Words as activism: workshop with Penny Evans

Taking Richard Bell's Embassy as a source of inspiration, local Gamilaroi artist Penny Evans is facilitating a placard making workshop exploring the power of words.
Penny Evans recently won the 2024 Koori Mail Indigenous Art Award, for her powerful work 'Elephant'. Created in the aftermath of the Voice referendum in 2023 she began making this major body of text-based wall pieces as a response to the deafening NO from non-indigenous Australians, and as a way to process her feelings of rage. Using paint and signs we will create our own placards formed from conversations with Penny and the group, around themes that strike passion in us. At the end of the workshop we will share our placards with the public by placing them in and around Embassy in the Lismore Quadrangle.
Bell’s installation Embassy, inspired by the first Aboriginal Tent Embassy pitched on the grounds of Canberra’s Parliament House in 1972, continues this legacy as a place of solidarity and resistance - a space where people ask questions, share ideas, and create plans for a better future.

Host or Publisher Lismore Regional Gallery