Christine McMillan's exhibition "Gathering"

We'd like to wish Archive friend and supporter, Australian artist Christine McMillan, all the very best with the launch of her exhibition Gathering, tonight at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery.

That's Christine in the photo on the right, with Iman. This was taken at the opening of our traveling exhibition "Portraits without names: Palestinian costume" at Museum of Victoria's Immigration Museum in 2002.

We displayed our traveling exhibition "Portraits without names: Palestinian costume" at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery the year after (photo at left).

Christine came to visit our director and use parts of the Archive's collection for inspiration, quite a while before that. She was very interested in Palestinian costume and Sinai bedouin dress, and even created a hand dyed and embroidered thob herself, along with a stunning burqa series. Jeni incorporated some of these works of art into "Portraits without names: Palestinian costume" as a way of showing how wonderfully Palestinian traditions were continuing to inspire artists from all over the world.

You can find a photo of Christine wearing the thob on our website.

You can visit Christine's website here (there is a link to Christine's burqa series but it's not working at the moment, so here is one example on the right of her Oman Wahibi style burqa with shells voile, cotton thread and shells) and blog here.

The photo on the left is a detail from her Sinai Desert style burqa, one of the works that was in "Portraits without names: Palestinian costume". This is a postcard we sell here at the Archive.

Gathering opens tonight and runs from 17 August - 30 September, 2007. Christine is giving a talk at 11am tomorrow, Saturday 18 August.

(Photos: Christine McMillan, Jeni Allenby)