Current & Upcoming Exhibitions
CRAFTING A DIFFERENCE
CHANGEMAKERS
17 May - 27 July 2025
Changemakers: Crafting a difference consists of an exhibition of textile banners that represent a range of historical and contemporary activist movements, together with banner-making workshops facilitated by artist and craftivist Dr Tal Fitzpatrick. Aesthetically, the works draw on the history of textile banners as artefacts used for activism, including the women’s suffrage campaign, as well as banners displayed in town halls and churches.
The exhibition demonstrates that Australian women’s quest for freedom and equality is ongoing. Many of the social issues raised by early activists remain vitally relevant today, including equal pay, sexual harassment, family violence, and female representation in Parliament and business.
Changemakers focuses on women’s empowerment and demonstrates that crafting — traditionally considered ‘women’s work’ — can be used for political expression and social change.
Changemakers: Crafting a difference is a travelling exhibition from the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, sponsored by Commonwealth Bank as part of CommBank Next Chapter, a program helping victim survivors of financial abuse achieve long-term financial independence.
Image: Tal Fitzpatrick, Activist banner, 2021. Museum of Australian Democracy Collection.
TINA PECH
BOOKISH
1 March - 25 May 2025
Why do we like books? Is it just their content we admire, or their look and feel? What makes a book more than a literary object? These are the questions Baradine artist Tina Pech explores in her exhibition, Bookish.
Books historically have been valued as the keepers of knowledge. Books house both information and imagination: they contain our stories, records, secrets, and potentials for growth, insight, and change. While they remain silent communicators, their power is towering, inspiring us to read, absorb, inscribe, and to become story tellers in our own right.
Bookish features works that use traditional and invented construction methods, as well as alternative stitching and materials, to create a collection of book-like sculptures, mutations, and hybrids which push and challenge how we regard books and their functions. Bookish shows works that seek to extend a book’s structure and contents beyond the expected, as well as challenging our perception of books. Bookish shows books as structural vessels able to be deconstructed and reimagined, laying bare a book’s skeletal anatomy while displaying their layers and accentuating their content.
Tina Pech is a fibre textile artist whose creative practice is heavily influenced by the physicality of books, their tactility, warmth, and tangible presence. Through the practice of constructing and deconstructing books, she invites us to explore their physical structure, experimenting and playing with a book's boundaries and anatomy.
This is a HomeGround exhibition, produced by the WPCC and supported by Orana Arts. HomeGround is sponsored by Wingewarra Dental.
IN CONVERSATION EVENT: Saturday 1 March 2025, 2pm
Image: Tina Pech, Book Blossom 1, 2024, altered book sculpture, gesso, acrylic paint. Image courtesy the artist.
YEAR OF TOYS
WASTE 2 ART
8 March - 24 May 2025
Waste 2 Art is an annual community art exhibition and competition that features artworks created by community members using recycled and unwanted materials. The results are imaginative and thought-provoking with the artworks showcasing recycling and sustainable living.
With this creative use of waste materials, Waste 2 Art also provides an innovative approach to waste education. Schools and community groups take up the challenge and create artworks out of materials that might otherwise be thrown away.
The theme for this year's exhibition is Toys.
Dubbo Regional Council is a proud NetWaste member and supports commitment to re-use and recycle through creative expression.
Image: Margaret Lynch, Miss Demeanour, 2025, mixed media. Image courtesy of Dubbo Regional Council.
ZANNY BEGG
THESE STORIES WILL BE DIFFERENT
8 March - 25 May 2025
These Stories Will be Different brings together a fascinating series of works that reimagine a medieval feminist utopia, probe the unsolved murder of a high-profile anti-gentrification campaigner and explore the connections between love, loss, and language in migrant communities in Australia.
The videos tell stories, but they also challenge the conventions of storytelling. Zanny Begg’s work invites you to see the world differently by drawing on ancient literary traditions, non-linear timeframes, and computer-generated randomisation.
Curated by UNSW Galleries, Sydney and touring nationally in partnership with Museums & Galleries of NSW.
Image: Zanny Begg, Stories of Kannagi 2019. Single-channel digital video, 23 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist
FROM THE VAULT
A WOMAN'S PLACE
10 May 2024 - 4 May 2025
This exhibition explores the stories of three local women of Dubbo, from three different time periods dating from the late 1800s through to the 1940s. The stories of these women reflect a broader discussion around women’s roles in the public sphere.
Mrs Blanche Soane was a prominent Suffragette, Nurse Mary Adams, the Matron of a Lying-in Hospital, and Mrs ‘Kep’ Wilkins, a prominent producer and organiser in Dubbo’s Theatrical community, how do we understand such prominent and respected local women in an era when it was a firmly held view that a ‘woman’s place’ was in the home?
From the Vault is supported by Create NSW.
