Herring Island Exhibition Report

The ASV exhibition on Herring Island benefits enormously from being part of the Summer Arts Festival –

• there is the clear advantage of being part of a continuous program so that people know that there are art exhibitions on the island for the whole of the summer.

• We share the effort and expenses of printing invitations, paying for advertising and distributing the flyers.

• The festival is so successful that negotiations with Parks Victoria become easier every year as they realise the value that the festival gives them and the state.

This year the sculpture exhibition included the Australia Day weekend. The Australia Day council publicises the program on Herring Island over the weekend and we did receive visits from people who found out about the festival from their website and other publicity. However numbers were down on previous years when the sitters lost track after 250 visitors. To some extent this is a good thing because in previous years there have been queues for the punt and overcrowding in the gallery. It is likely that there was so much else on over the weekend that Herring Island missed being part of the main buzz. Usually all the participating groups run demonstration events in the courtyard for Australia Day – however this year there were three groups represented: Janet Matthews and Vida Pearson for the Wildlife Art Society of Australasia, Charlie Solomon for the Koorie Heritage Trust and Jenny Rickards for the ASV.
The Preview Cruise did not go ahead – advertising was late, it was much too expensive to get many artists along and Melbourne River Cruises failed to attract outside patrons. I'll have discussions with MRC later to see if we can revive this pleasant event.
The opening was on the Saturday afternoon and we sold four works then and a further two on Sunday. Unfortunately this was the total of our sales. Selling artists were: Bronwyn Culshaw, Magdalena Dmowska, Gillian Govan, Jan Indrans and Lise Toft. Visitors were deterred by hot weather – neither of the two subsequent Saturdays gave us visitors and indeed the park was closed on the 7th February due to the extreme conditions. The last two Sundays brought reasonable numbers of appreciative and interested visitors.
21 sculptors entered the show – 20 finally contributing a great exhibition of 43 works. Particular thanks to Michael for working magic with the set up, for Patrick for administrative and treasury support, to Gillian for not only sourcing the wine and soft drinks but being the tower of strength in hospitality coordination, to all the sculptors for sitting, contributing and supporting – it was a great show. The bush fires did have an impact with one sculptor unable to collect work, and one sitting in spite of her son losing home and property.
Images will be on the ASV website – soon.

HISAF Coordinator Jenny Rickards

works shown here are: Michael Meszaros's"Bushfire" and Mark Cowie's "Blood of Eden"