A splash of color and a dollop of joy has brought winter sunshine into the country’s youngest regional art gallery, with a joint exhibition of new works from two unlikely collaborators.
Last November, acclaimed artist Ben Quilty realized his ambition of establishing a public gallery in his neighbourhood, in the southern highlands of New South Wales: Ngununggula opened its doors with an exhibition called High Jinks in the Hydrangeas, a collection of photographs and installations by Sydney artist Tamara Dean.
Last weekend the gallery – a repurposed heritage-listed dairy in Retford Park on the outskirts of Bowral – unveiled its latest show, Spring Collection: an exhibition of new works by veteran painter/designer/entrepreneur Ken Done, and craft-based installation artist Rosie Deacon.
The two artists share a compulsive fascination with intense colour, and an affectionate attachment to one of Australia’s most iconic motifs, the koala.
Young Japanese tourists flocked to Done’s Sydney harborside gallery in the 1980s to buy his koalas, the artist says.
“I could draw koalas that were so cute, nine-year-old Japanese girls fainted from their very cuteness, which is what I set out to do,” Done tells the Guardian.
“Now Rosie has taken the koala into a whole different level, very exciting, very graphic.”
The lighthearted focus of the exhibition fills the brief of accessibility, Ngununggula’s director, Megan Monte, says.
“People can’t help but crack a smile.
“It’s important for a regional gallery to offer diversity, and it’s incredible for kids to see the work as well as adults … [so] that they can stop and think about what art can be. And that art is something we should all be enjoying.”
While there are a number of commercial art galleries dotted throughout the southern highlands, locals and Wingecarribee council had spent some previous 30 years discussing the lack of a regional public gallery in the shire – but it had amounted to little more than talk.
The instant Sydney art adviser Justin Miller showed Quilty the former Fairfax family-owned 19th century dairy property in Retford Park, the artist was sold.
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The gallery’s name, Ngununggula (pronounced “Nuhn-uhn-goola”), means “belonging” in the local Gundungurra language. Quilty admits there was initially some opposition, on the grounds some people would not be able to pronounce it; and the venue itself took more than five years to come into being.
“It was a shed filled with rolled up barbed wire and corrugated iron,” Quilty tells the Guardian.
“But it was once in a lifetime opportunity to get a proper regional gallery. To build something similar from scratch, built out of the ground, would have been around $30m. And we’ve got this for $8m, with a beautiful, nuanced heritage that binds it.”
Sydney architects Tonkin Zulaikha Greer were tasked to redesign the National Trust-listed property, and builder/developer Richard Crookes became so involved in the project he decided to deliver it at cost. Crookes now sits on the Ngununggula board.
Quilty has no plans to exhibit his own work in the gallery anytime soon. The multi-award winning artist, who in little more than a decade has won the Prudential Eye award (2014), the Archibald prize (2011), and the Doug Moran national portrait prize (2009), said Ngununggula was never intended as “a vanity project”.
“The sooner my name is disassociated with the gallery the more everyone else’s names become involved,” he says.
“I don’t think it’s right that I should show in there for quite some time.”
In Spring Season, a dozen new works by Done flood the gallery’s first space, most on a large scale taking coral reefs as his inspiration. Several additional Done works adorn the walls of the gallery’s second space, in which Deacon’s riotous coral reef installation – originally created for the 2022 Australian fashion week show by Romance Was Born – sprouts forth from the floor.
The third space in Ngununggula has been colonized by Deacon’s mammoth multi-coloured mutation of a necklace, the fruits of a 1.5-tonne donation of polystyrene foam, gifted to Deacon by a Sydney toy manufacturer.
Both artists discussed their work at a briefing on site earlier this month.
“I tried to contain the colors … but it didn’t work,” said Deacon, who expanded a little on the joys and challenges of working collaboratively. To make the coral reef installation, she corralled her mother’s knitting circle in Deacon’s small home town of Nyngan, in central NSW; and for the necklace installation, she worked with what sounded like the entire gallery staff, including cafe employees.
The 37-year-old artist, who established her reputation in the art world comparatively early in her career, admits she was intimidated by art galleries and art school as a young person. Since graduating from the UNSW College of Fine Arts in 2009, she has shown in more than 50 exhibitions in Australia.
Deacon is self-effacing, almost dismissive, of her achievements to date. Done, less so.
“I was 40 when I had my first exhibition at Holdsworth Gallery, and three months later I opened my own,” said the 82-year-old artist, who has collected a wide assortment of accolades over the years, including the NSW Tourism award (1986), Father of the Year (1989) and an Order of Australia (1992).
As Done moved from painting to painting in Spring Collection, he self-interrogated out loud as small details within each work caught his eye.
“What are these things? I have no idea, you couldn’t look it up in a David Attenborough book,” he said, pointing to one.
“What is this? I have no idea,” he continued, about another. “It’s a lot about composition, balance, a big piece here, a little piece there. It’s like a piece of music, you have to get the notes right, you have to get the rhythm right – oh, here’s a little trill thing.”
Done’s inspiration for this collection stretches far back to his boyhood, when a Saturday job at his local Coles supermarket earned him his first diving mask. He has been captivated by the underwater world ever since.
Many of the works appear to merge garden and underwater themes; and most are on show for the first time. There is a wisteria reef painting, and one called Sweetpea Reef – “because it is pretty”.
“I like that word, it’s not a very fashionable word in contemporary art society, well bugger that,” he said.
“Pretty is a very nice word, beautiful is a very nice word, decorative is a very nice word.
“All these words seem to be a bit out of fashion in certain areas – but I don’t make the rules.”
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Spring Collection, new works by Ken Done and Rosie Deacon, is showing at Ngununggula in the southern highlands until 9 October