John Hurrell – 9 February, 2025

It is not often you come across a show where exemplary national talent from up to almost a decade ago is collected to be celebrated with a dramatic flourish. This unusual sprawling group presentation explores a wide range of intimately sized, unorthodox or ‘experimental’ items of painting, jewellery and sculpture, with some artists having two or three contributions. The collective ambience seems eccentric within the staid architecture of the Homestead, yet the show is exciting, fresh and invigorating.

The exhibition (a mix of fine and applied art [body ornaments especially]) consists mostly of works from The Arts House Trust (a long list with Michael Prosee, Israel Tangaroa Birch, Glen Snow, Patrick Lundberg, Dion Workman, Oliver Perkins, Helen Calder, Stephen Bambury, Brendon Leung, Johl Dwyer, Wi Taepa, Abbie La Rooy, Charlotte Fisher, Zac Langdon Pole, Ben Cauchi, Ghastly Studios, Kiki Hall, Murray Green, John Parker, James Ross, Noel Ivanoff, Rachel Hope Peary, Kayo Miyashita, and Natalie Guy) plus others from five invited guests (Angus Edwards, Hannah Valentine, Katherine Rutecki, Kevin Thorne and Rohan Hartley Mills). All in the small rooms on the ground floor.

Although the focussing theme is innovation within a range of dynamic and active disciplines, it can be argued that they shouldn’t have painted the walls (in my view they are far too dark and fiddly with their thematic variations), there are too many art types under examination, and that the accumulated results are unwieldy. The result of too many curators maybe? A teetering overload of piled up sensibilities gathered together from disparate scattered sources?

However, even if the above is true, but you are willing to be very pleasantly surprised, and like sniffing around the intricate lobbies and angular corridors of exhibiting spaces, taking initially short tentative steps down memory lane (the wall labels and exhibition handout are very informative), then this show is a winner.

La Rooy, Hall and Prosee have done a conspicuous public service in pulling together this multi-artist display, an event that more prestigious civic institutions should have tackled in some tidier (less specific) form (say, as a more general historic survey) long ago. Long live The Pah!

John Hurrell

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