Making Contact Art Exhibition

When the body leads, what emerges?

Art, live performance, poetry and a celebration of creativity! Join us for a special evening celebrating the opening of Making Contact, a collaborative art exhibition bringing together artists from the Mullumbimby Contact Improvisation community. Expect an evening of visual art, live dance and music, poetry and connection, celebrating the unexpected and wonderful things that emerge when we let the body lead and creativity flow.

Explore a diverse collection of artworks inspired by movement, improvisation and intuitive expression. Experience live contact improvisation performances featuring dancers and musicians, and discover Words to Move By, a newly created collective poetry anthology born from movement, imagination and the spaces between thought and feeling. DIscover something new and experience the creativity of our local arts community in a welcoming, relaxed atmosphere.

OPENING NIGHT 13th Nov

FREE ENTRY!

A celebration of local creativity, connection and community. Come for the art, stay for the performances, meet the artists and enjoy an evening of curiosity, inspiration and a little improvisational magic!

PLUS — OPEN MIC NIGHT

Monday 16 November, from 6 pm. Come along to share your own creativity or enjoy the contributions of others.

If you like to book a slot to perform email Paula

Paulaincontact@gmail.com

THE EXHIBITION CONTINUES

Thursday 12 – Tuesday 17 November

Daily, 11 am–3 pm.

With heartfelt thanks to the Saturday Mullumbimby Contact Improvisation jam for sponsoring this community event.

Bring your friends, come curious and celebrate with us. Everyone is welcome!

Our Exhibiting Artists:

Paula Williams

My practice for this exhibition has evolved through letting go of expected outcomes and surrendering to possibility, curiosity and the present moment. Conscious choices emerge along the way, yet the process is guided by spontaneous form-making and intuitive composition. 

This approach reflects my experience of contact improvisation, where movement unfolds through listening, sensing and responding in relationship with others. When do we ask, and when do we answer? How much do we listen? Where is the yes, where is the no? What becomes visible when we surrender to not knowing and trust what emerges?

Max Mortiboys 

My practice has grown from scribbles in a travel journal into a daily drawing practice. Over the past three years, travelling and experimenting have helped me rediscover the joy of creating.

Working primarily with oil pastel, I explore colour, texture and the physicality of mark-making. My playful, intuitive approach allows images to emerge without knowing where they’re going.

Influenced by contact improvisation, I see drawing and dance as practices of listening: staying present, following impulses, taking risks and softening into uncertainty. I’m interested in trusting the process and responding to something felt rather than fully known.

Nicola Taylor 

“I am interested in the peculiar relationship between being an individual and oneness.”

Nicola Taylor (b.1984) is a South African-born visual artist living on Bungalung Land in Australia. Her practice explores internal landscapes, consciousness and external environment with deep reverence. 

‘Much like a CI practice, my creative process relies on the present moment and the unknown.’

Through a closed eye somatic drawing process, I attune to physical sensations and responses, allowing my body to provide subtle content that guides my work. This intuitive process opens up vast internal landscapes, with the artwork expanding into images that reflect both inner and outer worlds.

Emjay Hindley

Meraki Glass

Glass Artist (Flameworking)

How does Contact Improvisation influence our art making? Perhaps the influence exists more so in the process than the output. 

Similarly to contact, like trying to pinpoint when does a yield become a push, become a reach become a pull - the boundaries between process and output are equally entwined

Does my art change because I alter the process? Or does the process change depending on the art.

Since starting to dance within contact and between my art; I’ve slowed down, I react less, I move with greater openness and leave space for allowing. I listen more where the whispers of intuition have become much louder. I respect my glass when pieces speak to me in cracks and I respond to my tools when they tell me how to move.

To be in contact with other dancing bodies means greater listening to my body,

Greater listening to my body means greater depth within myself,

Greater depth within myself means greater listening in my studio

Greater listening in my studio means greater contact with creation.

