Perth Festival 2025: Kate Mitchell, Dianne Jones, Mervyn Street

Enjoy three exhibitions connected by a relationship to place, site and community. Explore Kate Mitchell’s immersive and interactive Idea Induction, Dianne Jones’ photographic work inspired by Manjaree in The Beach, and Mervyn Street’s powerful Stolen Wages series on Kimberley history and resilience.

the EXHIBITIONS:

KATE MITCHELL: IDEA INDUCTION

Kate Mitchell’s exhibition Idea Induction is an immersive series of works that ask the question: where do ideas come from?

In this work, the artist is presenting an induction into her idea(s) in order for the viewer to be inducted into their own ideas. It’s a double induction and includes acts of conceptual midwifery – drawing ideas down from the ether, through you and into the world. In this project, Pythagorean ‘soul adjustment’ meets Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery.

Visit the artist and her singing chair- ask a question, solve a problem, make a decision or need to relax, the singing chair aims to orient the viewer towards receptive states that facilitate insight. Access the locus of creativity through this and other portals proposed by the artist in the exhibition and enter into the matrix of interconnectedness.

It is an exhibition with multiple entry points. It will meet you only where you want to meet it.

Kate Mitchell lives on Sunshine Coast/Gubbi country.

DIANNE JONES: THE BEACH

Dianne Jones will present a new body of work inspired by the history and site of Manjaree in Fremantle. Jones is a Ballardong artist from Noongar Country in WA.

Dianne Jones made the photographic series that her seminal works ‘Sunbaker’ and ‘Beach Scene’ are drawn from in 2003, more than twenty years ago. Iconic at their time in their displacement of colonial and heterogenous histories of place, these works have been repeatedly celebrated and exhibited. Waving and smiling at the camera, Jones’ inserted her own image and figure into these iconic Australian photographic works by artists such as Max Dupain and others. In these black and white photographs, her presence on the beach ‘queered’ these sites and firmly placed contemporary indigenous identities into Australian narratives and art history.

Presented alongside this work at beach sites around WA, Dianne will present a new suite of photographic works responsive to the site and history of Manjaree (Bathers Beach) in Walyalup, an historically important site of kinship and meeting in noongar culture. These works seen together complicate Australian beach narratives and address first contact in Walyalup and the historical figure of Captain Fremantle.

Max Dupain’s Sunbaker is Australia’s best known photograph and was printed by the artist in two versions. Although it was taken many years after the First World War, memories of bronzed Anzacs were still strong enough to give this image a nationalist resonance for contemporary viewers. Following the depletions of wartime, sunlight had a special meaning as an elemental force capable of promoting physical and spiritual wellbeing.

Dupain’s subject is a young man who lies ‘sun-slain’ on Culburra Beach in New South Wales, oblivious to anything but the heat on his wet back and the warmth of the sand below. The artist has positioned his camera almost at ground level in order to emphasise the sunbaker’s domination of his environment and his almost palpable connection with the replenishing forces of nature.

MERVYN STREET: STOLEN WAGES

The beauty of Kimberley Country and the harsh realities of life as a cattle worker there are brought to life in a vibrant collection of work by Gooniyandi Elder and artist Mervyn Street. With his vivid memory and natural talent for capturing movement and colour, Mervyn shares his life, Country and history of his family in paintings, drawings, carvings and animations that reveal love, struggle and triumph.

Stolen Wages features newly commissioned paintings that continue Mervyn’s legacy of telling truth to power, following his historic court victory over the State Government for decades of wages stolen from the cattlemen of the Kimberley.

A Perth Festival commission. Presented with Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency and Fremantle Arts Centre.