Category: Arts and Culture

Gallery 3

Earthsong is a newly commissioned body of work by South Gippsland artist Lucy Hersey – a fervent celebration of the Latrobe Valley and Gippsland. A meditation on the deep, agrestic – of rural/rustic living – pulse of our living world. With a background in scientific research, Lucy brings a rare intimacy and rigorous care to her materials, as a form of resistance to the mass-produced and synthetic compounds that correlate contemporary art practices.

Her long-held affinity for the complex terranean ecologies and the quiet sciences of soil – pedology, earth pigments and the unseen, guide this body of work. Presented in every work across Earthsong, Lucy composes the works using local earth: gathered pigments, grounded, sifted and held with the same care one might offer something ineffable. In these vast earthbound canvases, the landscapes of Gippsland rise into view; rolling hills, vivid, and untouched bushland, and cloudscapes that drift like slow-moving hymns.

Smaller plein-air works invite viewers into closer communion, the way one first beholds a sweeping vista and then kneels to observe the delicate veins of the ground below us. At the centre of this body of work, a sculptural installation, Dorodango – burnished spheres of pure earth – embodies Lucy’s ethos of communal-bound stewardship. Created from the remnants of her pigment preparations, these hand-formed shapes mirror the epochal rhythms of geographical transformation: rock to dust, dust to paint, paint to presence and finally back to a rock-like form, returning to the ground they came from.

Earthsong becomes in its entirety, both a love letter and an original essay – an exploration of painting that is at once terrestrial and ethereal. It calls on our shared responsibility to care for the places that sustain us and remind us that we belong to the lands. In offering this work, Lucy opens a considered refuge – where we are invited to slow our step, breathe deeply and let the grounding presence of earth steady the mind.

Like a long, unhurried stroll through the vast bush, forests and beyond; Earthsong asks us to listen – softly, attentively – to the world that sings beneath our feet.

Gallery 4

Homeground: Continuing Connections bring together the Kurec family in a deeply personal and intimate exhibition at Latrobe Regional Gallery. This special presentation traces the many threads that bind identity, culture, and kinship across distance and time. Inviting visitors into a shared space of memory, resilience and belonging.

Centred in Ukrainian heritage and grounded in Gippsland, Victoria, the exhibition reflects a lineage shaped by migration, loss and preservation. Across generations, the Kurec family have carried forward customs of rituals, stories, and forms of creativity that are, quite simply, in the blood. Their practices speak to the endurance of culture in the face of upheaval, and to the quiet power of domestic life as a vessel for history.

Through sculpture, painting, photography, performance, installation, family artefacts; heirlooms and ephemera, moving image, poetry and traditional design, this exhibition becomes a living archive – a recollection of memories. Everyday objects, sit alongside contemporary expressions, revealing how ancestral knowledge is tended, adapted and reimagined.

Tales of Ukrainian folklore motifs echo through material choices; the garden and the home as symbols of arrival and rituals. Homeground honours the complexity of finding home whether in a landscape, a community, a language or the gestures passed form hand to hand – from generation to generation.

The exhibition recognises and anchors Gippsland as a place of new beginnings and intergenerational connection. This exhibition invites guests to reflect on their own family stories, and the fragile yet resilient strands that shape who we are.

Gallery 5

A Country Practice brings new life to Janina Green’s seminal artist book – of the same title – A Country Practice, animating its pages into an immersive photographic installation that unfolds in chapters—much like the lived passages it draws from. Each section invites viewers into the shifting terrains of memory, migration, and belonging, tracing the contours of a life shaped by arrival, adaptation, and the quiet persistence of looking back.

Green’s story begins in 1949, when she and her mother were among the 75,000 migrants who stepped onto Australian soil in the wake of the end of the Second World War, following Russia’s raid on Easten European countries.

