Fourteen local and national artists!

Twelve premiere Festival works!

Exhibited across a range of extraordinary sites, including an abandoned car salesroom, a former police lock-up and an original miner’s cottage, Periscope explores: ruin, kitsch, abundance, alchemy, peepshows, history, projection and place.

Curated by Deborah Ratliff, the exhibition offers immersive engagement with some of the most creative individuals from the central goldfields region. Sugar from one, salt from another, mounds of spice, the artist’s mother, distilled concoctions, water, platinum, sound recordings, double adaptors, Chinese Hong Bao, plants, stoneware, discarded homewares, a reconfigured 1972 Holden Kingswood…

Compelling, complex and sometimes strange, the third Castlemaine Festival Visual Arts Biennial presents artists’ individual and collective responses to the Festival theme, Elemental.

Hunt & Lobb Building

Daniel Armstrong
Julie Collins and Derek John
Rhett D’Costa
Pia Johnson
Ben Laycock
Jessica Ledwich
Tanya Schultz
Dean Smith
Leslie Thornton
Frank Veldze
Jason Waterhouse

Tutes Cottage
Tara Gilbee

Old Police Lock-up
Clayton Tremlett

Periscope will include a Floor Talk Series and the following free participatory events:

Floor Talk Series
Enjoy a series of 30-minute artists’ talks on the Sunday of the opening weekend:
11am — Jessica Ledwich
12pm — Daniel Armstrong
1pm – Bindi Cole
2pm — Pia Johnson
3pm — Rhett D’Costa
Venue: Hunt & Lobb Building
Date: Sunday 17 March
Cost: Free

Eat! My Son
On the Saturday of the opening weekend, Rhett D’Costa and his octogenarian mum will prepare and serve a staple Anglo-Indian meal, extending the sensory and interactive experience of Rhett’s installation titled, Trade.
Venue: Hunt & Lobb Building
Date: Saturday 16 March
Time: 12.30pm to 1.30pm

The Elaboratory and the elixir of life: An apothecary’s wonderment.
Join artist Tara Gilbee at Tutes Cottage to examine the esoteric aspects of alchemy in her metaphorical laboratory.
Venue: Tutes Cottage, Greenhill Avenue, Castlemaine
Date: Saturday 16 March
Time: 2:30pm to 3:30pm

Hong Bao
Festival goers will actively contribute to Pia Johnson’s installation, Hong Bao. By adding Chinese red packets, audiences will be engaged in the traditional Chinese custom of gift giving and ancestor worship.
Venue: Hunt & Lobb Building
During hours of opening

Including EH5452 and Ab Blaster 40,000, these contemporary and innovative videos provide a compelling glimpse into the politics, personality, playfulness and heart being voiced by Bindi today.

Be prepared to have your heart and mind enlarged and your worldview transformed For Such a Time as This.

Twig explores and develops the geometry of the pentagon in two and three-dimensional structures, where mathematical perfection and the imperatives of tessellation balance against natural variation and bush-litter chaos. We begin with some basic materials and some rules of combination, but where do we end up? Twig alludes to both the biological and cellular, and to the social and societal, to the connections that exist between our molecules and cells, and to those we have with each other, in networks of family and friends.

Do you twig?

Twig has been created as an integrated artwork within the Festival’s Literature Program and will be fully experienced during these special events (see Collective DNA: We Are Made of Stories, Poetry and Song for details).

Elements of the artwork can be viewed at other times during the Festival, prior to performances, during the Castlemaine Market Building opening hours 10am to 5pm.

‘…the everyday transformed into something magical and enigmatic…’
Gina Fairley, Asian Art News Nov/Dec 2008

‘This is not art… I’ve got a 7-year old daughter and she could have done this for free and done a better job…’
Oscar Yildiz, Mayor of Moreland City Council, June 2011

Speakers will provide an insider’s view, reporting on their experiences, their current and upcoming projects, and commenting on the challenges they face, At This Time.

SESSION ONE: Keynote Speakers: 10am – 12:30pm

Professor Charles Green: Reader in Contemporary International and Australian Art, Faculty of Arts and Communication, Melbourne University: Bienniales of the South

Lisa Dempster: Director, Melbourne Writers Festival: At this time

Tony Elwood: Director of the National Gallery of Victoria

SESSION TWO: Panel One, Visual Arts Practice: 1:30pm – 3pm

Deborah Ratliff: Panel Chair: Curator of Periscope, Castlemaine State Festival Visual Arts Biennial

Rhett D’Costa: Cross-disciplinary artist, educator, currently undertaking his PhD at RMIT

Bindi Cole: Award winning, cross-disciplinary Indigenous artist

Andrew Goodman: Cross-disciplinary artist encompassing sculpture, sound, light and video

Tim Craker: Painter, sculpture and installation artist now living in Georgetown, Malaysia

SESSION THREE: Panel Two, Performance Arts Practice: 3:15pm – 4:45pm

David Lloyd: Panel Chair: Manager, The Capital, Bendigo’s Performing Arts Centre

Terrence Jaensch: Poet, curator of Castlemaine State Festival Literature Program

Jacques Sodell: Bendigo based sound artist

Sara Dandois: Director and performer of Belgian Company Time Circus

Jason De Santis: Director, Wulamanyuwi and the Seven Pamanui

Time Circus is a collective of artists who use recycled materials to build ingenious, unique, kinetic installations that are integrated with theatre and music performance. In Raildomino, Time Circus will engage in a hugely inspiring collaboration with Vossloh Cogifer Australia (steel railway ‘switch gear’ specialists), students from the Castlemaine Secondary College. Creative collaborations began months before the arrival of Time Circus in Australia, via social networking technology.

Raildomino has been an enormously exciting opportunity for local young people to work creatively with local industry knowledge leaders and artists of the highest international calibre. Drawing on the town’s famous history in steel forging and railway part production, Raildomino will result in a public sculptural installation to be built and exhibited on the Vossloh Cogifer site in Barker Street, Castlemaine. The work will be fabricated during the weeks leading up to the Festival, with some of the making process still underway during the Festival, allowing for interaction and engagement between audience and artists.

“Amazement our job, liberation our goal”
Time Circus

Bite is an exhibition of new work by higher Degree and Honours  students from the Bendigo and Mildura Campuses.

These five selected artists have responded to the Festival theme exploring public space, memory, text, excess, living materials, the animal human nexus and  notions of  uncertainty.

Geoffrey Brown
Michelle Day
Philipp Pahin
Catherine Shields
Candy Stevens

Download the full list of Open Studios and Exhibitions here:

Open Studios and Exhibitions Full 5.1 Mb PDF

Open Studios and Exhibitions Small Booklet 1.6 Mb PDF