Art / Sharing Stories Arts Exchange. At ANU School of Art & Design, until February 27. Reviewed by ROB KENNEDY.

Sharing Stories Arts Exchange (SSAE) is a project fostering positive relationships linking the Canberra community and local and regional indigenous/non-indigenous communities. 

The 42 works in this exhibition at the ANU School of Art & Design cross a wide range of styles and mediums. But this project has a much broader scope than just artists creating artworks. The SSAE program includes culturally rich learning opportunities and events, with a structured creative field program that explores communities and culturally significant sites on Country.

A work that immediately grabbed my attention was Helen Heslop’s, The Uncomfortable Truth. The artist photographed landscapes through distorted stained-glass windows as inspiration for her hanging window frames with sewn quilts that dangle on one side of these frames.

The effect is powerful because it references colonial women’s experience, often powerless, as the artist says, while evoking the house as a physical structure of dispossession.

A visually stunning work titled Clearing, by Holly Grace, is a blown glass construction of a two-person cross-cut saw with video projection. From both sides of the semi-transparent saw, the video projection is seen, but it’s also shown on a wall framed through a rectangle slit box in front of the projector. The beauty of nature appears prior to what was cut out and built by loggers.

The four paintings of the same subject by Kate Stevens titled Snowy Hydro #1 to #4, are of the Tumut 3 Power Station in Walgalu Country.  They offer an expansive view of part of the infrastructure and surrounding waterways and the way the station interacts with the landscape. She has captured the area with a soft hand that renders the images surreal-like.

Natalie Bateman’s two paintings titles Muriyira Djiraali and Sunshine on Hill, from the Walbanja-Yuin area on the south coast of NSW, show how her sea-dwelling history is captured through the designs incorporated on the canvases. They are of a soft-transfixing design emanating through the contrasting colours and negative spaces.

Anika Romeyn’s two watercolour works on paper titled Submerged/Exposed and Revealed/Concealed standout through their minimal colour selection and impacting images of a River Red Gum tree and surrounding waterway. She has applied water to drip down the paper increasing the aspect of being surrounded by water. Quite impressive.

The artworks come from highly experienced artists to people quite new at the craft. There is an enriching and inspiring engagement offered in this exhibition along with unique shared stories of Aboriginal culture, history and our environment.