Blow Back Ins in Broken Hill
Things move at a different pace in the country. In 2014, the Broken Hill City Art Gallery invited a group of artists to visit and make work for an exhibition. The show was so successful that a mere ten years later they decided to do it again. The idea was essentially the same: bring the artists to Broken Hill, show them around, and let them find their own sources of inspiration.
In Broken Hill and surrounds that’s not a big ask. The town is encrusted with relics of a mining industry that are irresistible to artists. For the painters, it’s a vision of the Industrial Sublime, for sculptors a treasure trove of rusty iron and bric-à-brac just waiting to be transformed into something to hang on a gallery wall.
It's not widely known that in 1904, Broken Hill opened the first regional gallery in NSW. It was a function of the prosperity that mining brought to this isolated region in the late 1800s, and a mark of the community’s booming civic pride. The new wealth also produced a town hall that would be the envy of many larger towns, and Mario’s Palace Hotel, which opened in 1889, and would become world famous through its appearance in the film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in 1994.
It had been a decade since I’d been to Broken Hill, but I had the full experience last week, staying at the Palace, checking out Pro Hart’s gallery, now sadly denuded of its impressive collection of people’s works, and visiting sites with the artists who featured in the exhibition, Blow Back-Ins - Gina Bruce, Ann Cape, Paul Connor, Renata Pari-Lewis and Willemina Villari. They were joined in the show by Sophie Cape, Chris Gentle, Mike McGregor, Kerry McInnis, Daniel Pata, and Ann Thomson.