HOLBERRY SCULPTURE WALK
By Dave Roberts
When it’s important to know about events in the community, as it is for us, you find yourself recognising certain names. So it wasn’t a surprise to find the name Louise Stokes come up when finding out about a sculpture exhibition in Nannup. Louise runs Holberry House, in Nannup, but comes to notice because she seems to be involved whenever we are writing up a community event down that way.
Living in the South West provides us with a great lifestyle, and at the heart of that has been our landscape. The forest, climate, great beaches, and fertility. Straight from there a wave of people have developed produce, and wine and cheese have been joined by marron, cider, berries, fish, and any number of things to leave us with a range of great tastes that borders on sensory overload.
Then of late, we’ve become more aware of just how much this region has going for it in culture. We seem to never be more than a couple of weeks from a festival. A wine festival, a farming field day, a rodeo, a medieval romp, music, music, music, it never stops.
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The arts play a really significant role in making us who we are, and in this region either new and exciting things have been arising, or up til recently, some of us haven’t been paying attention. Galleries dotted around the region show work by people we live with on a daily basis, and much of it is genuinely good. Some of it is in the long favoured medium of painting. And there are other things.... sculpture is something we pass much of the time without stopping to savour it, but there are sculptors in the region doing great things, and Louise has decided to present some of their work in the Holberry Sculpture Walk, as part of the Nannup Flower and Garden Festival, from Thursday 17 to Sunday 27 August, 2006.
Holberry House is set in 4 acres of landscaped gardens, within the townsite of Nannup, providing a great setting even before the work is presented, add sculpture by more than a dozen sculptors from the region and we’re in for a treat.
How did this one come about? The Nannup Flower and Garden Festival has always included a significant art festival, but they’ve been hard pressed to deliver the art in the winter due to shortcomings in their venue. Louise, as always, wanted to contribute and to make the festival even better, and was looking for a way forward. With the difficulties of the art exhibition in her mind, Louise saw “Sculpture by the Sea” in Cottesloe, and had a revelation. Like many others, she felt she hadn’t had enough exposure to sculpture, and figured that her own pretty special gardens could contribute. Louise notes that sculpture has a real range, “it can be realistic, or can be really left field” but across all this range she found inspiration a constant.
As you do, Louise planned a big show, but found that sourcing artists presented a challenge to begin with. She’s now compiled a database of exciting sculptors and will be showing broadly from that list. A statewide show was envisaged, but transport and logistics required a rethinking of boundaries. Now the show is nice and tight and still exciting, offering the bonus of providing opportunity for locals to get their work in front of the public.
While amassing the list of professional sculptors, research and word of mouth contact turned up a few enquiries from local people who considered themselves dabblers, and wanted to know if their work was good enough to show. In more than one case, a critical eye was cast across the work and the answer came back “yes” so the Holberry can also claim to be a platform for emerging sculptors in the South West.
The Holberry Sculpture Walk will be officially opened by Diana Roberts, at 2pm on Wednesday 16 August, at Holberry House, 14 Grange Road, NANNUP. The show is open from Thursday 17 to Sunday 27 August, 2006, and entry is by gold coin donation. All work has been made for this exhibition, and it is all for sale.
Living here continues to broaden me.... I’ll be checking this one out.
August 2006
