In September 2010, Art & Australia magazine initiated a collaborative artwork between artist Locust Jones and twenty-one refugee students at Lurnea High School in South Western Sydney. They worked together over five weeks and the result is 25 metres of canvas that is moving, challenging and uplifting.
The work will be unveiled for the first time as the centrepiece of the exhibition, ‘Subtext: Art for Literacy’, opening at Sydney’s CarriageWorks on 17 February, 2011. The exhibition has been independently curated for the Australian Literacy & Numeracy Foundation (ALNF) by Marni Williams and Chloé Wolifson and features eighteen Australian artists.
The Art & Australia initiative resulted from an invitation by the ALNF to work on an exhibition to raise awareness about their groundbreaking Refugee Action Support (RAS) literacy program. The students that have shared their stories on canvas are from countries as diverse as East Turkistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Sudan, Argentina and Thailand. Overlaid on canvas are personal portrayals of war and loss and poetry and raps that reveal a strong communal voice, expressing feelings and memories from the past and a celebration of old and new identities.
‘As a magazine that has been a part of the community for forty-eight years’, says Art & Australia’s Publisher/Editor Eleonora Triguboff, ‘we take great pleasure in initiatives such as these that bring a passion for the arts to a wider audience.’
Winner of New Zealand’s Bold Horizon National Contemporary Art Award 2010 and the 2009 Hazelhurst Art Award, Sydney-based Jones is celebrated for his swirling, epic-sized drawings. His new collaborative work will be exhibited until 5 March, 2011 alongside artworks by Jon Campbell, Will Coles, Simryn Gill, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Astra Howard, Michael Lindeman, Rob McHaffie, Noel McKenna, Mistery, Nell, Michelle Nikou, Tom Polo, Charlie Sofo, Manuela Strano, Arlene Textaqueen, Jake Walker and John Warwicker, with proceeds from artwork sales donated to the ALNF’s RAS program.
This collaboration has also been celebrated in an Art & Australia publication called A Space to Speak: ‘Let them feel us’, which includes interviews with the students involved and a foreword by Faustina Agolley, ALNF Ambassador and Presenter of Video Hits. A signed, limited-edition poster has been created by Arlene Textaqueen, with all proceeds going to the ALNF’s national programs.
The launch event will include guest speakers Prashanth Shanmugan, United Nations Ambassador for the Global Atlas of Human Rights, a leader in humanitarian law who has been recognised as a ‘Face to Watch’ by the Sydney Morning Herald, and Auday Al-Sheik, Lurnea High School student and collaborative artist who came to Australia as a refugee from Iraq. Mistery, one of Australia’s most renowned graffiti artists will also be performing on the night.