White Gum Valley is home to many of Freo's well known artists and is full of hidden gems with eclectic cafes, co-lab spaces, sustainable housing and beautiful parklands.
This week you'll find artists working across all spectrums of the arts, including painting, design, sculpture, writing, textiles and public art.
Tickets are valid all weekend.
We first suggest you walk if possible to avoid any parking issues. If you cannot take public transport and need to drive, there is free parking around Booyeembara Park and side streets.
Pete Ross was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and now lives and works in Fremantle. He has been peer recognised for his works in portraiture and landscape painting by notable exhibitions and participation in esteemed competitions such as the Lester Prize (formally Black Swan Prize for Portraiture), Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and Lethbridge 2000 Art Awards underscoring his status as an artist of merit.
More recently, Pete's works include Black Summers, where he adeptly merges observations of the natural landscapes with oil and acrylic paint on sculpted, fire-treated native wood panels in response to the most catastrophic fire seasons ever recorded in Australia that resulted in the deaths of billions of native animals, scorched 243,000 square kilometres, and left 34 dead.
At the heart of Pete's artistic vision lies a profound dedication to addressing the critical issues concerning the impact of human activity on the environment, communities, countries, and the planet as a whole. His oeuvre is characterised by a compelling portrayal of the interconnectedness between human actions and the delicate balance of nature. Through his powerful depictions, Pete endeavours to provoke contemplation on ecological and sociocultural challenges, urging viewers to confront the consequences of human interventions on the natural world. This commitment to bringing forth thought-provoking dialogues on pressing environmental concerns has become a defining hallmark of Pete's practice.
Pete continues to explore and challenge the boundaries of artistic expression through his considered creations, addressing pressing global concerns with unwavering dedication and artistic prowess.
Lyn Mazzilli loves to tell stories in line, colour and texture. Her themes are timeless Australian landscapes, as well as the minutiae of domestic life.
Through mixing bright emotive colours and rich textures, Lyn invites you to immerse your senses in how natural environments are interconnected and mutually dependent, in many subtle ways. She is interested in representing close-up familiar details, and at the same time, the broader panorama of bush vistas.
Lyn carefully plans her compositions by juxtaposing multiple viewpoints. The sun-lit patterns of early morning and late evening create the sensation of walking about in Booyeembara Park at different times of the day. Still-life interiors with domestic objects tell a narrative about the poetry of domestic lives. Her compositions explore spatial tensions between familiar objects, painted in vibrant colours and by expressively modelling their forms. Lyn strives to suggest the intimacy of everyday food preparation and household rituals.
Artist Wendy Lugg rescues old cloth, embedded with memory, and gives it new life in stitched artworks, often presented alongside photographic works and historical artifacts, creating dialogues between them. Fabric, thread and the camera lens have been her lifelong companions.
Her practice includes exhibiting and teaching internationally, curating exhibitions, undertaking arts residencies, writing about the arts and serving on arts and museum committees. Her awards include a Churchill Fellowship and an Australia Council New Work grant.
Arif Satar and Audrey Fernandes-Satar are visual artists working in Walyalup (Fremantle). Working individually and in collaboration, their cross-disciplinary practice intersects through a shared interest in uncovering complex memories and histories, both personal and collective. Across sculpture, drawing, text, printmaking, sound and the moving image, Arif and Audrey draw from ancestral stories, rituals, and crafting techniques, creating a rich dialogue between ecologies of the past and the present.
Arif Satar, born in the Island of Mozambique Africa, grew up under the Portuguese colonial rule. Today an investigation of his Indian-African-Arabic background is intrinsically embedded within his art practice, which draws upon densities of heritage, memory, contemporary literature and history.
Audrey Fernandes-Satar, born in India, grew up within a microcosm of stories of freedom and activism - collective memories shared or overheard, and then kept safe in an imaginary repository somewhere in her mind. Her artwork traverses' poetic text, painting, drawing and altered photographs - looking for symbols, grappling with history, and altering documentation from institutions, museums and galleries.
Together, Arif and Audrey have exhibited their works in Australia and overseas and have undertaken socially engaged public and community art projects. Their most recent project titled Time Space Disruption: The Bird Is Not Mine was presented at Palazzo Mora from May to November 2023 in Venice Italy during the 23rd Venice Architecture Biennale. Currently they are working towards a project for IOTA24 in Esperance and a solo exhibition for 2025 titled The Bird Song.
Jo Darbyshire is a West Australian artist, based in Fremantle. She studied Fine Arts at Curtin University in 1981, a Post-Graduate Diploma at Canberra School of Art in 1991, and a Master of Creative Arts in Cultural Heritage at Curtin University of Technology in 2004. Primarily a painter, Jo's abstract works explore her strong relationship with the WA coast and her interest in its underwater landscapes, islands, Fremantle Port and traces of colonial life. She often incorporates contemporary social history into projects and exhibitions. She exhibits regularly with Art Collective WA, and her artwork is held in all major public institutions in WA, as well as in private collections, nationally and internationally. Jo's recent solo exhibition opened at Art Collective WA on 9 March 2024.
