ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The Northern Rivers Community Gallery & Ignite Studios respectfully acknowledges the Nyangbal people of the Bundjalung Nation as the traditional owners of the land upon which the Gallery and Ignite Studios stands.
We pay respects to elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge their living culture and unique role in the creative life of this region.
Images: (cover) Belinda Smith, Woman with Yellow Flowers, 2024; (pgs 1-2) Tom Wolf, Flow, 2022; (pgs 3-4) Liv Enqvist, metta prayer, 2023.
MAYORAL MESSAGE
The 2025 annual Northern Rivers Community Gallery creative program promises to deliver an exciting and engaging year ahead of thoughtprovoking exhibitions encompassing a range of themes and mediums from local, regional, and national artists.
Our Gallery Coordinator, Imbi Davidson, leads a team of dedicated staff and amazing volunteers. Together they are set to make 2025 bigger and better than ever.
In 2025 the Gallery will deliver a first-class exhibition program with leading Australian artists and emerging talent, host the Byron School of Art and Southern Cross University Graduate Awards and work towards an inclusive, accessible and contemporary arts program.
Concurrently, Ignite Studios will host a range of public programs including creative workshops with professional artists, in-conversation series in the Gallery, engaging community projects, and launch a new ceramics studio and kiln firing service.
NRCG is a vital and valuable arts organisation in the Ballina Shire and is essential to supporting the community’s vibrant arts and cultural life. I can’t wait to see this exciting program unfold in 2025.
Sharon Cadwallader | Mayor Ballina Shire Council
WELCOME
NRCG and Ignite Studios has had an extraordinary year of engagement and delivered an exceptional program of exhibitions, public programs and events in 2024. Achieving a Highly Commended Museum & Galleries NSW Imagine Award and nomination for the North Coast Tourism Awards for the Ballina Contemporary Art Market, NRCG continues its trajectory of delivering high-quality programs and exhibitions, increasing audience engagement and sharing contemporary art with the community.
The 2025 Annual Program highlights the upcoming program of exhibitions on show throughout the year in the gallery, with an exciting range of local, regional and national emerging and established artists exhibiting their work. This year’s program is outstanding and places NRCG as a significant arts and cultural organisation presenting artistic excellence.
There are many ways be part of our creative community in 2025. NRCG will present highquality public programs throughout the year including workshops, artist talks and special events, as well as launching the community ceramics studio. We are always looking for new volunteers to join the gallery team and our monthly newsletter, social media and website are a great way to stay up to date with what’s on.
On behalf of the NRCG team, we look forward to welcoming you to NRCG and Ignite Studios in 2025!
Imbi Davidson | Coordinator Gallery & Ignite Studios
ABOUT US
The Northern Rivers Community Gallery (NRCG) & Ignite Studios is a leading arts and cultural institution of the Northern Rivers, fostering creative exhibitions and programs, building community engagement and supporting opportunities where arts and culture can thrive.
Housed in the heritage listed former Ballina Municipal Chambers and Ballina Fire Station, NRCG & Ignite Studios is a cultural precinct, equipped with professional gallery spaces, a retail outlet, artist studios, workshop and project spaces, artist residency, ceramics studio and kiln services. Our facilities support a range of economic and creative development opportunities across the creative industries.
NRCG 2024 IN REVIEW
Throughout 2024 NRCG & Ignite Studios has maintained its commitment to the creative industries, fostering renewed growth, opportunities and support for artists and community participation. Our statistics show increases in all areas of activity and our aim is to continue to build upon these positive trends into 2025 and beyond.
Visitation
TOTAL VISITORS & ATTENDEES
322,157 ONLINE ENGAGEMENTS PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS
PUBLIC PROGRAMS/EVENTS
POP-UP EXHIBITIONS OR HIRES
ARTIST SHOP SUPPLIERS
ARTISTS EMPLOYED
Images: (pgs 5-6) Robin Saunders, Licorice Allsorts, 2024; (pgs 7-8) Holly Ahern & Eden Crawford-Harriman, Princess of the Night (video still), 2024.
exhibition program
The Meterologist’s Daughter –Watching the Skies
Lesley Ryan
passing place
Col Mac
The Black Lake
Shanti Des Fours
Princess of the Night
Holly Ahern & Eden CrawfordHarriman
9 January - 2 March 2025
Lesley Ryan is the daughter of a meteorologist and has had a fascination with the sky since she was a child: its ever-changing moods, its ability to frighten or calm, and the impact it has on everyone. Lesley creates ambiguous landscapes that invite the viewer to imagine the setting of their place and time.
passing place is a series of paintings and sculptures made in response to the artists connection to the Ballina region. Taking its title from the point in a single-track road where travellers briefly converge before moving in the opposite direction. passing place explores the ways in which boundaries of time, place, biography and history can poetically overlap creating a brief plurality of cultural memory.
