We kick off Artwalk Freo with a walk around the stunning cottages and tiny streets of South Freo.
This week's artists work with paint, ceramic, sculpture, paper mache, procelain, maps and installation so you'll have lots to look at and explore.
Tickets are valid all weekend.
We first suggest you walk if possible to avoid any parking issues. Alternatively, if you cannot take public transport and need to drive into South Fremantle, free parking is available at the South Beach car park, Marine Terrace and around Chester Street for several hours. There are also some street parking options along a number of peripheral streets. Please avoid allocated residents parking in the small streets so your Artwalk experience is not ruined by a parking ticket!
Hailing from Appalachia and living in Fremantle, Laura Mitchell is a practicing visual artist and musician, a former 'dot com' art director, and a passionate educator/researcher. Her visual works have been exhibited and collected internationally. She was the violinist with former Freo band Trio Alegra and continues to teach and collaborate locally and abroad. Recent projects include a practice-led arts PhD, supported by a 3.5-year HDRS scholarship and completed first class in 2022.
The PhD culminated in a thesis Mashup painting: Liquid consumerism through the lens of Pop Art, and exhibition Retrotopia at Gallery 25, Edith Cowan University. Other exhibitions include Fringe World Festival, Artsource Old Customs House and PS Art Space, and a residency bridging A.I.R. Gallery, NYC and Fremantle Art Centre. Previous education includes an Adv Dip in Music Ed/Violin, an MFA in Design & VisComm from Virginia Commonwealth University, and a BA in Music/English from the University of Virginia, USA.
Up and coming Wayalup DJ known for fusing together an eclectic mix of songs and genres.
Musician and Producer for 20 years. Guitarist in Australian band Break Even. Sal has tattooed for 15 years and makes abstract art and sculptures at his home studio.
Marina Lommerse is a professional artist based in Fremantle. She has worked for the past thirty years in the creative fields of visual art, interior architecture, research and teaching. More recently, Marina has combined her passion for painting with her love of nature. Her solo exhibition, Riches of Isolation, explored the riches of our region during the two-year pandemic lockdown in Western Australia. Her current botanical work is part of a series of flower portraits of endemic wildflowers in Western Australia and Manitoba, Canada. She won the people's choice award for the York Botanic Art Prize in 2023. She has been selected to exhibit in several public arts festivals and group exhibitions in Western Australia and New South Wales. Marina has been commissioned to do a number of nature-based installations and murals in the Perth Region.
Marina was born in England and has lived in Tanzania, Canada and the UK. She has a MA (Design), BA (Interior Architecture) and a Certificate of Natural History Illustration. Formerly Associate Professor and Founding Head, Department of Interior Architecture at Curtin University, Marina was a Finalist in the Australian Awards for University Teaching. She has received grants for her creative work from the Australia Council for the Arts, the WA Department of Culture and the Arts, the City of Fremantle and Curtin University.
Penelope Forlano's childhood was spent crafting and in the 'flow' of needlecraft passed down intergenerationally through her matrilineage. Influenced by the process of building up form from simple repeated shapes and techniques, her furniture and public art practice continues to explore these possibilities.
Penelope is now exploring a new arena, anodized aluminium jewellery, as a fusion of her architectural and artistic practices. Created in response to a market gap, she started making brooches as a personal project to elevate her own simple block colour clothing. Her range is now available in small production numbers.
Hi, my name is Ned, I am 10. I am a young artist and little entrepreneur. I make small fabric hair buttons. I am at primary school in Fremantle. My interests are art, making Lego creations, gaming and listening to music. At the moment, I play guitar, drums and the double bass. I have two adult sisters who are into fashion. I like animals and have lots of pets.
The idea for making hair buttons came from some of my sister's old hair buttons which we still have. My mum helped me order the parts to make some buttons and buy the fabrics. For my birthday mum and dad had the cards printed for me. I was also given some fabric by a teacher. And now I am making bookmarks, keyrings and earrings. The name A Little Hare Button is fun because hair and hare sound the same but are different things. And hares are cute.
Trained in interior architecture Renée Parnell uses these design skills in public art and printmaking, mounted prints, home ware, cards, gift wrap and giftware.
Drawing inspiration from uniquely beautiful Australian landscapes and urban environments of our cities, ceramic artist Melanie Sharphan's Eucalypt Homewares are designed to be used every day. Ceramics, hand made porcelain tableware, trinket boxes, vases.
