Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) celebrates 70 years of the BRAG Collection with new exhibition, Landscapes of Imagination: From the Collection, opening Friday 4 July, 6pm.
BRAG will also be launching two new exhibitions, Mystery of Missing Westerlies by Chantelle Mitchell and Jaxon Waterhouse (Ecological Gyre Theory) in the BRAG Foyer Space, and Munch by Tom Buckland in the Forecourt Projection.
Landscapes of Imagination: From the Collection
Landscapes of Imagination brings together works from the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Collection that reflect the enduring artistic allure of Hill End. This historic village has captured the imaginations of artists drawn to its layered histories, dramatic terrain, and evocative sense of place.
Since 1955, many of these artists’ works have been acquired, contributing to the rich cultural heritage of the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Collection, now celebrating its 70th year.
Hill End is more than a physical location—it is a site of creative projection, shaped as much by interpretation as observation. The phrase “landscapes of imagination”, which lends this exhibition its title, speaks to how artists have long reimagined the region through memory, emotion, and artistic experimentation.
The creative legacy of Hill End has been widely explored, notably in a landmark exhibition held thirty years ago at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which helped cement its significance in Australia’s cultural narrative. Since then, the Hill End Artists in Residence Program has welcomed a new generation of artists, offering them time and space to respond to the landscape and its histories. Many of these works have entered BRAG’s Collection, enriching our understanding of the site as an enduring source of inspiration.
Landscapes of Imagination invites viewers to consider how artists transform place into idea, charting both inner and outer worlds through their depictions of this iconic landscape.
Landscapes of Imagination: From the Collection
BRAG Main Gallery
5 July – 9 November 2025
Opening Event, Friday 4 July, 6pm – RSVP essential
Mystery of Missing Westerlies
Mystery of Missing Westerlies is a body of work emerging in response to a news article from April 7, 1950 which details “extraordinary weather”; a local manifestation of global atmospheric change, being the disappearance of westerly winds across New South Wales in response to planetary changes sweeping the northern hemisphere. Working across installation, video and intervention, Mystery of Missing Westerlies considers pasts, presents and futures in an interconnected planetary atmospheric frame.
The disappearance of the westerly winds is itself both a historical anomaly and a planetary omen. We treat this climatic rupture as an atmospheric case file, a study in atmospheric disappearance, inviting consideration of the interplay between absence, evidence, and the forces shaping our world. Here, wind becomes both subject and metaphor—an invisible actor whose movements carry sediments, shape deserts, and drive oceanic currents, but also a narrative force whose disappearance tells of shifting global patterns. Embedded within this body of work are material traces of evidence and investigation, material clues in a wider investigation of climate, memory, and time.
Mystery of Missing Westerlies
Chantelle Mitchell (VIC) and Jaxon Waterhouse (NT) (Ecological Gyre Theory)
BRAG Foyer Space
5 July – 7 September 2025
Opening Friday 4 July, 6pm – RSVP essential
Munch
In 2015, it was discovered that mealworms can degrade polystyrene into usable organic matter at a rate of about 34–39 milligrams per day. Additionally, no difference was found between mealworms fed only styrofoam and mealworms fed conventional foods during the one-month duration of the experiment.
Munch is a short humorous video work featuring a hungry trio of life-sized meal worms chowing down on some plastic delicacies.
Munch
Tom Buckland
OUT THERE DIGITAL PLATFORMS | Forecourt Projector
5 July – 7 September 2025
Opening Friday 4 July, 6pm – RSVP essential
Images: Rosemary Valadon, Jean Bellete’s Bed (detail), 2004, oil on canvas, 152 x 122 cm. Collection of Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; Chantelle Mitchell and Jaxon Waterhouse, Wind, West of (still), 2025, Super 8 film, 6.27 minutes. Courtesy the artist; Tom Buckland, Munch (still), 2023, digital video. Courtesy the artist.
