Small and Great: A Creative Minds exhibition

Featuring a selection of intricate, light-hearted and clever works, Small and Great provides insight into the creativity and talent of Horsham’s creative young people.

Students aged from 10 – 17 were invited to participate in Horsham Regional Art Gallery’s after-school program Creative Minds over the course of Term 3, 2024. These young artists were scaffolded to explore playful yet deceptively complex ideas of ‘bigness’ and ‘smallness’ – and thus essentially –   our relationship to objects and the world around us.

 With the assistance of artist Milly Henley and educator Larissa Riddell, Horsham Regional Art Gallery’s Public Art and Public Programs Officer – the student’s final bodies of work are diverse and idiosyncratic, allowing us as the audience insight into the lives and thoughts of young people.  One student’s work, a paradoxically enormous human ear, deliberately runs contrary to one’s expectation of the human form and is also perhaps a comment on the adolescent’s right to be heard. Painstakingly rendered maquettes of intimate rooms such as bedrooms and libraries draw us into the inner worlds and thoughts of young people, creating personal spaces where protection, comfort and knowledge are championed. An enormous silver bolt or a dragon adoption centre also showcase the endearing and diverse imaginative worlds of these artists.

Using a broad range of approaches and expressive forms, including mouldable clay, found assemblage, designed objects, sculpture, textiles and fibre, maquettes and diorama – the resulting exhibition Small and Great will draw you in to look closer at intricate miniature scenes or abruptly challenge you with larger-than-life forms.