace and inspiration that art can provide to all of us in these difficult times.

If you are seeking information on novel coronavirus visit health.gov.au or call the Australian Government Department of Health Coronavirus Information Line on 1800 020 080.

Thank you for your understanding, and we look forward to welcoming you all back to TarraWarra Museum of Art soon.

TarraWarra Museum of Art is thrilled to announce its upcoming summer 2020 exhibition, Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce, developed in collaboration with Ikon (Birmingham, UK).

Featuring major new works from two of Australia''s most poignant and lyrical Aboriginal artists Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce, Looking Glass is both a love song and a lament for Country; a fantastical alchemy of the elemental forces of earth, water, fire and air.

Curated by Hetti Perkins, the exhibition reveals Australia''s ''secret war''-a battle fought on many fronts from colonial massacres and Stolen Generations through to the British atomic bomb tests at Maralinga-through paintings, video and sculptural works.

Born in Mundubbera, Queensland, Judy Watson derives inspiration from her Aboriginal matrilineal Waanyi heritage, working from site and memory to reveal Aboriginal histories and following lines of emotional and physical topography that centre on particular places and moments in time.

Yhonnie Scarce was born in Woomera, South Australia, and belongs to the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples. Working with glass, she explores the political nature and aesthetic qualities of the material-in particular its correspondence to the crystallisation of desert sand as a result of British nuclear tests in Maralinga, South Australia, during 1956-63.

Presented with the support of the Museum's major exhibition partner, The Balnaves Foundation, Looking Glass will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue and a series of online and in-person events and programs. 

Following its premiere at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Looking Glass will tour across Australian museums and galleries supported by NETS Victoria.

We''ll be announcing our reopening date and placing tickets on sale in the coming weeks, as we get closer to being able to reopen the Museum with COVID Safe measures in place. We can''t wait to welcome you back! 

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To mark NAIDOC Week 2020 and in celebration of our upcoming summer exhibition Looking Glass, we're holding a free online workshop for children inspired by artist Judy Watson's powerful artwork Spine, 1997.

Join Melbourne-based artist and educator Yaz Gat? online and learn about the different ways Watson applies pigment and paint to unstretched canvas and paper, before making your own two-dimensional artwork using unconventional and experimental processes.

Limited places, bookings essential.

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While closed to the public, we invite you to explore our current exhibition Making Her Mark: Selected Works from the Collection virtually. Take a closer look at each artwork, and gain deeper insights with an audio guide narrated by exhibition curator Victoria Lynn. 

Making Her Mark: Selected Works from the Collection offers a new appraisal of the work of leading women artists held in the collection of TarraWarra Museum of Art. The exhibition explores the themes arising from works by women artists in the collection-such as memory, landscape and abstraction-and also includes a modest selection of works by male artists that amplify these images, ideas and styles.

Who better to discuss the topic of art and technology than the Artistic Director of Experimenta, Jonathan Parsons, who is currently curating Experimenta Life Forms, premiering later this year at RMIT Gallery. 

Experimenta is Australia's leading organisation dedicated to contemporary art driven by technology. Working with some of the world's most adventurous contemporary artists, Experimenta champions new ideas about technology, explores creative possibilities and unearths emerging artforms.

Watch our full conversation to hear us discuss the future of interactive media art in a post-COVID world, and the ways in which expanded forms of art can change our understanding of our technological pasts and digital futures.

Electronic interests were also present in the 2018 exhibitions Edwin Tanner: Mathematical Expressionist and James Hullick: THE ARBOUR and THE ORRERY. As a professional engineer during the burgeoning of cybernetics and the increasing automation of industry, Tanner was intimately aware of the interdependence of humans and technology, even declaring that he was 'preoccupied with the circuitry of the species'. 

James Hullick's sound art-installation vividly brought to life the kind of whirring, twittering and buzzing circuitry and infrastructure which appear in some of Tanner's compositions. Hullick's THE ARBOUR OF DOORS was an enclosed speaker cave made of recycled audio-visual materials which visitors could enter and experience the softly spoken recitations of Tanner's poetry while THE ORRERY OF HUMAN DESIRES, a mechanical model of rotating speakers and analogue synthesisers, emitted a performance of madrigal voices. The two works were conceived of as 'instruments' for expanding audio-visual practice and, like Tanner, challenged conventional perspectives and habitual ways of looking (and listening).

Read the catalogue for James Hullick: THE ARBOUR and THE ORRERY here, featuring an essay by renowned filmmaker, writer, musician and academic Philip Brophy.

Back in 2012, we presented the exhibition Sonic Spheres, as part of our TarraWarra Biennial series.

Sonic Spheres presented an assemblage of artists engaged with sound, music, voice and performance, and included drawings, musical scores, sculptures made from musical instruments, paintings and video. The works invited viewers to listen to art, and find new sounds and melodies. 

