Exhibitions and events

For further information on any of the exhibitions and events, please contact the Rockingham Arts Centre on 9527 0734 between 8am-4pm, Monday to Friday (please note these days are subject to change at times). Information on other exhibitions and events can also be found on our What's On Calendar.

Meet Me In The Garden by Claire Billie Bushby, W. Sze Tsang and Mark Wahlsten

• Exhibition dates: Wednesday 9 April to Sunday 27 April 2025  
• Opening times: 10am - 4pm, Wednesday to Sunday
• Rockingham Arts Centre, 11 Kent Street, Rockingham
• Room: Main Gallery
• Cost: Free entry 
• Opening Event and Artist talk: Saturday 12 April, 4pm - 6pm. Register here.
• Artist workshop: Between Leaves and Light: Listen, Draw, Breathe – more information. 

Meet Me In The Garden is an ongoing community-driven project featuring artists Claire Billie Bushby, W. Sze Tsang, and Mark Wahlsten. This exhibition allows individuals to share their unique and diverse experiences of suburban gardens and nature reserves. It highlights the mental health benefits of gardening and the creativity involved. The focal points of this project are suburban gardens in Western Australia, where connections between gardeners, plants, and the local ecology are examined through sound, print, sculpture, and video artwork based on material collected during garden visits and interviews

About the artists

Claire Billie Bushby is an artist and curator interested in collaborative and participatory practices embracing interdependence with human and non-human environments. Their work is multidisciplinary, combining documentary processes with textile, drawing, photography, sound, video and social events.

W. Sze Tsang is a composer working across temporalities and histories. Tsang’s practice explores how combining sounds, visual, geospatial information and environmental data can express the multi-layered narratives on history and climate within place.

Mark Wahlsten is an illustrator and designer interested in understanding the landscapes he belongs to, how he grieves and how to feel useful, through examining barriers arising from colonial designs of communication systems.

Claire Billie Bushby Sample page from Shirley – Willeton’s Garden Journal, 2024, Handmade journal with Sumi E Japanese paper, 148.5 x 210mm
Image courtesy the artist.

Banner and Badge by Melissa Cameron  

• Exhibition dates: Wednesday 30 April to Sunday 18 May 2025  
• Opening times: 10am - 4pm, Wednesday to Sunday
• Rockingham Arts Centre, 11 Kent Street, Rockingham
• Room: Main Gallery
• Cost: Free entry 
• Opening Event and Artist talk: Saturday 12 April, 4pm - 6pm. Register here.
• Artist workshop: Recycled Jewellery – more information.

Jeweller and public artist Melissa Cameron, presents her take on the traditional forms of protest signage and adornment, banners and badges. This solo exhibition consists of large hangings and jewellery works made from non-traditional materials, some made during the 6.5 years she spent living in Seattle in the USA.

About the artist

Melissa Cameron is an Australian artist with Anglo-Celtic ancestry. She currently works on Whadjuk Noongar land in Perth, Australia. Previously she’s lived and worked in Naarm/Melbourne and on Duwamish lands in Seattle. Her aesthetic sensibility is influenced by her early studies in computer science, her first career and BFA earned in interior architecture (Curtin University, 2001), and her jewellery/metalsmithing MFA (Monash University, 2009).  Her practice alternates between meticulously researched socially aware / protest art, and technology and materials-based investigations to expand her capabilities and capacity. Both arenas centre the human body - politically or physically. Her works are in the public collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, and Cheongju City Collection in South Korea, amongst others, and she has exhibited in the prestigious Schmuck exhibition in Munich. Cameron has received grants and prizes, presented at conferences, attended residencies, and published writings on jewellery and architecture globally.

Melissa Cameron, covertlyprotestingthegovernment, 2017, stainless steel, vitreous enamel, titanium, 12 x 6.5 x 1cm

Bricolage by Tom de Munk Kerkmeer

• Exhibition dates: Wednesday 21 May to Sunday 8 June 2025 
• Opening times: 10am - 4pm, Wednesday to Sunday
• Rockingham Arts Centre, 11 Kent Street, Rockingham
• Room: Main Gallery
• Cost: Free entry
• Opening Event and Artist talk: Saturday 24 May, 4pm - 6pm. Register here.
• Artist workshop: Abstract Art Sustainably – more information.

