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Firstdraft is where the future of contemporary art emerges, through a program that is critical, ambitious and experimental.
current exhibitions
Using remnants of the world that her Mum, Aunties, and Nan lived in, Jasmine Miikika Craciun celebrates the love, life and strength they embody. Like the beautiful coloured glass and crockery that has stood the test of time on the sandy flats of Wilcannia long after the humpies have gone, the matriarchs of her lineage do the same.
still waters run deep brings together the work of five artists who live or have lived on Wilyakali and Barkindji / Barkandji Country in Far West NSW: Barbara Quayle, Blake Griffiths, Dan Schulz, Tannya Quayle, and Verity Nunan.
un/conscious is a large-scale artwork that features a collection of sixteen brightly coloured tactile canvases, creating a kaleidoscopic wall of colour. The textiles featured are recycled offcuts of vintage towels from Re/lax Remade, a sustainably focused, Sydney-based fashion label.
There is a red chair that once existed in an adoption agency in Seoul between 1983-1991 that was sat on by every adoptee for their 'first photo'. This year, 36 years after the artist’s ‘red chair photo’ was taken, she contacted the agency to enquire about this red chair and if it might still be there. The social worker’s only response––‘The red chair in your picture does not exist’. In the potent slippage of translation, correspondence and negation, this exhibition is a performative affirmation that, ‘yes, it does!’
upcoming
'Working Tiles' is an exhibition featuring works from 14 artists, designers, and makers, all operating within a shared studio environment. ‘Tiles’ gallery and studios are located on Gadigal and Wangal country, Lewisham.
This exhibition revisits selected works from Danish Quapoor’s recent good grief series, recontextualising them amongst related works. Quapoor’s trademark illustrative paintings on stretched paper feature alongside wall drawings and sculptures. Collectively, the works allude to diverse concepts including shifting personal identities, familial relationships, corporeality, grief, memorialisation, frustration, allergies, expectations, gender roles and sexuality.
(maelstrom) presents new works by South Australian artists Nicholas Hanisch and Nicole Clift. The two bodies of work, oil paintings and hand-woven tapestries, are responses to tangible and intangible manifestations of density, respectively. Nicholas Hanisch’s small oil paintings on canvas and bronze present intense tonal studies of sudden force, such as volcanic eruptions, fireworks, black holes, meteor showers and billowing smoke clouds.
Some Sort of Notation takes its name from the journals of Alexander Marshack: an archaeologist who, in 1964, published a study on seemingly random, human-made notches on palaeolithic bones. Adamant that the markings were far from meaningless, he proposed they were complex lunar observations— a proto-writing system. “It is clearly neither art nor decoration,” he’d said, “but some sort of notation.”
news
The team at Firstdraft are delighted to announce Firstdraft’s new Chair Augusta Supple and Treasurer Dominic Kavanagh.
We are thrilled to announce the appointment of Caity Reynolds as Firstdraft's new General Manager.
Firstdraft is now seeking proposals from artists, curators and writers for consideration in our 2023–24 Program. We invite ideas that champion experimentation, risk and inclusion.
interviews
“These spaces of imaginative and creative wildness are rare in a world that wants to compartmentalise and control all forms of cultural production.”
“We all have our own experiences of moving toward or away from connection, and for me, part of navigating these experiences necessarily involves a questioning of where I begin and end, what or who I consist of, and how the impacts of mutuality and difference influence how I move through the world.”
“I’m working mostly within the scope of documentary and experimental eco-cinema practices, utilising the principles of slow cinema and cinéma vérité.”
“The sun's pervasive presence allows it to be the subject, whether direct or not, for a lot of artistic practices and creative investigations.”
The Firstdraft Census is Firstdraft’s annual stakeholder survey for 2024. Firstdraft is growing and we want to hear from you during this period of change.