Sneak Peek at Easy Riders

Our next exhibition, Easy Riders, is currently being installed… We’re excited to have some large scale grafitti works being carried in right at the moment… Check out the photos!

Easy Riders will be open to the public from tomorrow morning. Do drop by and see some of the fantastic talent of Melbourne street artists.

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2013 at Hertiage Hill

Happy new year friends! We’re off to a roaring start for 2013.

We’re putting the final touches together for our Feb 3rd OPEN DAY (do check the link out, we got loads of interesting things happening that day, and they’re all free!)

Benga house is also going through a trandformation to become the artful Benga Studios. We’re removing the furniture from the old loungeroom and turning it into a studio for artists to hire. The room will be available for hourly, weekly and monthly rates.

It’s almost ready, but we thought we’d give you a few sneak peeks at it’s transformation progress.

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Guest post from our previous Artist in Residence, Clare McCracken

Dear Heritage Hill,

Thank you so much for having me over the month of August. Your studio space in the Old School House, adjacent to Laurel Lodge, is a beautiful working environment. Well lit and heated, it was both cosy and really functional. I had some pretty extraordinary weather while there but the space kept me warm and dry, and when the sun did come out, walking around your incredible gardens and eating my lunch under the shade of your giant fig trees was fabulous.

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Sneak peak at our current Artist in Residence, Clare McCracken

Today we thought we’d show you a sneak peek at some work in progress by our current Artist in Residence, Clare McCracken. She’s in her final week of her Residency in the old school house and she’s been creating some beautiful things inspired by the history and items at Hertage Hill . Clare is a multi-disiplinary artist and has chosen to work mainly in paint and craft for this project. If you’re interested in being an Artist in Residence at Heritage Hill in 2013, you can download all the information here. Applications close on Friday the 2nd of October, so don’t delay!

In the mean time, here is some of what Clare has been working on:

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Momentary Artist in Residence – Tom Francis

Today was a pretty exciting day here at Heritage Hill. Apart from the weather being glorious and the garden starting to bloom in preparation for Spring, we had musician Tom Francis drop by.

Dandenong residents might have heard Tom before, he has performed as part of the Station Sessions, playing some tunes on a Friday afternoon at the railway station. Today he dropped in to check out the acoustics in both Benga and Laurel Lodge. This resulted in Heritage Hill’s first wandering minstrel, with Tom moving from room to room around the site playing his guitar and singing. Sitting in the sun-drenched office looking out on the garden was made even more lovely by the songs drifting down the corridor.

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Emerging Aboriginal Artists opening

On Friday night, our current exhibition, Emerging Aboriginal Artists, had it’s opening. Our gallery was packed, lucky we’d taken some photos of the exhibition before everyone arrived!

Welcome to Country by Aunti Di Kerr

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Emerging Aboriginal Artists – new exhibition

Our next exhibition is Emerging Aboriginal Artists, opening next Friday night. It’s currently being installed by the curator, Steve Delany, and we wanted to give you a sneak peak at the process.

Postcards for the exhibition on the front desk

The mail out to our mailing list – both internal and external

Some of the artworks lined up on the windowsill ready to be positioned around the gallery

One of the artworks in it’s final position

The curator, Steve, deciding on final placement of the works

The exhibition runs from the 1 June to the 1 July and we’re open to the public from 10-4 Monday to Friday and 12 to 4 on Sundays. So do come by and have a look at the beautiful work by some very talented local Indigenous artists.

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Reading context in images

Today, artists are installing our next exhibition, Artspirations, and as they figure out the layout of the show, which artwork goes where, it made us think about context.

Any two images you put together do comment on each other. So when you’re hanging an exhibition, you need to think about what images together are saying. This was really apparent in our first exhibition this year, The Changing Face of Women.

The exhibition consisted of 26 images from a local photographer, Graham Southam, over the span of around 40 years. Mr Southam donated his entire collection of negatives, around 130,000, to the council in 1991. We were thrilled to curate an exhibition out of these images, however not all the negatives had any explanations so we were occasionally in the dark about what the images were about. One of the images we picked for the exhibition was this one:

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Introducing two of our volunteers – Maria and Ernie

Heritage Hill is run by a small staff ably assisted by a dedicated group of volunteers. Today I would like to introduce you to two volunteers who have been with us for 18 years, Maria and Ernie. They popped by this morning so I took the opportunity to ask them a couple of questions.

Maria and Ernie under the Persimmon tree

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Are you the next George Negus?

Last week, we had a very exciting media event in the garden. Village Graphics director, Daryl Pitman, was filming around Heritage Hill for an upcoming TV show about Dandenong! It was such big news that the Leader Newspaper, sent out one of their photographers, Andrew Batsch, to cover it.  

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