Watt Space Gallery

CURRENT EXHIBITION

Michael Cusack
FIELD NOTES: The Ruins of Ideas

8 May – 27 June 2026

Field Notes: The Ruins of Ideas assembles a suite of works that are not ascribed as finished pronouncements, referencing instead ‘notes’ – observations made in passing, marks made from thinking, and noticing the relationships between ground and pigment. Paint here behaves like soil or sediment, layered and compressed and colour feels gathered rather than chosen. These works emerge from a place where ideas are not produced on demand, but weathered and wrought into being by time, labour, and repeated attention.

Bringing together painting and found objects as parallel modes of inquiry, the works operate as provisional records – concepts, materials, and gestures unfold through accumulation and revision. In this ongoing encounter, gestures remain visible and rather than arriving at fixed meanings, the works hold open a space in which perception can unfold over time.

Field Notes proposes the exhibition itself as a working field: a place where ideas remain open, contingent, and responsive to their context.

_{IMAGE: Michael Cusack Swinburne, 2006, oil and graphite on canvas, 183 x 167 cm. Donated by Michael Cusack to the University of Newcastle through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gift Program.}

PREVIOUS EXHIBITION

The Story So Far – Helen Britton

Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft

An Australian Design Centre, ADC On Tour National Touring Exhibition

6 February – 24 April 2026

Helen Britton is a multidisciplinary Australian artist based in Munich, Germany. Her practice includes jewellery, sculpture, drawings, stencils and installations, and is informed by popular culture and folk art, threatened traditions, environmental destruction and human anxiety.

Her work is featured in 2026 at Watt Space Gallery in The Story So Far, a touring exhibition from The Australian Design Centre and part of the Living Treasures series.

The solo exhibition series honours eminent Australian craftspeople through celebrating their mastery of skill, their achievements and the unique place they occupy in the national design culture. Helen is the 10th Living Treasure: Master of Australian Craft, and will be the 5th woman honoured in this series.

The Story So Far

Between 2017 and 2019 Helen traveled three times to Australia to document the house of her great Aunt and Godmother Kath Carr on the Clarence river (Ngunitiji, Yagel Country). Kath taught Helen how to make collages with pressed Australian flowers that she had collected, or with metal fillings from the lathe in the shed, to paint on porcelain which was her greatest hobby, and to make jewellery. Her house was full of wonders, shells, gemstones, driftwood, dried seaweed and fish. When she died her house was locked and left completely intact. Helen's detailed photographic investigation was a journey back to the beginnings of her creative practice.

This project, titled The Story So Far, takes as its starting point this photographic essay creating a network of connections between that time and this. The work will also comment on the rich and complex world of country women, of a time of creative frugality that formed Helen's early experience of Australia, of lost possibility, and of a colonial past and present, still so deeply problematic. New work, painting, installation, jewellery, drawings and objects will feature in the exhibition alongside photographs of Kath's house.

A major monograph with the publishing house Arnoldsche and the awarded German Book designer Alexandra Rutischka accompanies the exhibition, and a  screening of a feature documentary made about Helen and her practice will also take place alongside the exhibition.

Watt Space Gallery is part of a multi-state national tour of Helen’s exhibition supported by a grant from the Federal Government’s Visions of Australia program that has supported the research and development for Australian Design Centre to work with Helen to present the exhibition.

_{IMAGE:  
Helen Britton Junkyard 3, 2025, silver, paint, velvet, wood, copper, and steel
Photography: Dirk Eisel. Image courtesy the artist and Australian Design Centre. Helen is represented by Gallery Funaki.}