Celebrate the exhibition opening of Jonathan Nichols: The inside of painting on Friday 10 May, 6pm.

Thank you to major sponsors, local winemaking co-operative Boomtown Wine, and local bar and brewery Love Shack Brewing Company for sponsoring wine and beer, alongside support from StrangeLove with non-alc beverages.

Free event. Please RSVP here.

Jonathan Nichols: The inside of painting

Jonathan Nichols is known for making figurative paintings that evoke a sense of intimacy, while still reaching outward into the exterior world around us.

In this exhibition, he presents two loose groupings of paintings made 20 years apart. The first six works, dated between 1998 and 2001, were painted directly from the screen of one of the early commercially available laptop computers – a 1997 Apple PowerBook 1400cs. The second group uses mannequins and figurative shapes from the history of art. These paintings were completed between 2021 and 2022, after Nichols returned to Australia following several years living in Singapore and Malaysia.

By staging this marked temporal gap of 20 years between the two groupings, Nichols invites us to focus on how paintings extend beyond the specific contexts of individual works. He is interested in a painting’s painterly character and its passage in time. It is the aspects of painting that leap across the gaps between individual works that Nichols suggests are internal to painting and key to how it operates.

As part of the 2024 Melbourne Art Book Fair, Castlemaine Art Museum presents a two-day regional art book fair held throughout its 1931 heritage Art Deco building.

From 10am to 3pm across 1–2 June, CAM will host a dynamic art book fair showcasing work by central Victorian artists, writers and publishers, alongside a series of special events including artist talks, workshops, a book launch, and panel conversations on artists publishing their work. A unique design installation will also be presented to coincide with Melbourne Design Week.

With a vast range of stallholders from central Victoria, this is an extraordinary opportunity to meet regional artists, designers, writers and publishers, and support Castlemaine’s vibrant creative community on Dja Dja Wurrung Country.

Based in Castlemaine, Digital Mould Design (DMD) are the leading digital mould and formwork designers in Australia. Following the first design installation with Like Butter in 2023 as part of Melbourne Design Week and Melbourne Art Book Fair at CAM, this year DMD have created a distinct steel GFRC mould installation to activate the gallery space. With many years of experience in concrete and GFRC (Glass Fiber Reinforced Concrete) moulding, DMD specialise in solving the complex forms found in contemporary Australian architectural projects.

Tim Preston and Sholto Turner of DMD will be in conversation with CAM Director, Naomi Cass, discussing their design installation and offering insight into their process. Hear how DMD use 3D computer modelling to digitise the concrete form based on architectural drawings, CAD files, sketches or briefs, to design and develop mould and formwork systems suitable for a range of fabrication methods.

Presented as part of CAM Art Book Fair, in conjunction with the 2024 Melbourne Art Book Fair.

Speakers

Digital Mould Design
Digital Mould Design (DMD) offer world leading concrete formwork, mould design and fabrication technologies. DMD specialise in the design and supply of in-situ formwork and precast moulds for commercial builders, large scale domestic developments, landscaping and urban development. DMD apply leading edge technologies to suit any shape, finish and budget. These technologies include laser cut steel, CNC machined polystyrene foam (EPS), fibreglass and 3D printing. Projects include MONA Hobart, Park Hyatt Sydney, University of Melbourne, Jewel Tower Gold Coast, MCG Melbourne, Melbourne Metro Tunnel, Sea World Atlantis Queensland, Curtin University Perth, Mildura Riverfront Precinct, Melbourne Quarter, Idée Fix Winery Margaret River.

Now showing at Castlemaine Art Museum, Julie Millowick: Surrounding features a selection of work from 36 years of documenting the Central Victorian post goldrush environment around the home of the artist, including a new series seen for the first time. In this exhibition, Millowick captures the beauty of her surrounding in tumult and recovery. This strangely poignant landscape has been turned upside down through violent extraction – but it remains resilient and offers capacity for renewal.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition, Surrounding by Julie Millowick is a publication that extends her photographic documentation. The publication features an introduction by the artist, an essay by exhibition curator Jenny Long, full-colour photographs, and an interactive map. The publication showcases Millowick’s diverse explorations of her environment, using film, pinhole camera, photogram, lumen, cyanotype and digital capture.

In this panel conversation, hear from artist Julie Millowick and the team behind the publication: Jac DiBlasi, Designer; Jessie DiBlasi, Producer; Rob Gale, Image Editor; and Stephanie Holt, Editor. Chaired by CAM Director, Naomi Cass, the conversation will explore the publishing process, considering artistic and design sensibilities from concept to completion, collaborating as a publishing team, and realising the publication in tandem with a major exhibition.

Presented as part of CAM Art Book Fair, in conjunction with the 2024 Melbourne Art Book Fair.

