- Date: Wednesday 16 April 2025, 10.30am - 12pm
- Location: Rockingham Arts Centre, 11 Kent Street, Rockingham
- Cost: $15 per person
- Registration close: 4pm, Friday 11 April 2025
Meet Me In The Garden (MMITG) is an ongoing project that highlights the mental health benefits of gardening and the creativity involved. Listening and responding to the sounds around you through drawing can offer a meditative opportunity to heal and manage life in a time of community challenges and climate crises.
Visual artist Claire Billie Bushby will introduce this meditative event, inviting participants to slow down, listen deeply, and connect with the local ecology while listening to a soundscape performed by composer W. Sze Tsang. This accompanying soundscape combines field recordings with a map of the gallery, rendered into a digital autonomous instrument.
As you listen, you are invited to translate what you feel into visual form — drawing lines, shapes, or textures that are inspired by the soundscape. This event is about freeing your creativity. Participants are free to move around and find a comfortable place during the event. No drawing experience is necessary and basic pens, pencils and paper will be provided, but feel free to bring your own materials if you prefer.
About the facilitators
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.
- Date: Wednesday 16 April 2025 and Wednesday 23 April 2025
- Interview times: 1.30pm-2pm, 2.15pm-2.45pm, 3pm-3.30pm
- Location: Rockingham Arts Centre, 11 Kent Street, Rockingham
- Cost: Free
- Registration close: 4pm, Friday 11 April 2025
You are warmly invited to join visual artists Claire Billie Bushby and Mark Wahlsten for a relaxed cuppa and a chat about your garden and gardening experiences. This friendly, informal conversation will help shape the development of the Meet Me In The Garden (MMITG) project in Rockingham.
MMITG began as part of Spaced WA’s Know Thy Neighbour #3 program in 2021, which invited artists and community members to explore meaningful ways to shape our cities together. The project has captured conversations about care, connection, and creativity in our local environments through audio interviews, photographs, and reflective journals. Now, MMITG continues as an ongoing project, sparking hopeful and creative dialogue about how we can live together with care in an environment of climate change — starting in our gardens. No ongoing commitment is required. Your story will be audio-recorded as part of the project, adding your unique voice to this growing conversation. This conversation will take approximately half an hour. Bookings are essential as places are limited.
Come along, share your experiences, and be part of something special! Registrations are essential.
- Session 1: Wednesday 7 May 2025
- Session 2: Saturday 17 May 2025
- Time: 10am - 12.30pm
- Location: Rockingham Arts Centre, 11 Kent Street, Rockingham
- Cost: $20 per session
- Registration close: 4pm, Friday 2 May 2025
This class will involve diagnosing scrap metals to find their suitability for jewellery versus wall art, and basic clean-up techniques. With the provided recycled materials, students will be stripping shielded copper wire from its plastic sheath, then designing, cutting and manipulating this wire to make jewellery and other objects, along with their recycled materials. Bring your rusty or recycled bits and bobs to this class to learn the skills to turn them into beautiful and unique art with jewellery artist Melissa Cameron. Pre-made stainless steel earring hooks and brooch backings, as well as silk or waxed linen cord to hang pendants will be provided. Participants to bring small found metal or plastic objects, a sketchbook, pencil and eraser.
About the facilitator
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).
- Date: Saturday 26 April 2025
- Time: 1pm - 4pm
- Location: Rockingham Arts Centre, 11 Kent Street, Rockingham
- Cost: $50
- Registrations close: 4pm, Friday 18 April 2025
This workshop aims to give participants a clear plan to create a pastel landscape, from conceptualisation through to block in and layering techniques, with emphasis on the importance of tonal value.
About the facilitator
Tiffany Forster is an avid pastelist, most recognised for her vibrant birds, landscapes, and large floral paintings. She works both from her home studio and en Plein air, inspired by the light and colour that abounds in Western Australia.
Forster’s plein air pastels received two of the major awards at the 2023 Plein Air Down Under festival and she is keen to keep furthering her knowledge and sharing her love of this fascinating medium.