All of these pieces, all of these steps form a dance, an endless spiral of creativity and allow me to find the flow and rhythm in creation and birth some-thing into existence that wasn’t here before.

Without contact improvisation the spiral was simply a circle.

Does a spiral ever end? Or do we just evolve beyond seeing its beginning

Anna Rosa

Clay Sculpture

Raised by atheist parents with no connection or belief in  the unseen, I travelled and grown to be enchanted by the ways people make homes for the sacred : temples, altars, offerings, places where the divine can be welcomed, witnessed and prayed to.

Travelling through India and Indonesia, I watched people make daily offerings and began to wonder how I might find my own ways to pray: to honour the land and commune with the unseen forces I have felt more deeply as my sensitivity has grown.

My dance informs my art; my art informs my dance. Where I once mostly sought stillness through seated meditation, I now find it in the meeting of bodies, or with my hands immersed in clay. I follow the impulses of my body and allow form to emerge, much as I follow the currents of a contact improvisation jam:  meeting, listening, yielding, holding structure, falling,allowing.

Dance has drawn me out of my head and deeper into my body. More and more, I find myself moving through life by intuition rather than intellect, allowing the body to lead where the mind cannot.

Through my hands a siren emerged and I see her as a goddess to be worshipped. She has been imbued with prayer as I slowly spent time with her emergence. She visited me in my dreams and spoke of nature's abundance. 

Recently, Josh, from The Emerald Podcast, spoke to the power of placing eyes upon sculptures, and the way that, in devotional objects and deity adornment, cracks and crevices can be imbued with prayers, becoming portals between worlds. Since hearing that, I have felt a shift in my sculptures, in the presence of their eyes, and in the altar itself… as though something has begun to look back.

Raychel French 

Gaia Kinesis - Photography 

@gaia.kinesis @m_mpix

With love and humbleness, I offer my attention and respect to the elemental and ancestral spirits of this Country, Bundjalung. I give deep thanks to the First Peoples of Bundjalung - caretakers and custodians, and their legacies. My gratitude to the Elders of the past, present, and emerging, and the Old People’s track - Gidjuum Gulganyi. 

These photos come from the mountain range known as Mt Jerusalem. I give deep thanks to my fellow activist and comrade, Mark Seiffert, for being fun and safe, allowing us to cocreate and capture moments together. 

As a kinesthetic art and science, CI beckons me into a state of presence and playfulness, hooked by curiosity and discovery. In this solo and communal creative space, I receive a range of quirky, medicinal experiences - embodied exercise, bootleg bodywork, creative therapy, mindfulness, amateur acrobatics, go with the flow dojo, conscious playground, non-verbal regulation haven. I enjoy the poetic and athletic practice of organic, freestyle motions that lead me to explore and contemplate concepts in physics and metaphysics, individual and collective energetic boundaries, all while mapping and navigating the fluctuating personal and dynamic flavours. 

Making contact with myself, Creation, and other peers through this movement style is a realm where I can release, recharge, and replenish. It’s unique and beautifully different to when I make contact with Creation and Country, where I am regenerating, recalibrating, remembering. The bioelectrical and eco-psycho-spiritual connection between our bodies and the Earth is the sacred synergy that deeply heals me. Both experiences always bring the gift of deep listening, and always different conversations. 

The photographs capture connection and communication with Country and Creation. Grayscale seeks to evoke contrast and stirring. I chose a black and white palette to enhance line and light, depth and shadow. I was inspired to play with polarity and duality, particularly through the feminine and masculine energies represented in clothing. The lack of colour feels like a calling to humans to remember, reflect, imagine, to action and connect back into Earthkeeping and ancestral wisdom. Country is kin and we all need to play our part in caring for the family. 

Nature is always our first teacher. Nature is always dancing between expressions, through weather, seasons, flora, fauna, civilisations, migrations, trends, etc. I love to dance and play with Country - always learning, remembering reciprocity.