Made to Move

Giving creative kids "Room to Move" at Toowoomba's Lighthouse

Summary for the Lighthouse

Emma Mactaggart

Made to Move Exhibition

The "Made to Move" exhibition by Nadine Reynolds was a dynamic exploration of creativity and motion, captivating 177 visitors during its successful run. Held in The Write Gallery, the exhibition showcased Nadine’s innovative techniques for unlocking creative potential through visual storytelling and interactive design.

The exhibition featured six events, including the opening event and creative workshops, inspired participants to engage with their own untapped creativity.

Professor Laurie Johnson from UniSQ praised the exhibition, stating: "The 'Made to Move' exhibition by Nadine Reynolds is a thought-provoking, eye-catching proof of concept of the artist's capacity to connect people with their untapped creative potential. I look forward to working with Nadine to apply the same process to researcher motivations and personal investments in their own work."

A collaborative exhibition with Nadine Reynolds

The Write Gallery 16 November-14 December 2024.

A review by Sandy Pottinger.

The Write Gallery at The Lighthouse is a happy light-filled space that is the perfect venue for Nadine Reynold's "Made to Move." This is an exhibition that links science with history, art with storytelling, culture with experience, and halts movement in a vibrating moment. In its own quiet way, it embodies the words of Inayat Khan, Indian Sufi musician, poet, and philosopher who said:

"What science cannot declare, art can suggest, what art suggests silently poetry speaks aloud, what poetry fails to explain in words, music can express. Whoever knows the mystery of vibrations indeed knows all things."1

The silk paintings offer a contemporary interpretation of a process that has a long and noble history reaching back some three thousand years to China. In the background of the creative activities that shape the exhibition there are echoes of mulberry leaves, silkworms, cocoons, and silk, a textile which combines delicacy with strength.

Through a series of workshops artist and teacher, Nadine Reynolds has engaged the interest and participation of fifteen children to create a very special collaboration. The young artists explored portraiture, painting to music, and ideas drawn from their imaginations. Using these images as her basis, Reynolds filtered them through her own particular skills in painting on silk to produce panels of interest. Her extension work is presented with the original artwork by the young participants. This adds a further visual presence as well as encouraging confidence and involvement in her collaborators. The light, floating fabrics, untethered and unframed, become banners of honour. The kinetic movement generated by a sudden breeze or the passage of a viewer adds a certain energy that captures the transient joy and effervescence of childhood. A number of the works include embroidered embellishments that highlight a detail or emphasize a line. Some of these have been completed by a group of volunteers who formed an old-fashioned sewing circle in which to share their skills that cross generations of women's domestic artistry. As well as the collaborative pieces the exhibition includes a series of tantalizing art historical fragments which translate effectively to the silk painting format. These are accompanied by brief didactic statements that share Reynold's recollections, interests, and consuming passion for the arts.

1 Khan, H.I., The Mysticism of Sound, (Revised Edition), 2014, Shambhala Publications, Boston,

Affect / Effect by Nadine Reynolds. Opening speech Cara Ann Simpson 9 March 2024.

Good afternoon and thank you to Jo Beazley, Cultural Services Officer and Coordinator Exhibitions and Public Programs, alongside Jane Orme from Toowoomba Regional Council for introducing me and being present today. I would like to also begin with an Acknowledgement of Country.

I would like to Acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands, waters and skies on which we gather today, the people of the Wakka Wakka nation. I pay my respects to Elders past, present, emerging and future. I also acknowledge the cultural diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I would also like to acknowledge Country as our provider, protector and guide.

It is such a pleasure to be here today to open Nadine Reynold’s exhibition, Affect / Effect. I met Nadine last year in 2023 when she attended my Exhibition Development Intensive program at the Queensland College of Arts for Flying Arts Alliance. I caught up with Nadine earlier this week to have a chat about her work during the installation.

This exhibition draws together four artwork series including: Little Rocks, At Home, Do You Know Your Place?, and Meeting Place, alongside 2 beautifully detailed artist journals. Themes of memory, experience, identity, place and people connect these series. For me, one of the highlights is the artist journals, which stand on their own as artist books. They share the transition of practice and artist as Nadine developed and refined her approach to making.

Nadine’s professional background resides primarily in education. It is fascinating to see an exhibition that draws from a teaching role to bring concepts and methods across to professional creative practice. It is a reversal of the role cycle that is often the approach to creative practice. In this reversal, there is a wealth of layered narratives that come through the work, particularly when listening to Nadine discuss each series.

The first series on entry to the gallery is Little Rocks, which developed from Nadine’s earlier series ‘Rocks in my Head’ about her journey with vertigo. Nadine shared with me the origin of her interest in creating art about rocks that goes back to her childhood. Her parents fostered her interests father had a love of rocks and often visiteding galleries with Nadine. A formative gallery visit with her father was seeing Turner’s travel diaries of landscapes and geographies. These memories are layered within the Little Rocks artworks, while sharing Nadine’s interest in exploring the Australian landscape and capturing it without creating any disturbance.

Place continues to play an important role in Nadine’s series, At Home, where she explored the bounds of her garden during the COVID lockdowns. This series sits in contrast to Little Rocks, where the wealth of life abounds in rich colours reflecting the joy and beauty to be found in gardens. In these works, the compositions are full, brimming with change and growth, reflecting both nature’s growth and the development of an artist transitioning from one series that emanates inward reflection and stillness to another looking up and outward.

The connection between place and person become integral in the series, Meeting Place. In these works, there is an acknowledgement of the importance that place holds in creating community, growing culture and forging connections. One of these works focuses on the special connection that exists between mother and daughter, where Nadine has embroidered her daughter’s childhood drawings over a sketch of Nadine with her daughter. In another work, Nadine draws attention to the Empire Theatre, a local landmark of significance to many in the community, including her family. These threads share with us intimate stories of Nadine’s life, but many are relatable to our community where we can layer our own personal narratives and memories on top of these works.

The silk landscape series, Do You Know Your Place?, is Nadine’s most recent and resolved body of work. In this series, her skill is evident in the confident strokes. The process for these works leaves no scope to re-work the silks. They are responsive works that use a limited palette where Nadine matches primary colours to the landscape. This draws upon her educational experience and demonstrates her colourist capabilities. For me, there is a link to the Heidelberg School and the watercolour palette favoured by Albert Namatjira. These links create further narrative layers connecting the works to Australian art history, as well as to the many ways that we label, depict, understand and interpret landscape and place. The use of Indigenous place names and geographical coordinates reinforces the many ways in which landscape can be depicted and interpreted. These two ways of describing landscape offer perspectives that dive into cultural, social, scientific and historical modes of learning and interpreting. They create a depth to these works that allow us to look deeper and consider the way in which landscape is understood in Australia.

This exhibition is rich with stories that are provided by both the artist and viewer. One area that Nadine wants to draw peoplespeople’s attention to, is the fluidity of her chosen support material - silk, which ripples and responds to air movement including the interaction of our bodies in the space, the air conditioning, or even the door opening and closing. This motion reflects Nadine’s transitory practice, which consistently draws upon her personal story of immigration and love of the Australian landscape and its inhabitants.

I would now like to welcome Nadine Reynolds to share insights into her work and acknowledgements.