Speakers

Julie Millowick
Julie Millowick began her photographic career working in the darkroom of Athol Shmith, John Cato and Peter Barr. After completing her studies at Prahran College of Advanced Education, she worked as a press and public relations photographer, after which the direction of her commercial folio changed and she worked as a corporate industrial photographer. Julie achieved early recognition for her photojournalism when she exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Centre for Photography in 1977 in Australian New Work. She has exhibited and published regularly since then, with work held in major photography collections in Australia and internationally. In 1993 she exhibited work in the exhibition Intimate Lives with Sally Mann, Nan Goldin and Jaques Henri Lartigue at the International Fotofeis in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Jac DiBlasi
Jac DiBlasi is a graphic designer with a passion for publication design with a Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Communication Design from Swinburne University of Technology. She has a demonstrated history of working in the events services industry across Melbourne festivals and institutions including Fed Square and the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre (MCEC). Her superpower is her keen ability to collaborate with clients and artists, identifying the perfect format and style to enhance a published narrative for print outputs of 250 to 200K. Jac employs design elements that add to the reader experience, such as the fold out guiding map included in Surrounding or the section for readers to document their own family recipes in Nonna to Nana.

Jessie DiBlasi
Jessie DiBlasi is a multidisciplinary artist and writer with a proven track record of socially engaged practice. Her work explores and celebrates tradition, history, and connection through visual and practical application, often employing the photobook along with interactive programming to engage audiences. Her work has been awarded and recognised nationally and internationally through awards, residencies and collections that include the State Library of Victoria and National Library of Australia and has been selected for art prizes including The Blake Prize, the Muswellbrook Art Prize, Maggie Diaz Photography Prize for Women, MAMA Art Foundation National Photography Prize, and Iris Award.

Rob Gale
Born in Melbourne, Australia, Rob Gale is a graduate of Prahran college who has worked as a freelance commercial photographer nationally and internationally for over 35 years. Currently, he teaches photography at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he has taught photography and digital postproduction to vocational students for more than 16 years. Outside of teaching, Rob continues to work on independent projects, most recently completing pre-press production for Michael Coyne’s internationally award-winning book about village life around the world Villages: Hearing the Grass Grow’. Rob has had work exhibited at the Ballarat International Photo Biennale and as a finalist in the Moran Photographic prize, Aussie Street Awards, Head on Awards and The Blake Prize.

Stephanie Holt
Stephanie Holt is a Fryerstown-based editor, who specialises in arts and culture publishing. She is current Chair of the Institute of Professional Editors, Australia and New Zealand, and works part-time with Overland journal and the History Council of Victoria, as well as maintaining a freelance editing practice.

How do artists make a space for their work in publishing? Can self-publishing provide artists with a new form of agency in reaching audiences in constrained financial times?

This panel conversation will delve into these questions and investigate the role of self-publishing for artists. Hear from a range of self-publishers including illustrator and writer Lorena Carrington of Pardalote Press, artist Deborah Klein, and artist Clayton Tremlett, and discover practical insight into the self-publishing process – from high production artist books through to limited edition zines.

Presented as part of CAM Art Book Fair, in conjunction with the 2024 Melbourne Art Book Fair.

Speakers

Lorena Carrington
Lorena Carrington is an illustrator and writer whose books have been published in Australia and internationally. She is known in Australia for her illustration work in the field of fairy tales and picture books, and she also writes for older children. She designed and jointly coordinated the anthology South of the Sun: Australian Fairy Tales for the 21st Century; and runs Pardalote Press, an independent publishing house, with author Sophie Masson. She was the recipient of the 2020 Australian Fairy Tale Society award, and a 2023 May Gibbs Creative Time Fellowship. Her picture book Satin, written by Sophie Masson, is a Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book for 2024.

Deborah Klein
Deborah Klein was born in Melbourne and grew up in the coastal suburb of St Kilda. From 1973 she lived and worked in London, returning to Melbourne in 1980. In 2011, she began dividing her practice between Melbourne and Ballarat, moving permanently to the latter in late 2019. The artist gained degree and post-degree qualifications from Chisholm Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Gippsland School of Advanced Education and a Research MA from Monash University, Gippsland. Since 1987 she has regularly held solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions in Australia and internationally. Klein's practice encompasses painting, drawing, printmaking and book art. Her work has received numerous awards and is held in public and university collections throughout Australia. In 2009 she founded Moth Woman Press, through which she publishes her artist books and zines. MWP publications are held in the permanent collections of the National Library of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, State Library of Victoria, State Library of Queensland, Melbourne Athenaeum Library, Monash University, Bank Street Arts, Sheffield, UK and the Baillieu Library, Melbourne University.

Clayton Tremlett
Clayton Tremlett was born in 1964, he studied Painting and Printmaking at Charles Sturt University between 1980 and 1984. His works draw explicitly from Australian history and culture, following sustained periods of research. He is renowned for his linocut portraiture; however, he also works with etching and screen printing to produce wallpapers, artist’s books, installations, editioned and unique state prints. He is represented in the Australian National Gallery, Bendigo, Geelong, Castlemaine, Hamilton, Mornington Peninsula, Wangaratta and State Library of Victoria collections.