Kinship, identity, landscapes and popular culture on show this July.
This July the Northern Rivers Community Gallery (NRCG) presents four exhibitions exploring kinship and connection to Nyangbal Country, investigations of identity, love letters to place and reinterpretations of images drawn from popular culture. All are welcome to attend the official exhibition launch on Thursday 25 June from 5.30pm in the gallery.
As an arts and cultural initiative of Ballina Shire Council, NRCG fosters a diverse range of contemporary art from across the Northern Rivers region and beyond. This suite of exhibitions showcases the high calibre of artists making work regionally, and NRCG is proud to support the creative development of regional artists.
Origin Myths | Swerve
Origin Myths offers a quiet but searching meditation on where we come from, and what that really means. Through vibrant, imaginative paintings, the artist explores adoption as a legitimate and rich origin narrative, gently dismantling the assumption that biological roots are the natural foundation of selfhood. Informed by new materialist thinking, the work understands identity not as something fixed at birth, but as fluid and continually unfolding, shaped by connection, environment, and lived experience.
Image: Swerve, Kisses, 2026
Gradually and then suddenly | Rebecca Lavery
This exhibition presents a body of paintings developed through an ongoing, practice-led investigation into the condition of images within contemporary society. Drawing on sources from popular culture, news media, digital platforms, and personal archives, Lavery selects images shaped by circulation, context, and time. Rebecca Lavery is the recipient of the 2025 SCU Graduate Award.
Image: Rebecca Lavery, Skaters Fall, 2026
Love letters | Amelia Reid
The paintings in Love letters are odes of unconditional love, responsive expressions of place, shaped through encounters while walking on Moorung-Moobah Bundjalung country. The works interrogate landscape painting as a mode historically connected with colonisation and often presenting inhabited landscapes as empty. This exhibition reimagines 'landscape' as never empty, but alive and teeming, an animated, agentic organism that is dynamic, multiple, and conscious.
Image: Ameilia Reid, VIP, 2026
Nanang Wabang | Sonya Breckenridge & Maurita Moran
Nanang Wabang, big sister and little sister, is an exhibition exploring connections to Nyangbal Country and Kin through the creative mentorship between Aunty Sonya Breckenridge and her niece, Maurita Moran.
