Tag: Featured

Regional $50 million art museum reopens

November 3, 2021
by Annie de Merindol
Exterior photograph of newly renovated Shepparton Art Museum

Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) has announced its inaugural exhibition program that will be presented in the new $50 million art museum designed by acclaimed architecture firm Denton Corker Marshall.

Spanning five floors, SAM will launch with a suite of new exhibitions and major artist commissions by emerging and established Australian artists, with work to be presented across the Museum, the surrounding precinct, and online. Coming together with a spirit of regeneration, the reimagined Museum will represent the diversity and richness of Victoria and its unique local surroundings along with the vision and aspirations of its people.

The exhibition program spans sculpture, painting, video, photography, ceramics, and installation and is set to build upon the existing strengths of the SAM Collection, including its nationally recognised ceramics collection and the nation’s most significant collection of South-East Australian Aboriginal art.

SAM’s inaugural collection exhibition, Flow: Stories of River, Earth and Sky, showcases the nation’s largest holding of the extended Namatjira family, and is presented alongside a dynamic lineup of world premiere Australian exclusives and commissions celebrating artists from across Australia and around the world. 

Highlights of the program include a major survey exhibition of the work of renowned Yorta Yorta artist Lin Onus; a new artwork commission by acclaimed Yorta Yorta, Wamba Wamba, Mutti Mutti and Boonwurrung artist, Maree Clarke, titled Connection to Country – I Remember When…,2021; and a new participatory commission by Amrita Hepi. 

Be brave enough to suck at something new

November 1, 2021
by Annie de Merindol
Woman sitting on sofa back looking relaxed and into distance to her right

{TW}

Hi, I’m Annie, Founder and Editor of Midlife Slices.​ I’m a media/communications professional by day but in my heart of hearts, I’m a writer.

Midlife Slices has been a little idea of mine for years, one I have sat on and sidelined and not dared to voice in anything more than the whisper of The Unworthy. Yet here we are. It has finally had life breathed into it and it feels bloody amazing!

A little about me….

I was born in Sydney, Australia, arguably one of the most spectacular cities in the world. I have two elderly parents still straining tea and toasting crumpets and putting up with each other’s shit after 60yrs, three brothers, four nephews, and an ex-husband. I also have two kids, a 16yo daughter and a 13yo son.

In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s a lot of testosterone in one family.

The women? Just my mother, my daughter, and me. But more on that later.

I’m a first-generation Australian. I grew up without any extended family, believing ‘nannas and pops, aunties, uncles, and cousins’ was an Aussie thing, not realising (in that wonderful way that children don’t) what I was missing out on. My heritage is sewn from English, Russian, French, New Zealand, and Spanish grandparents and great-grandparents, and so on. On a good day, I appreciate the richness of this tapestry; other days the cultural jumble makes my head spin.

In many ways and to many people, my childhood was idyllic, filled with arts and culture and foreign exchange students and community activism and international travel. But there was a darker side, too.

I’m a child sexual abuse survivor. If you are, too, I see you. I see you through the grimy lens through which we’ve been forced to view the world.

I’m medically diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and clinical depression. And while it’s not officially recognised as a diagnosis, when I learned about C-PTSD, it answered a lot of questions for me around how my life has played out.

On reflection, I was already deeply depressed as far back as my mid-teens – I have fantasised passionately and often about ending my life – but lacked the language, resources, or self-awareness to articulate that or seek help, though my diaries from the time speak volumes.

I’m innately curious. I love to read. I love solitude and intimacy in equal measures. I’ll always choose philosophy and nature over small talk and Snapchat filters.

I am privileged, indeed. But I know trauma and neglect and suffering. I know debilitating mental illness and pain and dysfunction and the chaos of addiction, and the deeply disordered behaviours and ways of operating that accompany, enable, and protect us from that which is so painful it cannot be spoken.

I am also unbelievably fortunate to have learned about the healing and recovery process. Not the process, just a process, just me and mine, and my tiny, daily story of hope.

And now I know midlife, too. Yay!

As Founder and Editor of Midlife Slices, I am driven by a desire to connect deeply with – and tell the stories of – other midlife women. My vision for this community is that it is authentic, and compelling, and healing; an evolution of the emotional kind. For myself, of course, but hopefully for others, too.

And my dream is for Midlife Slices to become a growing into, a relinquishing of oneself to the tide of, midlife that I am realising has the potential to become the greatest, most awe-inspiring period of my life.