Sonic Spheres featured a work by Australian artists Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, who often collaborate on large-scale artworks that explore diverse subject matter with a focus on revealing the unseen and the unheard. 

The work, Monocline: black boxes, 2011-2012, is a real-time, 3D interactive environment that the visitor can virtually travel through by moving their body in different directions. This short clip shows the artist Joyce Hinterding navigating the abstract space.

In this way, the visitor's body became a conductor of the moving image.

We''ve just released the exhibition catalogue for Pierre Huyghe: TarraWarra International 2015, exhibited at TarraWarra Museum of Art from 29 August to 22 November 2015, featuring essays by exhibition curators Amelia Barikin and Victoria Lynn.

This was the first solo exhibition in Australia by internationally renowned contemporary French artist Pierre Huyghe, with works that spanned installation, film, sound and light. 

Huyghe''s projects were envisioned as a series of temporal excavations, highlighting art''s potential to generate science-fictional time zones and develop alternate chronological platforms.

Founded in 2007, Video Vortex is a network of artists, activists, coders, curators, critics, and researchers linked by the exchange of ideas, materials, and discussions both online and offline. 

The just-released Video Vortex Reader III: Inside the YouTube Decade responds to a broad range of emerging and urgent topics, from bias in YouTube's algorithms, to the use of video in messaging, image theory, the rise of deepfakes, a reconsideration of the history of video art, a reflection on the continuing role and influence of music video, indy servers, synthetic intimacies, love and sadness, artist videos, online video theory in the age of platform capitalism, video as online activism, and the rise of streaming. 

Especially for kids and families, this free online workshop is inspired by the bold abstract artworks in Making Her Mark. 

Join practicing Melbourne-based artist Minna Gilligan and discover the possibilities of mark-making and using colour to create unique works on paper. Express how you're feeling, harness your imagination, and cultivate your creativity as Minna guides you through a series of drawing activities online. No special materials or equipment required; experiment with common household materials and equipment to make marks!

Thursday 9 July, 10-10.40am, reserve your free spot here!

Making Mondays continues every fortnight while we''re closed, with simple activities to keep people of all ages feeling creative and connected to making as part of our #tarrawarraathome series.

Have you ever been stuck on where to start with a blank page in front of you? Writers sometimes experience this when they sit down to write and artists can feel this way when they are about to make a start on a new artwork! Incidental marks can make great starting points for a drawing, sketch, painting, or even a print. Putting something unexpected on the page makes it a lot easier to get those creative juices flowing. Try drawing and doodling around tea stains to create something extraordinary out of a mistake!

To participate in Stories from the Room, simply:

- Document your reflections on living through the COVID-19 pandemic through letters, emails, personal writing, journals or memos, at any length and in any language you prefer

- Write as often as you wish; multiple submissions over time are welcome and each contributor will have a dedicated folder in the archive

- Send your writings to storiesfromtheroom@twma.com.au or by post to Stories from the Room, c/- TarraWarra Museum of Art, PO Box 310, Healesville VIC 3777, Australia.

Please ensure your communication is dated, with your name and location only. Do not include any private details (such as street address, telephone or email) in the letter, which may be exhibited at the Museum. Anonymous quotes may be published online or used for promotional purposes. All received writing will be saved in an archive as physical copies, and each contributor will have a dedicated folder for recurring contributions. Submissions will not be returned to the sender, and will remain as part of the artwork. Submissions are welcome at any time - there is no closing date for this open call.

Biljana Ciric is an independent curator currently based in Melbourne. Her recent exhibitions include An Inquiry: Modes of Encounter presented by Times Museum, Guang Zhou (2019); When the Other Meets the Other Other presented by Cultural Center Belgrade (2017); and Proposals for Surrender presented by McAM in Shanghai (2016/2017).

"Through new modes of encounter and connectivity in a time of closed borders, Art as essential activity seeks to generate a renewed feeling of solidarity amongst the international community. Underlying this approach is a spirit of generosity, of not being afraid to learn from each other, and a willingness to allow for cracks to open wider and expose certain failures. In showing their vulnerability...each of these artists prompt us to consider a new role for art as a form of radical care."

Living between the US and China, Jasphy Zheng is an interdisciplinary artist whose recent practice explores the inevitable failure of communication at interpersonal and collective levels.

With social installations, unannounced performance, sculptural objects, and artist's books, Zheng constructs situations as public interventions that aim to raise awareness of our social and cultural environment in and out of the context of contemporary art.

"In my ongoing long-term project Stories from the Room, I wish to stimulate a physical gathering by collecting parallel realities from participants and displaying them at TarraWarra Museum of Art. Through a collective act, a sense of emotional connection is generated, in the form of a community, regardless of distance."