Curated by Simone Taylor
Image: Photographer Unknown, Group portrait of nurses including Mary McDonald, later Matron Adams, Local Studies Collection, Dubbo Regional Council, 2015_222_PHO
BETWEEN WAVES
31 May - 7 September 2025
Between Waves amplifies concepts related to light, time and vision – and the idea of shining a light on our times – expressed by the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung word ‘Yalingwa’. The exhibition variously explores the visible and invisible energy fields set in motion by these ideas, to illuminate interconnected shapeshifting ecologies within, beyond and between what can be seen.
Through a range of contemporary artforms including video, installation, poetry, projection, photography, painting, sculpture, sound, printmaking, and a digital commission, the invited artists have developed reflective and site-responsive projects which explore and experiment with the intersection of material and immaterial realms of knowledge and knowing.
Participating artists embrace the push and pull dynamics that flow beneath the surface, navigating ideas of presence and absence, the known and unknown, transgenerational and collective consciousness. Together, their reflective and site-responsive new commissions, traverse internal and external worlds, embracing the sensory and cyclical rhythms of light and sound, thinking, and feeling, listening and seeing, interwoven with ideas of material memory.
Between Waves is an exhibition developed by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) touring nationally with NETS Victoria, curated by Jessica Clark.
This project has been supported by Creative Victoria through the Yalingwa Visual Arts Initiative and the NETS Victoria Exhibition Development Fund; and the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program.
Image: Cassie Sullivan, wayi (to hear) 2023, seven tarlatan monotype prints on frosted acrylic, 170.0 x 122.0 cm each. Installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2023. Commissioned by ACCA. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis
FROM THE VAULT
FRONTPAGE
14 June - 24 November 2025
Using our collection of archived local newspapers, Frontpage explores how newspapers, and their front pages have evolved over the last 150 years. Before the advent of radio and television they were the main form of mass communication providing access to news, entertainment and commerce, helping to shape public opinion. Over the decades newspaper front pages have undergone considerable change, reflecting broader trends in technology and communication, making for a fascinating insight into shifting cultural attitudes.
From the Vault is supported by Create NSW.
Curated by Simone Taylor.
Image: The Dubbo Liberal, 3 December 1935, Local Studies Collection, Dubbo Regional Council
RAWDON MIDDLETON VC
IN THE FACE OF OVERWHELMING ODDS
4 August - 31 December 2025
Rawdon Middleton was a promising young man with a bright future ahead when World War II broke out in 1939. Like many of his peers, he enlisted to train and fight in the tumultuous conflict engulfing Europe.
Rawdon's story is one of remarkable dedication and sacrifice that continues to resonate through generations—a tale of a local boy who, against overwhelming odds, became a hero.
As we acknowledge the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, Rawdon Middleton reminds us of all who served and what we are each capable of.
Image: 402745 PO Rawdon Hume Middleton (photographic detail) as student pilot No. 7 Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS) course at No. 5 Elementary Flying Training School (5 EFTS) Narromine, 1940, Collection Australian War Memorial P01O19. 003
CLEMENTINE BELLE MCINTOSH
SOWING AND SEWING
7 June - 7 September 2025
In Sowing and Sewing Gilgandra-based artist Clementine Belle McIntosh challenges the human-centric relationships which define our inherent “sense of place”. Combining textiles with traditional painting techniques and impulsive mark-marking with nonhuman collaboration, McIntosh’s textile installations reflect the dynamic and complex interactions present between local environments, industries, and communities in the context of rural Australia.
A continuation of McIntosh’s regenerative approach to art making, Sowing and Sewing invites viewers to be enveloped by the textile materials utilised and consider the narratives of the land, the industry that relies on it and the people that live within it. Thus, allowing us to build our own associations towards a “sense of place”.
This is a HomeGround exhibition, produced by the WPCC and supported by Orana Arts. HomeGround is sponsored by Wingewarra Dental.
IN CONVERSATION EVENT: Saturday 7 June, 2pm.
Image: Hairdo, Clementine Belle McIntosh, 2025, childhood ribbon, raw wool fleece dyed with plant-based dyes, pearls from my mum’s broken necklace, silk thread and found farming fencing wire (detail). Installation view Rofe St Gallery Leichhardt May 2025.
PEOPLE PLACES POSSESSIONS
DUBBO STORIES
Permanent Exhibition
The history of Dubbo told through the people who lived here. Stories of hardship, perseverance, ingenuity, tragedy and joy – Dubbo’s past is at once surprising and enlightening.
Telling the story of a place and its people is made easier by examining the myriad of ways we document, express and articulate our experiences. For a museum, the photographs, books, objects and official records help us to record history. The archives held by the WPCC allow community members to access this material for research or general interest. From diaries and ledgers to photographs that transport us back in time, the WPCC Collection provides a unique portal to our past.
Image Credit: Maker unknown, Shoe – Female – Chinese, date unknown. Red satin. Braid edging continues down to the toe. Calico sole with embroidery under the heel. Bird and flower embroidery. Orange tie embroidered in shades of blue. Designed for the custom of bound feet. Collection WPCC.
