Ballina’s Northern Rivers Community Gallery is launching its 2023 Public Programs this weekend, with a free after hours in-conversation event featuring exhibiting artist Marian Tubbs and ABC Radio National presenter Daniel Browning.
This will be followed by a live improvised sound performance by Eora/Sydney-based electronic and mixed-media artist Laura Hunt.
Commencing in the gallery at 3pm on Saturday, Bundjalung and Kullilli man Daniel Browning will provide unscripted insight into Marian Tubbs’ current NRCG exhibition Reversible Destiny, and delve into her practice and career.
Mr Browning is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, documentary maker, sound artist and writer from the Bundjalung and Kullilli peoples of far northern New South Wales and south-western Queensland. Currently, he is Editor Indigenous Radio with the ABC and presents The Art Show on Radio National.
A visual arts graduate, Daniel Browning is also a widely published freelance arts writer and has worked on publications by the Art Gallery of NSW, the National Gallery of Victoria, QAGOMA and the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Transforming the everyday
Marian Tubbs’ practice examines human-centred technologies, natural ecological systems, and language. She conflates body and object, high and low culture, and the physical and virtual to transform the everyday into a space for deep play. She works with accelerated shiny chaos, reflective of recent ecological and economic events.
Tubbs’ works are chaotic and unrelenting but also provide spaces of poetry and hope; her assemblages do not always look as if they belong to art, and she’s interested in transgressing notions of belonging.
This is the first solo exhibition Ms Tubbs has held in the Northern Rivers since moving her practice to the region. Since 2019 she’s participated in multiple themed exhibitions, curated exhibitions of emerging artists and overseen three graduation exhibitions as Course Coordinator of the Bachelor of Art and Design at Southern Cross University.
Laura Hunt
The artist talk will be followed by a live, improvised, ambient, sonic performance by electronic musician and mixed media artist, Laura Hunt.
As a musician and an artist, Ms Hunt has toured and exhibited internationally.
Her work is multi-disciplinary, investigating the body as a conduit for transformation. Science fiction and philosophy underpin her exploration of the mechanics of the world we live in, and water in particular, is a common thread in her work – as a force of life, of destruction, and of constant change.
Her art crosses a myriad of forms, including drawing, photography and 3D modelling.
Building on her five-year relationship of creative and technical collaboration with Marian Tubbs, Laura Hunt will draw samples from the soundtrack to Ms Tubbs’ video work, and perform a live, improvised collaboration within the gallery space.
These two first met in 2017 whilst DJing at an art festival in Tasmania, and have since formed a collaborative relationship across forms and creative mediums, exhibiting together, swapping creative and technical expertise, and learning about permaculture farming in the Northern Rivers.
On Saturday, the doors will open at Northern Rivers Community Gallery in Cherry Street at 2.30pm. In Conversation with Marian Tubbs and Daniel Browning starts at 3pm. Laura Hunt’s sonic performance will start at 4.30pm.
All ages are welcome, and the event is free, with no registrations required. For more information, visit nrcgballina.com.au or phone the gallery on 02 6681 0530.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
