Coota Calling

In March 2023 we took a round steam train trip from Junee to Cootamundra to experience the Bethungra Spiral. When we reached our destination we were meant to stay on the platform for twenty minutes then re-embark but I used the time to blitz the local heritage centre and the arts and crafts shop. I ventured no further or would have missed the train. 

Previously I had only seen the station and its immediate environs

Recently I again went to Coota, as the locals call it, this time specifically to see ‘Ivy Hill Gallery Goes West’ at the Arts Centre Cootamundra in Wallendoon Street. How I heard about this exhibition is one of life’s strange coincidences. I hadn’t talked to my old school friend Robyn, who lives in Tanja on the New South Wales’ South Coast for months and called her to see how she was going. Her husband suffers from vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s and I know her life isn’t easy. Two serendipitous nuggets emerged from our chat. One was that she had secured respite care and would be in Sydney during the same week that I would be later in the month. The other was that her longtime friend, Carolyn Killen, former proprietor of Ivy Hill Gallery, was bringing a collection of works by South Coast artists to the Arts Centre Cootamundra imminently.

Sandwich board displaying exhibition poster

To my delight the exhibition opened just days before my planned Sydney trip which meant I could introduce myself to Carolyn and report back on the exhibition to Robyn. My sister, Belinda, and  I took my yellow MG on the road on the morning of Sunday 22 September passing glowing fields of canola, the carcasses of unlucky roos, flocks of foraging galahs, looming silos and dormant rail yards. We talked incessantly in our private patois which involves assuming the voices with which we endow family pets, many now long dead, and impersonations of colourful characters we encounter in our daily lives. It is not false modesty to state here that Belinda far surpasses me in skill and variety in this endeavor but I am her seasoned stooge.

We needed to re-assume our mild mannered public personae on arrival in Cootamundra.  We did the obligatory loop of the town before realising we had passed the Arts Centre on the way in. It is a reclaimed industrial building that has housed many businesses including a butter factory and an importer/exporter and occupies a whole block. This background and much more was conveyed to us by the delightful Anne Steinke, one of the centre’s management committee, who greeted us and gave us a tour. Carolyn was out but expected back in about an hour. Anne showed us the ‘dirty studio’ a term probably familiar to ceramacists and printmakers but new to me and the meeting room with its eclectic collection of art books and art works. Her greatest pride is the impressive Tin Shed Theatre space that seats 122 and hosts film screenings and live performances. After facing a few funding hurdles the Arts  Centre has forged an impressive presence in the town and offers an amazing range of creative opportunities.

The  Arts Centre, Cootamundra

To the Ivy Hill exhibition itself…

The exhibition poster (see above) showcases one of Karen Sedaitis’s joyful acrylic floral paintings. There are four in the show and they are among the standout works. Botanic motifs also feature in the paintings of Tanja Riese and Veronica O’Leary. Riese’s watercolours impart an ethereal, sometimes apocalyptic mood to plant forms, rainforest and waterways. O’Leary’s bold acrylic still lifes evoke a comfortable bourgeois existence with nods to Cubism and Margaret Preston. Kerry McInnis and Philip Cox have both contributed bold landscapes – it was unsurprising given her palette to learn that some of McInnis’s watercolours share their locations with those depicted in Fred Williams’ work. More abstract in style are the oils and acrylics of Helen Gauchat and the ink drawings of Ivana Gattegno. Gauchat’s display a spareness and luminescence reminiscent of the Heidelberg painters while Gattegno brings an expressionistic writhing quality to her depiction of intertidal land and tree forms.

A Kerry McInnis landscape (image from exhibition catalogue)

Several figurative and landscape works by Penny Lovelock are on show, the former have a whimsical, illustrative quality and include beautifully rendered rural animals, both domestic and native. Livestock are also celebrated in the cattle portraiture of Megan Crane and the delicate porcelain figurines of Anneke Paijmans. The other sculptors and ceramicists included in the exhibition have a diverse range of styles from Jen Mallinson’s sleek stainless steel forms to the fusion of industrial and organic motifs in Mike MacGregor’s pieces to the naïve chunkiness of Jackie Lallemand‘s charming dog and chook sculptures. All works are for sale. The exhibition itself is rewarding as was making acquaintance with this remarkable Cootamundra facility.

One of Jen Mallinson’s more monumental pieces

Post exhibition viewing we asked for recommendations for lunch. Being a Sunday, not much was open. The weather was fine and we wanted to be outdoors. Helen’s in Parker Street has a courtyard so that’s where we went. The courtyard at Helen’s reminded me of those in pre-gentrified Glebe terrace cafés from the 1980s. A jumble of outdoor furniture crammed into an ungroomed space, a concrete path leading to an outdoor dunny. The plastic palm fronds and tin butterflies and birds were the only touches of 2000s aesthetics. Our coffee was fine but our Caesar salads rather disappointing. Next visit to Coota I hope we find somewhere to rival the cafes we’ve found in Temora and Coolamon.

Carolyn Killen with Megan Crane's bovine character studies

We did get to meet Carolyn Killen, albeit briefly, before leaving town.  We congratulated her on the impressive exhibition and asked about the logistics of bringing such a major cache of works overland.  And of course I told her I would be seeing Robyn in a few days and we both wished we could have been experiencing ‘Ivy Hill Gallery Goes West’ together.

 All photographs except the Kelly McInnes image are mine.