EXHIBITION DATES: 15 August – 11 October, 2025

OFFICIAL OPENING: Friday 15 August 2025, 6pm

COST: Free

Details

Vivienne Binns, Richard Blackwell, Ham Darroch and Al Munro investigate pattern as a fascinating, compelling visual phenomena. At a deeper level, the “Patternmakers” reflect on pattern recognition; which in both human cognition and computer science, enables processing of complex problems and informs the high-level ability of making predictions. 

About the Artists

Al Munro

Al Munro is a Canberra-based artist whose interests span painting and drawing-based practices. Her art practice and research draw on diverse fields including artistic abstraction, geometry and textiles to explore the relationships between visual art, craft and science. Al has exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally, and her work is held in public and private collections.

Hamilton Darroch

Hamilton Darroch is an Australian artist working in painting, sculpture and performance. Me makes large scale wall paintings and series of paintings that resonate with human scale and the perception of space. His sculptures are created from altered and discarded existing objects, conceptually redirected using optical effects of geometric colour to reveal new meanings which are influenced by the vernacular and art history.

Richard Blackwell

Centered between sculpture and print-media, the interdisciplinary practice of Richard Blackwell involves a network of objects, a collage of marks, observations and processes, representing his felt experiences of the city. Parsed by printmaking, robotic fabrication and advanced manufacturing technology, produced through idiocractic systems of and automation, Blackwell’s work analyses the changing mechanics of human labour, considering the ways in which human limitations can be transcended by creating systems of production that supplant manual labour. His work, largely, is a reflection of what it means to make physically and digitally, in the context of the urban landscape. Created with film faced plywood, his recent relief works deal with ideas of modularity, fusing individual experience with architectonic space. Grappling with the unknown ways in which virtuality is changing our social reality and collapsing geographical space, the works function as urban cartography, and yet they also map the complicated, lonely virtual spaces that are rapidly subsuming contemporary (Western) existence.

Vivienne Binns

Vivienne Binns OAM is a pioneer of feminist, collaborative and community-based practice in Australia. Binns’ first exhibition, at Watters Gallery in 1967, was widely criticised for its provocative and sexually explicit imagery. After the Watters exhibition, Binns embarked on a range of ephemeral, cross-disciplinary and collaborative projects that precipitated her role as a leading figure in the development of community-based practices in Australia.

From the 1980s on she worked as an artist and educator, teaching painting, drawing and art theory at Sydney University, Charles Sturt University (Albury), and The Australian National University. In 2021, Binns was the recipient of the Australia Council Award for Visual Arts, while in 1985 she was given the Ros Bower Memorial Award for visionary contribution to community arts. Binns was additionally awarded the Order of Australia Medal for Services to Art and Craft in 1983.

Vivienne Binns’ most recent work in painting and assemblage reflect her interests in the function of art making as a human activity, that which occurs in all social groups, and the manifestations of this throughout these communities. This is especially visible in Binns’ use of patterning and surface treatments, connecting historical art movements to domestic, familiar imagery.