In this edition we feature the Perth Festival Visual Arts Program, skewed to local content due to pandemic restrictions and border closures, but in the process shining a spotlight on the richness and depth of an increasingly confident arts sector.

First up, John Curtin Gallery Director Chris Malcolm provides a personal insight into the development of Everything is True, the largest survey to date of the extraordinarily resolved sculptural works of Abdul-Rahman Abdullah. These ‘drawings in space’ in wood mask laborious hours in creation until set free to occupy their own state of being.

We caught up with Gemma Weston, Perth Festival Visual Arts Program Associate who describes a 2021 program rich in local content and broadened gallery participation. The Program interprets both the Festival theme of Bilya, or river, with its multiple meanings of past, present and tributary influence and connections, as well as responding to our times.

As Exhibition Manager/Curator at the Holmes à Court Gallery, Laetitia Wilson provides inside knowledge of its Festival show, Reflection / Submersion. Audiences can expect to be immersed in watery reflection in a diverse range of media encompassing new works by invited artists and works from the Janet Holmes à Court Collection.

Lastly, Annette Peterson joins the Artist’s Chronicle to cover Alluvial Gold by Erin Coates at Goolugatup Heathcote Gallery, the result of fascinating research into the site through an annual invitation TILT program. A curtain of oyster shells, dolphin bone forms fashioned into musical instruments and film of the murky depths of the river merge to form a single, yet worrying view of the river’s ecosystem.

Lyn Di Ciero

Editor