This exhibition from Western Australian artist Tom de Munk-Kerkmeer explores his life and practice through Bricolage, a French term used for a DIY approach and refers to the construction or creation of works from a diverse range of materials that happen to be available.  De Munk-Kerkmeer embodies this term through his DIY ethic, and his use of recycled and discarded materials to create his art attempt to restore a cyclic relationship to the earth.

About the artist

Tom lives by his creed of building his relationship with the Earth by minimising his footprint in everything he does. He relies on walking, cycling and public transport, with a design ethos that most of his artwork must be able to be transported by these modes.

Tom de Munk-Kerkmeer, Chaos and the Tyranny of Symmetry, 2020, bamboo, bicycle tube rubber, acrylic paint, 350 x 500 x 250 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

2025 Upcoming Exhibitions

City of Rockingham Art Prize

14 June to 6 July 2025

The annual Rockingham Art Prize returns for 2025 and includes 2D and 3D works from selected finalists working across a variety of mediums.

Maara dookerniny - Hands creating -  2025 NAIDOC Exhibition by Emily-Rose, Norma Macdonald, Robyn Jean, Sarah Kapor, Wesley Jackson

9 July to 27 July

This exhibition celebrates the creative legacy of three generations of a family, showcasing the deep connection between their ancestry, culture, and artistic expression. Spanning decades of storytelling through various mediums, Maara dookerniny - Hands creating weaves together the threads of shared heritage and individual journeys.

Tender by Annette Petersen, Sue Leeming and Nicole Steenhof

30 July - 17 August 2025

Tender is an emotional expression and contemporary exploration in painting, touch, and interpretation. It's an ambitious exploration of the transcendental power of paint. The artists aim to elevate the materiality of paint and other mediums to transcend their environments and practices to greater dimensions.

The Weight of Things by Brianne Sharp, Hugh Breslin, D'Arcy Coad, Soph Grey, Kasia Kolikow, Kristy Scaddan, Holly Yoshida

20 August - 7 September 2025

The Weight of Things brings together artists with diverse backgrounds and practices responding to the theme of possession and object. Artists interrogate how objects influence our lives with both artists and viewers challenged to rethink their attachments to objects, and to consider the broader impact of our possessions.

Florescence by Lori Pensini

2 October - 19 October 2025

Lori Pensini’s body of work will explore the language of flowers with a focus on native west Australian flora. In keeping with her signature figurative narrative canons the floriographic symbols will interface with the human form bringing to bear intimate inner thoughts and responses to psychosocial challenges experienced in the modern world especially in regards to the feminine psyche of ‘being enough’.

City of Rockingham Castaways Sculpture Awards

25 October - 2 November 2025

Castaways attracts thousands of visitors every year to view the pairing of sculpture made from repurposed materials with environmental messages, a subject particularly relevant to our times.
These annual awards offer Western Australian artists, primary and secondary schools the opportunity to showcase their artwork in a long-running, high-profile event, set against the beautiful backdrop of the Rockingham Foreshore.

Happy Meals & Scooter Skids by Students of Rockingham

12 November - 30 November 2025

The exhibition will showcase creative works developed in a collaboration between artist Andy Quilty and students from Warnbro Community High School. Happy Meals and Scooter Skids is an opportunity for young people in the outer suburbs to express their identity in a celebratory way, build social inclusion, community pride and forge new social connections, resulting in increased confidence and mental wellbeing.

Tic Toc by Sally Stoneman

3 December - 21 December 2025

We live in the Anthropocene, a time when humanity has affected the balance in the natural world and we're now encountering climatic changes. This exhibition involves a layered approach to evoking the natural elements of fire, water, earth and air using lighting, sound, sculpture and painting/drawing.

Past exhibitions