The Black Lake presents a series of small, quiet monotypes that offer abstract glimpses, like fleeting flashes of memory, of a vast black lake near the artist’s former home. Created long after the artist moved away, the works respond to the lingering visual and emotional resonance of both a place and a former life.
Shanti Des Fours, The Weight of Water, 2024
Drawing from Australian and Sri Lankan perspectives, Princess of the Night explores existential narratives, cultural spirituality, and the ephemeral beauty of nocturnal blooms. This installation is an immersive, technology-driven enquiry of the Epiphyllum oxypetalum JANUARY
Image: Holly Ahern & Eden Crawford-Harriman, Princess of the Night (video still), 2024
Image: Lesley Ryan, Run Off, 2024
Image: Col Mac, stopping place (detail), 2024 photo by Louis Lim
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NEAR ENOUGH (IS GOOD ENOUGH)
Aaron Butt
Pushing Up Daisies
Emma Lyn Winkler
Where the Light Gets In
Sam & Jacqui Sosnowski
Worlds Within Worlds
Emily Imeson
6 March - 27 April 2025
NEAR ENOUGH (IS GOOD ENOUGH) is a body of work that explores Frank Hurley’s images of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17 through a series of experimental paintings. Critiquing the colonial and patriarchal goals of expeditions and using unexpected colours and patterns responsive to Hurley’s photographic images, the works in this exhibition play with techniques, pigments and substrates.
Emma Lyn Winkler’s experimental, multi-media exhibition delves into death and the absurd using collage, painting, animation and ceramics. Her work examines the way we respond to our own mortality, confronting the futility of attempting to ward off death. Through fractured layers and theatrical characters, Emma explores embracing death as a means to confront anxiety and existential dread.
Emma Lyn Winkler, Entropy (detail), 2023
This joint exhibition by Sam and Jacqui Sosnowski showcases the couple’s talents in both printmaking and ceramics. Based on the Leonard Cohen song, Anthem, Sam’s prints investigate the play of light and shadow while Jacqui’s (mainly raku) ceramics explore the preceding line of the song - there’s a crack in everything….
Image: Jacqui Sosnowski, Time and Tide, 2023
Worlds Within Worlds is an immersive installation that explores human and nonhuman worlds to re-imagine a more compassionate, coexistent way of being in and of the world. Combining divergent methods of art-making, including batik, painting, soil staining, burying, collage, sewing, embroidery and recycling, the exhibition features patch-worked paintings and soft sculptures that fuse natural pigments on canvas and cotton.
Image: Emily Imeson, Home for the Bees (detail), 2024
Image: Aaron Butt, Little Green Men (detail), 2024
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1 May - 22 June 2025
Distant Friends
Peter McLean
sunset on the dog fence
Verity Nunan
I hope this helps
Liv Enqvist
This exhibition was initiated soon after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when online platforms became the main means of maintaining friendships and social interactions. Distant Friends encompasses relief printed portraits based on social media photos of the artist’s friends as a basis to create a series of highly pixelated and innovative abstract portraits.
Image: Peter McLean, Distant Friends-Greg (detail), 2020
These works emerged from time spent on the ‘wild dog fence’ in corner country watching that big sky move over that long line. The artist would like to acknowledge how this sky country connects with the Maliangaapa, Wadigalis and Wangkumaras peoples and the Wilyakali and Barkindji people, her home in the Far West.
Image: Verity Nunan, Untitled (detail), 2024
I hope this helps is a series of textile meditations where you can stop, pause and take a deep breath. This exhibition offers a soft, embroidered space inspired by mindfulness and the art of being present.
Image: Liv Enqvist, metta prayer (detail), 2023
‘To undergo the transformation we must surrender everything’. The inception den is a resting place, a place of recharge amongst nature’s physical embrace. This exhibition, Den Inception, creates a home within the gallery using botanical elements and soundscape to bring the outside in and give the viewer a sense of wild nature, recharge, reverence, and retreat.