In returning to her Gippsland photo negatives decades later, Janina found herself confronting the landscape that had shaped her—the beauty and burden of rural life, the push and pull between idyll and harshness, and the solitude carved into a woman’s daily experience. These images carry that duality: bucolic and beautiful, rustic and unvarnished, attentive to both the tenderness and severity threaded through country living.

A Country Practice becomes not only a photographic installation but an act of reclamation. It charts what has changed—socially, environmentally, and generationally—and what continues to echo. Through Green’s lens, the past is not fixed; it breathes, expands, and invites us to consider the landscapes we inherit and the selves we grow within them.

Gallery 6

Unpacking Home explores how migrants to Australia create belonging in new places through gestures, objects, and daily acts that transform displacement into connection.

Across three parts, the exhibition moves from the material to the emotional: from the interior spaces of settlement to the wider landscapes of belonging. Through artworks and objects drawn from the Gallery’s collection, Unpacking Home considers how people make, sustain, and see home.

Centred on women’s labour — domestic, social, and cultural — the exhibition recognises the often unseen work that holds families and communities together. It reveals home not as a fixed destination, but as a continuous act of care: a process of making the unfamiliar familiar, of turning arrival into belonging.

Galleries 1 & 2

The Land as Witness traces the evolving relationship between people and the environments they inhabit. Moving from untouched wilderness through cultivated landscapes to sites of industrial transformation, the exhibition reflects on how human ambition and necessity have reshaped the natural world. Through photography, sculpture and mixed media, the artists explore how the land absorbs and records the traces of human presence — bearing memory, resilience and loss in equal measure.

Together, these works invite us to consider the landscape not as a passive setting, but as an active participant in our shared story, one that remembers, responds, and continues to shape the contours of our collective future.

This Autumn season, Latrobe Regional Gallery is thrilled to unveil an exciting, diverse, and heartfelt array of exhibitions.

Lucy Hersey: Earthsong

The Land as Witness
LRG Collection

HOMEGROUND: Continuing Connections
A Country Practice

Unpacking Home
LRG Collection

3pm guided members tour.
Official opening 4pm to 6pm.

Official opening featuring curators and artists. Light
refreshments and grazing table provided.

Opening night performance
They Carried Soil Under Their Nails is a new
performance work by artist Kiera Brew Kurec.

Over the duration of 45 minutes, six performers gesture to the
cycles of seasons, time, familial history, oppression, displacement and colonisation.
The work is an homage to erased and stolen histories, unspoken trauma and how the landscape and the body are repositories for these memories.

Local author John de Souza draws on his own years at Kurnai College, Churchill, to bring readers a sharp, imaginative junior novel set against a potted history of 1997.

Starting high school is no small feat for Ted. Between navigating bullies and searching for where he belongs, guidance from an Elder and an English teacher helps him begin to understand his roots. When Ted and his brothers stumble upon a mysterious time-travelling taxi, they’re propelled into defining moments of their family’s past – a fast-moving exploration of history, identity and courage.

De Souza describes himself as a laconic writer. Aware that much junior fiction is marketed towards girls, he deliberately crafted a shorter, punchier novel to engage reluctant young male readers, a group reading less than any generation before them. In addition, the book can be easily enjoyed by adults or anyone nostalgic about the 90s.

The tale’s origins stretch back to De Souza’s own childhood. In Grade 2, he began writing adventures featuring Fred, Harry and Ted – names that now resurface in this story. Even the chess battles in the book have local roots, inspired by write ups of the Latrobe Valley Chess Club in the Latrobe Valley Express Community Corner.

De Souza extends his heartfelt thanks to friend Kaylene Mustoe for her insightful critiques, suggestions and constant encouragement and to Hollie Johnson for her striking cover artwork.

You’re invited to the book launch of Ted and the Time-Travelling Taxi.

5:30pm, Friday 30 January 2026
(First Friday of Term One)
Language Centre, Kurnai College – Churchill Campus
Corner Northways Road and McDonald Way, Churchill

Books available for purchase and signing.