The first publication in our Field Guide series has arrived! Created especially for kids and families, TarraWarra Field Guide: Making Paint & Ink is designed to promote exploration and experimentation with things found in the natural world, or around the home, to create an array of unique paints and inks!

With colourful artwork and illustrations by Healesville-based artist Clare James and easy to follow prompts, learn how to make your very own paint and ink with what you have at hand.

Click here to download the Field Guide online.

We'd love to see what kinds of paints and inks you make! Share your creations and colourful experiments with us using #tarrawarraathome.

Have you been following along with our Making Mondays series, posted every fortnight on our Instagram and Facebook pages? These simple activities are designed to keep people of all ages feeling creative and connected to making as part of our #tarrawarraathome series.

Recently, we''ve collaborated with some local and Australian artists who have concocted some inspiring Making Mondays activities that can easily be done from home:

Nature Confetti with Bronwyn Ward

Natural Mobiles with Katie West

Together using text with Darcey Bella Arnold

Pareidolia Collage with Minna Gilligan


 

What frightens or threatens you the most right now? What do you believe is in urgent need of protection?

Greek artist Danae Stratou invites you to participate in her global art project Open the Black Boxes by answering either of these questions with one word. Open the Black Boxes is a continually evolving, online database that maps humanity''s hopes and fears as unique digital infographics that can be filtered by age, gender and country. As words are added to the project, a dynamic-data Australian word cloud will be created.

Open the Black Boxes will become a valuable record of our time: raw materials for artists, researchers, and people from every walk of life to make sense of the present crisis and reimagine our future.

Learn more and submit your responses here.

Experimenta''s new Studio Sessions series takes you through the lens to examine artists' spaces and their relationship with technology. Presenting projects and perspectives on how artists are working with technology, it is an opportunity for our arts community to connect and communicate, sharing their experiences on the diverse practice that is 'media art'.

In this first episode, Australian artist Matthew Sleeth reflects on his time spent recently in the studio, provoking him to think more broadly about his history working with image as motion. He discusses his collaborative process working with diverse technologies and how this approach has allowed him the creative flexibility that has shaped his career. 

Developed by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Hyper-linked is an exhibition for the digital realm, presenting new projects by seven contemporary Australian artists: Heath Franco, Brian Fuata, Matthew Griffin, Amrita Hepi, Kate Mitchell, JD Reforma and Justene Williams. Each is alert to the almost paradoxical fact that we are experiencing mass disconnect in an age of hyper-connectivity.

They examine the role the internet plays in shaping our lives and the ways in which we communicate, bearing witness and paying tribute to our networked selves.

See more from Hyper-linked here. 

We are thrilled to announce that TarraWarra Museum of Art has been recognised by Tripadvisor as a 2020 Travellers' Choice award-winner in the attractions category.

Based on a full year of Tripadvisor reviews, prior to any changes caused by the pandemic, award winners are recognised for consistently receiving outstanding visitor feedback, placing us in the top 10% of businesses worldwide.

While the irony of currently being closed isn''t lost on us, we thank everyone for their support and look forward to our reopening!

Vale John Nixon, a vital figure in contemporary Australian art for over five decades. From the late 1960s, he established a practice dedicated to the ongoing innovation of non-objective art and the readymade, with these enquiries eventually extending into experimental music, collage and many other modes of making. John will be well remembered by his artistic colleagues-whom he supported through initiatives that created new means for the distribution and discussion of art, such as the gallery Art Projects in Melbourne (1979-1984)-and the many students and young artists whom he generously mentored.

TarraWarra Museum of Art presented his work on a number of occasions, most notably his exhibition EPW: Polychrome in 2007; his inclusion in the TarraWarra Biennial 2012: Sonic Spheres; in the current exhibition Making Her Mark: Selected Works from the Collection; and, the exhibition he curated for the Museum in 2005 from his own collection of the Warrandyte Potters Cottage.

We extend our deepest condolences to Sue Cramer, his daughter Emma and family.

Dear friends,

We are delighted to let you know that TarraWarra Museum of Art will reopen on Saturday 28 November 2020 with our major summer exhibition Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce.???

Our reopening comes with a few new measures including timed ticketing, capacity limits and increased cleaning regimes, as outlined in the Government's roadmap to recovery. Over the coming months, we will continue to provide online experiences of our collection and exhibitions as well as a calendar of virtual and in-person public programs.

Bookings are now open for general admission tickets. To help us manage capacity, we encourage you to pre-book your timed-entry tickets ahead of your visit. Click here for a list of frequently asked questions relating to our new conditions of entry and measures we''re implementing to keep you and our staff safe. 

Our Museum and the wide expanses of the Yarra Valley are the perfect place to recharge and connect with nature and art, and we can't wait to welcome everyone back!

With best wishes,

Victoria Lynn
Director
TarraWarra Museum of Art

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