Image: Immortal Soil, hollow (detail), 2024
Wagtail at the Picture Palace
Robin Saunders
2024 SCU Graduate Award
River Mueller
I will not regret hope
Belinda Smith
Nyangbal NAIDOC Exhibition
Group Exhibition
26 June - 17 August 2025
Wagtail at the Picture Palace is an exhibition of relief monoprints on Japanese Kozo paper by regional artist, Robin Saunders. Robin’s experimental approach is process-led and created through the lens of art’s healing potential. In this series she imagines a wagtail’s nostalgic flight through the colours and patterns of an Art Deco Picture Palace.
Image: Robin Saunders, Spearmint Leaves, 2024
Presented in partnership with Southern Cross University (SCU), this exhibition showcases the work of a recent graduate from the Bachelor of Art and Design (BAD) Undergraduate program. The award supports the promotion and development of outstanding emerging graduates from the BAD undergraduate program and presents exciting emerging art practices to local audiences.
Image: River Mueller, It could be you; it could be us (it is you; it is us) (detail), 2024
I will not regret hope is an expanding body of sculptural work by artist Belinda Smith who uses figurative sculpture as a means of expressing her personal outlook and experience. This exhibition presents a series of small slip cast female busts, glazed and patterned to express her personal and hopeful optimism.
Celebrating 2025 NAIDOC Week, this exhibition will feature the work of local First Nations artists from the Nyangbal clan of the Bundjalung Nation and celebrate the creative talent, culture and stories from local Nyangbal artists.
Image: Belinda Smith, Love Blush (left) and Heartfelt (right), 2023
Image: Tania Marlowe, Djandamandi Jagun - Garrima Jagun, 2023
Glimpse of Alba –Sealladh Air Alba
Jemima Patch-Taylor
Beneath the Fallen Petals –Uncovering the Seeds of Surrender
Lauren Hotson
Do We Choose?
Georgie Milln
The 14th Annual Grace Cruice Memorial Exhibition
21 August - 12 October 2025
Glimpse of Alba is a personal exploration of the wild terrain and rich folklore of the Scottish Highlands. It is a pilgrimage to an ancestral homeland and the artist’s insatiable draw to a completely foreign, yet familiar, environment. This work tells a story of a strange contrast between the two; how far can one go and still feel at home?
Lauren Hotson’s work delves into the quiet strength and beauty found in life’s cycles of loss and renewal. Her intricately crafted ceramic vessels and organic forms evoke resilience beneath fragility: inviting reflection on the transformative power of surrender and the subtle rebirth that follows.
Do We Choose? is an invitation to explore the complexities of choice and the forces that shape our decisions. Using fine-line pen drawings from a molecular viewpoint this exhibition challenges visitors to reconsider their perceptions of free will and the unseen influences that guide their lives.
Image: Georgie Milln, Camus mornings (detail), 2023
Presented by the members of the Ballina Arts & Crafts Centre Incorporated (BACCI), the 14th Annual Grace Cruice Memorial Exhibition is a tribute to Grace Cruice and her vision showcasing the best works created by BACCI members.
Image: 12th Annual Grace Cruice Exhibition (installation view), 2023
Image: Jemima Patch-Taylor, Passing Place, Glen Etive (detail), 2024
Image: Lauren Hotson, Requiem for Renewal, 2024
CONNECTIONS
Gill Williams
Katie Pink
Tending Wounds
Grace Fayrer
Food and Drink
Home School
Achiever
16 October - 7 December 2025
Through CONNECTIONS Gill explores our very human desire for connection: the commonality and capacity to connect beyond the limits of language and social structures, with one another and the force of life itself. Gill’s work is intensely personal. His style is bold, brazen, vibrant, joyous, carefree and visually arresting. He is as generous with his painting as he is to those around him, giving always without limits.
Gill Williams, Lion Drinking (detail), 2023
Presented in partnership with the Byron School of Art (BSA), this exhibition showcases the work of a recent graduate. The award supports the promotion and professional development of outstanding emerging graduates from the BSA three year course and presents exciting new talents to local audiences.
Image: Katie Pink, Acid Eruptions, 2024
Through the lens of positive and negative pinhole photographs, Tending Wounds searches for resolution in the face of loss, navigating themes of nostalgic longing and memory. Deeply rooted in the artist’s personal experience of loss and memory, the images capture the woods of her childhood in Southeast England through the form of pinhole photography.
