EXHIBITION: Gooch's Utopia: collected works from the Central Desert

Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery will be the first venue to exhibit the Flinders University Art Museum Touring Exhibition, Gooch’s Utopia: collected works from the Central Desert, straight from its successful exhibitions at Flinders University and Riddoch Art Gallery. Curated by Fiona Salmon, Director of Flinders University Art Museum, this exhibition features works drawn from the art collections of the late Rodney Gooch (1949-2002) and donated by him to Riddoch Art Gallery (Mount Gambier) and Flinders University Art Musuem in Adelaide.

Encompassing batik, paintings, works on paper, sculpture and other three dimensional objects, the project surveys the work of Anmatyerr and Alyawarr artists resident at the outstations of Utopia, a tract of land 240km north-east of Alice Springs, in the latter decades of the 20th Century. Almost all of the Utopia works are by women and many of the designs are concerned with ‘Awely’ or ‘Women’s Ceremony’. Interestingly the exhibition also examines the contribution one person can make to the public realm as a private collector.

Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery is also making its own contribution to the exhibition. Included are six of the 19 batiks from the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art at The University of Western Australia, shown to complement Gooch’s Utopia. These works were made in the late 1990s by artists living in the Utopia homelands and have been exhibited in Peintres aborigenes d’Australie at Parc de la Villette in Paris in 1997.

This exhibition is supported by Visions of Australia, an Australian Government Program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of cultural material across Australia.