Join us for the opening of Heather + Kate Dorrough: Lineage, an exhibition of multi-disciplinary works by mother and daughter Heather and Kate Dorrough, encompassing fibre art, paintings, prints, ceramics, sculpture and video. 

This exhibition will be opened by Anne Ryan, Curator of Australian Art at The Art Gallery of NSW.

Heather and Kate's dynamic work explores the nexus between the arts and crafts movements, female creative lineage, body and landscape, river and fertility, and environmental issues and activism.

Originally trained as an interior designer, Heather Dorrough (1933 – 2018) worked in London and New York before arriving in Australia in 1962, where she began making fabric and fibre works after the birth of her daughter Kate. She later developed her own techniques with machine embroidery, painting with dyes, and the sculptural use of fabric. This exhibition includes her most significant works, earlier fabric hangings and low relief sculptures that heralded the shift from a craft-based tradition to the arts, and a large body of prints and paintings, inspred by the Hawkesbury River landscape, seen together for the first time at MAG&M.

The practice of Sydney-based artist Kate Dorrough (b.1964) sustains a conversation between paint and clay, launching an inquiry into the interplay and tension between the gestural mark and the hand built ceramic form. The artist's recent work explores the River as metaphor, bestowal of fertility with a cyclicality of renewal and destruction. Her painterly gestural marks evoke totemic symbols and an inferred language of an enduring landscape. In this exhibition her work will directly respond to her mother’s, creating a dialogue and an interplay exploring memory and the personal in recognition of her mother as mentor.

A timely book (which includes essays by art writers and curators, Christine France, Julie Ewington, Dr Peter Emmett, and Anne Brennan) on Heather's extensive sixty year career will also be launched at our Artist Talk: Kate Dorrough event on Sun 17 Sept, 2 - 3pm.

Free event

Wine by Little Ripples, MAG&M Events Partner