Image: Grace Fayrer, Tending Wounds II (Negative) (detail), 2024
Food and Drink is an exploration of the mundane through the lens of contemporary notions of horror and science fiction. Its heterogeneous elements offer a meal for the senses couched amidst unsettling and uncanny signifiers in an effort to generate complex systems and encourage critical engagement.
Image: Home School Achiever, Inside, A Collapsing Building (installation view), 2023
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public programs & ignite studios
PUBLIC PROGRAMS & IGNITE STUDIOS
Adjacent to the Gallery and housed in the heritagelisted former Ballina Fire Station, Ignite Studios is a community-engaged facility comprising workshop spaces, creative studios, an artist residency program, offices, and a ceramics studio.
Each year the Northern Rivers Community Gallery & Ignite Studios deliver a vibrant public program of creative workshops, artist talks and special events, and hosts community events from popup exhibitions, launches and film screenings to workshops, meetings and creative forums. NRCG works with local and regional artists and creative facilitators to deliver our programs.
Gallery Tours
Tours of our current exhibitions by Gallery staff and volunteers are available for community and school groups upon request. Tours are free and advanced bookings are required.
Ignite Artist Residency
The residency program offers time and space for a single artist to expand their artistic practice. It includes access to studio space and a small bedsit accommodation. It is open to local, national and international arts professionals from a broad range of creative disciplines. Applications are accepted year-round.
Images: (pgs 23-24) Ignite Studios Resident Artist Mayra Castro, 2024, Image Kate Holmes; (pg 24) Linocut Workshop with Steven Giese, 2024, Image Michelle Eabry.
Creative Studios
Two light-filled studio spaces with wooden flooring, air conditioning and secure, 24-hour access are available for long-term, low-cost leases to creative practitioners, organisations, and businesses from the region.
Creative Workshop Spaces for Hire
Two accessible spaces are available to hire for workshops, creative events, pop-up exhibitions, meetings, and special projects. Subsidised rates are available for artists and community organisations.
Ignite Ceramics & Kiln Firing Services
A ceramics throwing studio with six wheels, and two electric Woodrow Kilns, available for hire by qualified ceramic artists to make work or run their own workshops, as well as for emerging ceramicists to come and play on the wheel.
Ignite Studios is a wheelchair accessible venue. Participants can contact the NRCG team ahead of time for all accessibiltiy requirements.
For more information about our public programs or Ignite Studios, contact our Creative Programs Producer at nrcg@ballina.nsw.gov.au or visit nrcgballina.com.au
Images: (opposite, clockwise from top left) Artist Talk Daniel Browning & Marian Tubbs, 2023, Image Elise Derwin (ED); BCAM Ceramics Demo, 2023, Image Kate Holmes (KH), Weaving Workshop with Jugan Dandii, 2023, Image ED; Together Event VA Workshop, 2024, Image HK; BCAM Erth Street Performers, 2023, Image KH; Linocut Workshop, 2024, Image NRCG; Screenprinting Workshop, 2023, Image ED; Bright Sparks Kids Workshop, 2021, Image Natalie Grono.
gallery shop
NRCG GALLERY SHOP
The NRCG Gallery Shop features a range of handcrafted jewellery, ceramics, quality art books, gift-wares and greeting cards and is a popular destination for locals and visitors seeking special and unique gifts and home-wares.
Local & Ethical Suppliers
Suppliers for the Gallery Shop are largely sourced from across the Northern Rivers, offering a range of unique and bespoke local products that reflect who we are as a region and community. The Gallery Shop offers an ever-changing selection of artisan jewellery, cards, postcards, ceramics, curated art books and other hand-crafted products from regional makers.
We also source ethical arts and crafts from socially engaged enterprises supporting artists and makers from Indigenous Communities in the Kimberly region and basket makers from remote villages in Myanmar.
Sell your products with us!
If you are a designer, artist or craftsperson and would like to apply to sell product in the Gallery Shop please contact the Gallery Services Officer at nrcg@ballina.nsw.gov.au or visit our website nrcgballina.com.au
Images: (pgs 28-29) NRCG Gallery Shop; (opposite, clockwise from top left) Isabell Hillier Art Cards; Pali Baskets; Kate Stroud Earrings, Smoky Tea Ceramics, NRCG Gallery Shop, 2024, Image NRCG; Jacqui Sosnowski Ceramics; Hanky Fever; Jacqui Sosnowksi Ceramics: (pgs) 32-33 NRCG Exhibition Opening 2024, Image Ben Wyeth.
