Cybermancy brings together Gigi Malherbe’s and Adele Warner’s meditations on the short-comings of the human body. As the suffix “mancy” denotes, artworks cast a speculative gaze to the near contemporary future to examine the integration of technology with the physicality and decay of the body.
Magic Cave grew from research Emmaline Zanelli began in early 2023 into the social culture and family dynamics surrounding the mining industry in South Australia, with a focus on youth. Influenced by the young people she met and their interests, Magic Cave is an absurdist fantasy interpretation of life underground
Guruwa gunya (gum tree home), is an immersive solo exhibition of new work by muruwari artist, Dr Virginia Keft. The exhibition invites audiences to an experiential and sensory encounter that blends concepts of Country and the natural world of the Australian bushland, with the domestic and urban space of ‘home’.
My Soil Farsh فرش (Carpet) expresses the profound experience of placemaking through transforming and innovating a cultural object. For Prita Tina Yeganeh, the connection stems from the cultural values and rituals of kinship and community-building deeply embedded in the familial environment that nurtured her sense of belonging as a child.
Muruwari artist, Virginia Keft, invites you to spend an evening with her for a free weaving and yarning workshop in the gallery space of her immersive exhibition, Guruwa Gunya (gum tree home) at Firstdraft.
Weaving Connections is a free interactive weaving and yarning circle that supports cultural connection and builds understanding through collaborative weaving. Connect with others while you learn about the artist's connection to culture, learn sculptural weaving techniques, share a story, and discover a new skill. No prior experience is necessary; whether this is your first time, or you are a master weaver, all are welcome. Weaving materials will be provided. This is an all-ages workshop.
Firstdraft is excited to present, Baajo (Come and Dance), a cross-cultural collaboration that brings together together Ghanaian circus performers, dancers and musicians.
Featuring artists Angelica Osuji A.K.A DJ Lady Chika, Pedro Olympio, Yacou Mbaye and Lucky Lartey, Baajo promises an exhilarating evening packed with cultural immersion, starting with a short film screening that highlights the vibrant narratives of the street of Accra Ghana alongside a showcase of the Ghana Road Show act, hectic Afrobeats dance battles, and a chance for you to hit the dancefloor with DJ Lady Chika on the decks who will be making sure the Afrobeats keep coming!
Find your CATCH 🎣
Firstdraft is delighted to announce the Firstdraft Auction is back and will open Wednesday 7 August. In its 15th year, the Firstdraft Auction remains steadfast to its aim of supporting artists.
Join us from 2-4pm on Saturday 1 June for free artist talks with the artists and curators of our May/July exhibitions.
dwelling / belonging brings together five emerging artists on unceded Gadigal land, with diverse Asian heritages and journeys to and from Australia. Each has experienced being a contemporary Australian, by choice or by birth, and holds tightly an engagement with their cultural and ethnic ancestry - explored, shared, processed, and learnt through their art practices.
Affection brings together artworks that explore ideas of obsession and objectification; fantasy and culpability; sentimentality and subjectivity. The suite of works sees to the artist inhabiting different roles as victim and violator, to invoke discussions of power, agency and gender dynamics.
This project focuses on the ways deaf and hearing bodies can un/intentionally be gatekeepers, intermediaries or couriers in spaces. porous not only references the collaborative experiences between the artists, but also the way the audience connects those experiences.
I will meet you there, came to realization by the contribution of over twenty friends, family members, artists and acquaintances. The project aims to reflect on the notion of "home" from a collective perspective.
Join us from 6-8pm on Friday 31 May for the opening of four new exhibitions at Firstdraft.
Learn how to do photo transfers onto homewares with Bonnie Huang and transform pre-loved ceramics with a collage of poetry and nostalgic clip-art images to give the unused objects new life.
Knees, palms, forehead, bow down and kiss cool tiles. Like so many before and so many to come, humans find themselves present before shrines of many makings. Come craft a personal shrine with artist emoeba h♡rtbridge.
Join Kate Coyne and make your own interactive inflatables from upcycled materials like chip bags, recycled paper and paper straws! Create interactive, air-powered creations that explore sculpture and pop-ups. Animate a character, an abstract form or a weird sea creature!
Join Sehej Kaur and Kaylee Rankin for a community quilting session at Firstdraft. In strengthening and sewing together fragments or loose memories of each person's fabric, our host's offer an opportunity for reflection on community, solidarity and collective resistance.
Delivered in partnership with Hope St exclusively for Woolloomooloo Youth Week, the crafting of a wind chime using found objects seeks to generate mindfulness at a pivotal time of development. Firstdraft hopes to promote mindfulness towards young people’s personal wellbeing and attitudes towards the environment.
Join us from 5-7pm on Saturday 6 April for the opening of four new exhibitions at Firstdraft.
Kate Coyne's studio practice explores how experience can be embodied and the nature of the relationship between the body/experience and materiality in a socio-political feminist context. Temporality, the progression of past, present and future is inherent, with materials discolouring over time and gravity taking over form and identity in the same way that it does with an ageing, sagging body.
In Unruly Edges, Ellen Dahl, Emma Pinsent and Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria have collaborated to create an imagined ecotone or contact zone, formed as the boundaries of their works dissolve and entangle, initiating new dialogues between their works in order to draw out previously unexplored or emergent ideas in their practices.
Firstdraft’s pop-up classroom, Class S2, calls for you to tap into your child-like self with the materials, knowledge and memories collected and experienced by who you are today, making objects in experimental and hopeful ways.
What ideologies are subverted when curtains assert versatility, sensuality and movement in spaces typically defined by fixedness? Cubbyhouse (Nothing is Certain, said the Curtain) merges the familiarity of Ali Noble’s existing textile-based practise, with the exploration of a new format, video.
Join us from 5-7pm on Saturday 6 April for the opening of four new exhibitions at Firstdraft.
Within the shared realms that we move through lies a concealed network of invisible architecture that charts separate paths and boundaries. Soft Cell brings together work by five artists from the 2023 Firstdraft program to navigate these nebulous and unclear borders and ambiguous social constructs.
Luddite/Sodomite is a series of four textile and embroidery installations that investigate the immediate link between labour and textile through a queer lens.
To be post-Partition, is simultaneously to be post-colonial. Yet the wounds of Empire still infiltrate and seep through folds of diasporic and intergenerational memory today.
You Won’t Believe The Snap In Your Throat examines the processes of digestion at the locus of industrial and post-industrial fabrication methods.
I feel the weight of the minute as I bend my body towards the clock is a multimedia installation examining time and the labour of self-care for the disabled and ill body.
