Ray Rixon
For 40 years Ray’s professional painting practice has focused on White Bluff’s fragile beauty and he has exhibited regularly throughout the NSW North Coast, Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
Ray is a mark maker, utilising a layering technique, to build form, to create painterly surfaces and translucent colour effects. Heavily textured surfaces, scarred and abraded, elicit a visceral response to his work.
Sarah Mufford
Born in Bellingen, Sarah has recently returned to the North Coast after 20 years in Sydney. Working predominantly on paper, her labour-intensive, geometric abstractions are informed by Eastern and Western pattern systems. Trained at the Australian National University, Canberra School of Art, with postgraduate studies at the University of Technology Sydney, Sarah has exhibited most recently at AirSpace Projects, Liverpool St Gallery Project Space in Sydney and Glasshouse Regional Gallery.
She was has been a finalist in the Hazlehurst Art on Paper (commended), Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award and winner of the commendation prize at the Banyule Works on Paper Award in Melbourne.
Jo Elliott
A change of life for Jo and her family in 2012 led her back to her passion for art, after a professional life in coastal ecology and environmental management. Jo’s art now combines her scientific knowledge and observational discipline, to blend and explore the fusion of art and science and its endless and exciting possibilities.
Jo holds an Advanced Diploma in Visual Art, from the North Coast Institute of TAFE. She is currently employed by TAFE NSW as a support officer in the Creative Industries faculty assisting in the delivery of the Diploma of Visual Arts course at the Coffs Harbour TAFE campus.
Tori Donnelly
Tori is a young Gumbaynggirr and Bundjilung artist whose work has taken a traditional approach since her recent move back to the Mid North Coast. With a Diploma of Visual Arts and holding a Cert III in Design, Tori aims to blend and explore traditional practices with contemporary concepts while immersing herself in Culture and Community.
John Van Der Kolk
John originally trained as a pattern-maker/industrial designer in the plastics industry in Sydney but has been a full time sculptor since moving to the Mid North Coast in 1989. He has held numerous group and solo exhibitions and his work is represented in a number of public and private collections in Australia and overseas. John has been involved in numerous international events, including the Florence Biennale in 2007 where he was winner of the Lorenzo de Medici medal for sculpture.
http://www.vanderkolk.com.au/
Terri Butterworth
As a painter, Terri seeks to achieve expressive images based on elements of inspiration which consider feelings, sense of place, mood and atmosphere. She works with oils on canvas and is interested in nature and all of its wonderful arrangements. the notion of interconnection, the perception of defined boundaries. The intensity of emotion that can be conveyed in her artworks continues to intrigue her. Terri has exhibited widely in Australia, USA, has won several awards and her work is held in private and public collections in Australia, USA and Japan.
Jeremy is an artist, educator and environmental activist. He also has a great deal of experience and a long history of creating collaborative art, having been a contributor to a series of sculptural works with artists from Australia and Oceania that have featured in Sculpture By the Sea. Jeremy has been described as an artist who forms a dialogue with the natural world by using found materials. His often site specific pieces are also often ephemeral; affected by, and commenting on, the changing forces in our landscape. Jeremy says he believes there are extraordinary things to be found in the ordinary everyday world that sits right under our noses.
http://www.jeremysheehan.net/
Ash Frost is an artist and community arts worker living on Gumbaynngirr land who is passionate about everyday creativity and arts processes that bring communities together. She has worked for the Coffs Harbour City Council as the Gallery & Museum Program Facilitator and for the Community Arts Network (CAN) on Noongar Boojar in WA. Her own practice has a focus on the everyday, using creativity to move throughout, and respond to, space. Her works are mainly in watercolour and mixed media.
Phill Greed
Phil moved to the Coffs Harbour area in 1983 and has been a maker and teacher of ceramics for over 35 years and is a founding member of Coastal ClayMakers Inc. Phil holds a Bachelor of Arts (Ceramic Design) from Caulfield Institute of Technology (Melbourne, Vic) and a Graduate Diploma in Vocational Education and Training, SCU.
“I have always been fascinated by the alchemy of glaze and the firing process; the possibilities seem endless”.
@phil_greed_ceramics
Born in the UK, JP Willis studied Fine Art and Printmaking at Royal West of England Academy of Art, and the University of the West of England where he completed a BA (Hons) Fine Art and Masters in Printmaking. JP Willis moved to the north coast of New South Wales in 2000 and taught at the North Coast Institute of TAFE from 2002 till 2012 and now solely devotes his time to his arts practice.
Self-contained, uncompromising and contemporary, Willis’s steady output has created a body of stunning work laced through with dystopian themes: the inevitability of the cruel twist, examining the world around him with a painter’s sensibility and a sharp eye.
JP Willis has exhibited widely overseas and in Australia with works held in collections including Tate Britain (UK), Art Gallery of New South Wales (Australia), The British Library (UK), Print Council of Australia (Australia), Queensland State Library (Australia), University of Washington (USA) and the AKI Academy of Art & Design (The Netherlands) to name a few.
Julie Nash is a visual artist and teacher, specialising in ceramics. She is currently making ceramic objects rich with associations of time and place, memories and emotions. Julie also emphasises connections in her work, between a specific location and its’ history, which creates a discourse on environmental issues. The objects’ surfaces are highly decorated with drawn and carved illustrations.
Julie has been a practicing and exhibiting artist for 20 years. In recent years, her work has been selected for the Still Salon, Clunes Ceramic Award, the North Sydney Art Prize and the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award.
julienashart.com
Chris Armstrong
Chris Armstrong is a poet whose work has been published regularly in Australia’s leading literary journals. She writes from lived experience, immersing herself in wild environments as a source of knowledge and inspiration for her writing. She was runner-up in the 2015 Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets and received an ASA Emerging Writers Mentorship for her poetry manuscript The Watershed, which was published as a chapbook in 2017.
You can find Chris's poetry online at Plumwood Mountain, Cordite, Overland and Griffith Review.
Mark & Megan George
Mark has a Bachelor of Design, Visual Communications from UTS, majoring in film and video production and began his career in Sydney's advertising sphere as a creative designer and producer. Megan has a Bachelor of Applied Science, Occupational Therapy from Sydney University but, her passion for efficient outcomes, organisation and people has led her into film and multi-media production.
Mark and Megan are Co-Directors of DesignWave Pty Ltd and their feature film ‘Thirst’ has screened in cinemas, on SBS Tv and is available on multiple streaming services around the world.
In 2013, Megan was selected for the NSW Mentoring Regional Screen Practitioners program and in 2016 Mark was selected for the ‘Regional Producer Elevator Program’, part of the Ones to Watch Initiative, supported by SPA - Screen Producers Australia, Screen NSW and Screenworks Inc.
He’s a familiar and long-standing name in the Coffs Harbour music scene. He loves sound quality. His workspace is a tangled skein of electricity. And he is the sound of the White Bluff Project - the only musician/composer in the diverse team of collaborators drawn together for this unique project. As an active song writer in the Coffs Harbour area, Martin Van Veluwen has penned more than 500 original songs and recorded 19 independent albums. And, as both a musician and engineer, has helped many local and interstate musicians fulfil their musical dreams. Martin has also been heavily involved with Coffs Harbour’s Conservatorium team, which he joined in 2005, and helped establish their new studio up before also writing their Recording and Sound Design Course.