I always feel honoured when I’m asked to give a speech to open a friend’s art exhibition.

This week I had the privilege of opening my friend Chelle Wallace’s photography exhibition, Portals of the Inanimate at gallery DownTown, a part of the Tweed Regional Gallery in Murwillumbah, NSW.

I first met Chelle when we came together to curate an exhibition about the Big Flood for the Murwillumbah Art Trail in May 2017. Chelle’s poignant photographs and those she collected from others about that crisis event remind me of the power of bearing witness to our stories, great and small.

All of my beautiful website photographs have been taken by Chelle in the past 12 months. She has an eye for the quirky, the stories behind the frame. I asked her to take some photographs of me last year for my webpage, something not too formal that expresses the essence of my off the wall creativity. 

 It was really hot and she suggested we walk dowen to the vacant land at the end of her street where there is a big pipe. I posed in the pipe, peering through tree branches and throwing leaves into the air, all in my red dress I had bought for the occasion.

Chelle caught it all in her lens showing a side of myself I don’t normally access. Like a true artist, the photographer caught the story behind the frame. This is an excerpt from my speech I gave on Friday night.

Chelle Wallace is a storyteller. She tells her story through the lens of a camera in her still life tableaus. In true storytelling fashion they reveal their plot and character, but it is what they hint at, what they conceal that leads the audience into a place of mystery and discovery. 

Chelle’s first solo exhibition was in a local café, a series of photographs in the still life tradition which she later explored in more detail in this current major exhibition. Starting with a small series of flowers in vases, her still lives became explorations into her own story and that of her mother’s generation of women relegated to home makers. Their homes became their creative canvas, as Chelle wrote “ a conduit for identity”.

I know that when you dig deeper into your subject and really explore the things which inspire you; an inner personal connection reveals its story. It’s the essence of storytelling both in writing and visual art.