Arts Events & Things To Do in Margaret River.
Arts Margaret River exists to support and nurture the work of artists across all disciplines, and to foster a love of the arts within our community.
Radical Futures : Gathering Ground (Exhibition)
Thursday, 8 January, 2026 @ 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM
In a world increasingly defined by displacement, division, and disconnection, the question of belonging has never been more urgent.
EOIs Close: Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Exhibition Dates: January 8-February 3, 2026. Mon-Fri, 10am-4pm
Exhibition Launch: Friday, January 16, 2026. 6-8pm
Gathering Ground wants to explore the profound human need for home, belonging, and connection in the face of collapsing systems and fractured communities. It seeks to bring together artists to interrogate what it means to create a safe, welcoming place for ourselves and each other.
The exhibition will explore the dilemmas of belonging – the tension between inclusion and exclusion, between being welcomed and being othered. The act of being welcomed into a space can highlight differences, underscoring the fact that belonging is not a straightforward or stable and unchanging condition, but can be a complex, often contradictory experience shaped by identity, history and power. Gathering Ground grapples with these complexities, asking how we might create spaces that truly welcome ‘the other’ without imposing conditions or erasing their identity.
Gathering Ground aims to respond to the pressing realities of our time: the growing refugee crisis, the epidemic of loneliness, the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty, and the pervasive sense of alienation among young people. These challenges are not isolated but interconnected, revealing a global crisis of belonging that demands both local and collective solutions. The artists in this exhibition are invited to offer aspirational visions of what it means to come together – across cultures, generations, and histories – to build a world where belonging is not a privilege but a right.
The exhibition also wants to address the tension between displacement and rootedness. The experience of home is deeply nuanced. For some, home is a place of safety and belonging; for others, it is an unreached (and maybe unreachable) ideal; for yet others, it is a site of erasure or exclusion. The artists will explore what it means to nurture ourselves, our communities and the environment, and what does life feel like when we truly belong?
Gathering Ground wants to challenge hyper-individualism, celebrate collaboration, and honour the wisdom of old/traditional/ancestral practices. It will be an invitation to listen and a reminder that the future is not something we enter alone but something we create together. It will offer a glimpse of what that future could be: a gathering ground where we all belong.
This exhibition forms part of the state-wide ‘Radical Futures’ exhibition series that will culminate in a larger group exhibition at John Curtin Gallery in late 2026.
