January 2024 Mailbag No 2

Trevor Lee in Canberra recommends that if you are travelling through south east New South Wales between Sydney and Canberra it is well worth your while dropping in to Bundanon.

Bundanon is in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, Australia, in Wingecarribee Shire, on Gandangarra and Dharawal Country and the home of the artist Arthur Boyd (1920-1999). Nowadays Bundanon is a national arts organisation which creates learning programs for students of all ages and operates Australia's largest artist in residence program. Bundanon promotes the value of landscape.¹

You can visit the Bundanon Homestead and Arthur Boyd’s Studio and in
2022 Bundanon's facilities expanded in with the opening of a new Art Museum and Bridge for creative learning.¹

Trevor has recommended a vist to see the MIWATJ YOLŊU SUNRISE PEOPLE exhibition which according to John McDonald from the Sydney Morning Herald is a stunning exhibition that makes you lose all sense of space and time.

John McDonald has written:
Yolngu country, in the gulf of Carpentaria, draws its identity from the everlasting rendezvous of salt water and fresh water. The same daily drama takes place in the Shoalhaven, in a vast estuary near Nowra. As with Yirrkala, where the Yolngu live, Bundanon, the property gifted to the nation by Arthur Boyd and his family, is an estuarine environment. This affinity is teased out in Miwatj Yolngu: Sunrise People, a stunning survey by a group of artists who have taken Australia by storm in recent years.
Bundanon director Rachel Kent developed close ties with this Indigenous community during her years as a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and has been longing to do such a show. It’s hard to think of a more dynamic art centre than Buku at Yirrkala – a status reflected in the number of awards accumulated, the quantity of work acquired by public museums and leading private collectors, and the lineup of top commercial galleries eager to represent individual artists.²