Jo is represented by Art Collective WA.
Susan Flavell is a well-known Fremantle based artist. She recently exhibited a major exhibition The Horn of the Moon, 13 Goddesses and their Consorts at John Curtin Art Gallery. Her art practice reveals notions of the fantastic, the monstrous and the mythical, applying a range of material strategies to create compelling sculptural forms. She is driven by a fundamental commitment to the use of recycled materials.
Sujora Conrad is a multi-disciplinary West Australian artist with a BA(Art) from Curtin University. Working with 'Relationships to Land and Place', environmental issues feature strongly in her practice. She exhibits regularly, sometimes using audio visual components alongside 2D and 3D gallery work.
With many years working in remote desert communities, Sujora's work often begins in the field observing and gathering natural or discarded materials for development on site, or in her Fremantle studio. Finished works float between framed and wall hung, suspended or freestanding, gallery and on-site installations. Sujora predominantly uses natural or reconfigured materials, which includes collecting and grinding burn-site charcoal, distilling botanical inks and resins, stitching-in and embedding with beeswax, and collecting waste materials from urban building sites. She has completed two rural Art Residencies and several remote and urban projects.
Narayani is an Australian artist living and working in Fremantle. She has a range of ceramic work. In her sgrafitto series, she has combined clay with her love of line and colour to create fun, unique contemporary pieces which are fully functional. She is also fascinated by RAKU and barrel firing - primitive firing techniques which can produce stunning surface effects for purely decorative effect.
Kelsey Ashe is a Fremantle based artist who works in large scale formats across Print Making, Film Making and Textiles. Due to the scale of work, Kelsey has occupied commercial studios around Fremantle for over 20 years but has now moved her practice to her home studio in White Gum Valley. Kelsey has studied traditional Japanese aesthetics and textile processes and uses these to develop artworks that draw on constructed mythologies and ficto-critical narrative.
Recent artworks are highly detailed drawings of an imaginary Antipodean landscape, screen-printed with botanical hand-mixed dyes. Kelsey has exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Molly Ryan is a textile artist, researcher and educator focused on understanding people's relationships with textiles through practice-led research. A commitment to preserving the natural environment and reducing waste governs her creative and entrepreneurial practices. Molly exploits the creative potential of materials through experimental and innovative textile processes.
Grace is an artist, teacher, and emerging academic. The historic link between femininity and nature and ways of visually representing this relationship in an intuitive manner based on myth and allegory interests her.
Eveline Kotai has been exhibiting regularly for over 40 years. She lives and works in Fremantle and is a member of the Art Collective WA. Her art practice incorporates a diverse variety of media, including drawing, painting, printmaking and stitch. Applications of her imagery have also extended into building integrated public art projects and textiles. The studio will have examples of process and samples of some of these items on sale and/or on display.
Eveline is represented by Art Collective WA.
Stitch, for Megan Kirwan-Ward, has always been an entry into mark making, three-dimensional fabric construction and print illumination. During the last fifteen years, Megan has lived and worked within remote landscapes. The experience strongly influenced chosen materials, selected palettes and subject matter. Increasingly, she is drawn to the textural qualities inherent in observed botanical forms, how stitch can suggest ways they sit against their ground, and how their colours are part of a widespread patterning. The exploration of small details within and around the botanical forms has become an opening to describe the places they inhabit.
Bridget Seaton migrated to Perth from the UK in 2010 to pursue her love of the Australian bush, the driving force behind her work. Although predominately a studio painter, she likes to spend time walking and painting en plein air in the bush, which is an essential process of her art making that enables her to commit places to memory. These memories are distilled and translated into paint once back in the studio. She is seduced by colour both in the natural world and on her palette and spends hours mixing colours from just a few tubes of paint.
Also a printmaker, she uses the technique of monotype to explore textures of the natural world through mark making and layering. Bridget cares deeply for the environment, having a particular reverence for trees, calling them, "the figures in my work on the stage of this vast land". She seeks to paint place as she experiences it, not as a static view but an amalgamation of memories. Bridget is a qualified arts educator with a Fine Art degree from the UK. She held her second solo show at Zig Zag Gallery last year and won first prize for printmaking at Beverley Art Prize 2022.
Jane Aitken is a Perth based ceramicist who creates hand-formed and thrown ceramics using either porcelain or stoneware clays. Techniques of slab building, coiliing and pinching are done to create forms and then a variety of decorative applications applied. Jane mostly takes her inspiration from the natural world - colours, texture, and forms of the land and sea, which offer limitless possibilities. Through her pieces she aims to capture the essence of our wild Australian places. Her ceramic journey is one of constant experimentation with a variety of techniques and its possibilities of form, surface imagery and decoration.