Olivia Samec has a degree in Fine Art from Curtin University, studied Fine Art studies at UWA and Claremont School of Art, and has been immersed in Aboriginal culture and art for seven years while living in Arnhem Land and the Central Western Desert. In 2023, she undertook a Churchill Fellowship to UK, NYC and Europe. Highlights of her work include Sculptures by the Sea, highly commended in the Black Swan Portraiture Prize, large scale commissions, and reconciliation works with Noongar Artist Kerry Stack.
Inspired by north, south and central Australia, Olivia uses light and rich colours to evoke a distinct sense of place. Fire and water are recurring themes, along with popular favourite whale shark art. The paintings in her rockpool series are pressed into brushed aluminium, which gives a unique look with an added reflective, watery quality. Olivia makes monoprints directly from southwest bush botanics and transforms them through magnification, collage and mirror imaging. Baroque, with its sense of exuberance, movement, colour, and sense of awe of nature, has been a constant reference point for Olivia. The family's 200-year-old Austrian kacheloven provides a tangible link and reference point in all her art works, including a varied range of sculptures.
Cathy Cooksey is a South Fremantle ceramicist, designer and art educator. She is inspired by the apparent randomness of weathered ancient landforms at the same time as the order and logic of geometry and pattern. Her pieces are understated, with minimal adornment and either no glaze or spot glaze, allowing the raw, natural quality of clay to be appreciated. Cathy's ceramic work has previously been exhibited at Sculpture by the Sea Cottesloe.
Sara Drake is a Fremantle-based mapmaker, artist and sculptor, working in a unique illustrative style. She specializes in creating highly detailed and decorative mixed media maps. Her work ranges from large-scale globes and bespoke world maps to more intimate maps of towns, cities and countries.
Sara's work combines a wide range of techniques, including sculpture, painting, cartography and modelmaking and a multitude of materials, both found, new and recycled. She studied 3D Design at Central St Martins College in London, and consequently established a unique and very niche career as a mapmaker, working all over Europe. She moved to Australia in 2007 and set up her mapmaking studio in Fremantle. Most works are made as private commissions, but Sara also creates maps for corporate and media clients all around the world. Recently, she has started producing a range of high quality, limited edition prints of her maps, several of which are now held in the Map Collection of the State Library of WA.
Originally from Sydney, Jan Purser has been a Fremantle-based artist for over 20 years, learning first in Sydney and then from several Perth artists. Jan is also a naturopathic nutritionist, finding her art practice the perfect foil to her busy health practice. Her painting style varies from abstract to representational and she uses acrylics, oils, gouache, and acrylic pens. Jan also works with paper mâché and creates individual artworks such as bowls, pots, and also vases where she uses repurposed glassware as the base vessel.
Jan finds inspiration from the coast near her home and from her travels within the countryside in Australia and overseas.
janpurser.com.au
@janpurserart
@janpurserart
@janp4070
@janpurserart9650
For Sandra Black's work, she continues to focus on surface decoration and shapes derived from organic forms, particularly the structures of plants and trees, exploring both their ecological fragilities and adaptive strengths. Journeys to the great southern region, the Alice, and the Pilbara have all provided imagery for Sandra's work. A fascination also developed for her with the structures of industrial areas observed through both overseas and local travels along with their subsequent impact on our environment. She looks at combinations of the observed structural forms with surface elements of nature. There are still elements of light play within, through the porcelain vessels and objects Sandra makes, that explore translucency, illumination, and reflection.
Having spent most of his artistic life as an actor, Robert Hensley has come to painting late in life, and carries that love of the theatrical into his paintings. He tries to capture the conflict that creates drama of the everyday in his abstract expressionist paintings. The feeling that ends up as an abstract painting is often triggered by nature, home life, world events, and personal interests.
Beste Ogan was born and raised in the coastal town of Izmir, Turkey, surrounded by the crystal-clear turquoise waters, the white pebbly beaches and the luscious cuisine of the Aegean. Today, this rich sensory inventory of her coastal upbringing, combined with her cultural heritage, subconsciously informs a collection of tactile porcelain tableware and homewares. Slipcast porcelain is the perfect medium for the granular detail she seeks, whether it's the mimicry of a leathered surface or the fine interaction of oxides creating one-of-a-kind marbled surfaces reminiscent of windswept beaches.
Beste designs and makes each piece with the aim to elevate the dining experience by extending the joy good food gives to all five senses. She believes that now, more than ever, homes are a retreat from a world full of uncertainty and overwhelm. She hopes her work brings people little moments of joy as they sip their morning coffee or connect with their loved ones over a delicious home-cooked meal.
Now based in South Fremantle, the iridescent colour of the Indian Ocean sparks memories of the Aegean, and shells, urchins and driftwood provide studies in form, colour and texture.
