From the Director's desk...

Christine McMillan

We've all been very quiet at the Archive, apologies to our regular readers...

Several staff have been on leave with health problems (including me), I can't even blame it on the Australian winter because we are scattered worldwide, lol. Let's hope we all get better soon!

In between bouts of sick leave I did at least manage to visit Christine McMillan's exhibition "Gathering" at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery and catch up with Christine, who has been a supporter of the Archive for many years. The exhibition was stunning. As always Chris' choice of media - in this case, everything from echidna spines to gauze bandages to grass seeds (see photo above) - is extraordinary. Here's a small section from the essay written by Amanda Lawson in the exhibition brochure:

"one of the most impressive aspects of Christine's practice is the way she moves seamlessly across media. It seems her pursuit of visual languages to capture concepts or shape a fascination with the physical properties of the material world cannot be fixed or limited by any one medium. Her practice is truly hybrid, resisting neat categorization, and all the more interesting to observe and appreciate because of that fluidity...

"The works are driven by a sense of energy and enquiry as well as an acute attention to detail. Based in, but never limited by, the local and regional environment this intricate body of work resonates at global level"

The Archive is lucky enough to share one of those works as Christine very generously donated an exquisite work on paper, utilizing watercolour and echidna spines. Photos coming soon...

On the last day of the Bathurst exhibition Christine presented a performance with Lisa Roberts and Karen Riley. Chris writes on her blog:

"The movement was connected by white cotton gauze, if one person made a movement the other had to compensate. The ‘as the dry’ projection played over the gauze. Tracy Sorensen, whose background is in journalism, community arts and video script writing, videoed the Gathering performance. Sue Clarke-Lindfield operated the still camera for the animations. It was another gathering"

You can view the You Tube video below.

I'll bring you up to date with other Archive happenings in a later post. For now: a final word to our readers: if you would like us to promote any Palestinian projects or events, please just drop us a line, we'd love to help!

(Photo: from Christine's blog
Video: You Tube)

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)