Kaye Shumack: Drawing Sydney
Kaye Shumack: Drawing Sydney presents a selection of drawings created over the past five years that explore motifs and traces from the urban landscapes of Sydney’s public spaces and streetscapes, revealing the beauty of the city’s lesser known, ordinary locales as well as key landmarks.
These observations, combined with memory of place, elicit the sense of the artist creating a dialogue between time and place, melding the present and the past. As Sydney continues to be re-shaped by large building and infrastructure projects, urban spaces are increasingly contested.
Shumack’s works are inhabited by the energy or spirit of each location, providing clues to the city’s layered history and the ways in which it has been shaped and loved by its inhabitants. Together, this impressive body of work reminds us not to take our city, or its history, for granted. Kaye Shumack is a much-admired member of the NAS community who very sadly passed away recently.
Melinda Hunt, one of Kaye’s fellow Drawing students in the NAS Master of Fine Art program, paid tribute to her:
“We all admired not just Kaye’s remarkable drawings but also her considered, insightful and affirming contributions to conversations about our work and theoretical concerns. Kaye loved being at NAS, her relationships with fellow students and supervisors and her light-filled studio where she could focus on making work. We’re thankful for the opportunity to know Kaye and pleased that thanks to her generosity, she will be remembered through the Kaye Shumack Sunflower Drawing Prize, an annual award of $3000 for an MFA Drawing graduate whose work contributes to broadening awareness of social issues.”
EXHIBITION DATES: Saturday 6 – Saturday 27 November 2021
EXHIBITION LOCATION: The Drawing Gallery
OPENING HOURS: Monday–Saturday, 11am–5pm
CURATORS: Katrina Cashman and Joe Frost
Introducing the National Art School Short Courses Program from July–December 2025
Whether you’re a beginner, rediscovering a past passion, refining your skills, or considering our Fine Arts degree, the short courses offer a stimulating and rewarding experience for all levels.
Our 2025 program begins in July with Winter School, followed by Term Three, Spring Weekend Workshops in September, and Term Four in October.
Learn more and enrol at the link in bio.
Apr 10
Making Sound is a performance event featuring four artists who make devices that make sound, including Gary Warner, Pia van Gelder, Ben Denham and Sean O’Connell, presented following Facture: Drawing Symposium 2025, Saturday 12 April 5-6pm.
Gary Warner creates an improvised soundfield with his ‘aleatoric ensemble’ autonomous sound machines, a collection of modified turntables that spin ad-hoc bric-a-brac assemblages.
Pia van Gelder (pictured) amplifies an electronic circuit as it is built in real-time. Under the moniker of “PvG sans PCB,” in these performances, van Gelder works on a breadboard with electronic components and additional found objects to demonstrate the electronic variabilities produced in the material world.
Ben Denham and Sean O’Connell perform together with handmade synthesizer systems that sense and sonify barometric pressure and the flow of electrons through matter.
Purchase your tickets to the symposium at the link in bio.
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Pia van Gelder, `sans PCB`, 2021, performance, Collings Creative, image courtesy and © the artist
Apr 6
Passionate about collections and the arts? Join us as a Digitisation Volunteer!
The National Art School Archive and Collection team is looking for enthusiastic Digitisation Volunteers to help bring our art collection to life! Your work will play a key role in making art and history more accessible—by photographing and recording our collections, enhancing our museum database, and digitising our extensive archive of photographs. Through your efforts, every stored object and artwork in our collection will have a high-quality, searchable digital record for generations to come.
Apply at the link in bio.
Apr 2
Opening night: Gesture and Trace
Join us on Saturday 12 April for the opening night of Gesture and Trace, a collaborative exhibition with the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts (LAFA), Shenyang, China. Featuring 16 students and recent alumni from the National Art School (NAS) and LAFA’s Textiles and Chinese Ink Departments, this exhibition explores cross-cultural perspectives on drawing and material practices.
This exhibition is presented by the National Centre for Drawing, in conjunction with Facture: Drawing Symposium 2025.
Purchase your tickets to the symposium at the link in bio.
Apr 1
Bring a friend to Winter School and save!
We’re offering a 15% discount on the purchase of a second Winter School course—as part of our exclusive ‘bring a friend’ special.
How it works:
1. Sign up for any Winter School course
2. Invite a friend to join you on the learning journey
3. Get 15% off when you purchase a second course for yourself or your friend
Learn more at the link in bio.
Mar 31
Introducing Sean O`Connell and Pia van Gelder, speakers at Facture: Drawing Symposium 2025
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Moderated by Ben Denham, Sean will explore traditional and extended practices that map connections and energetic exchange within abstracted landscapes, while Pia will discuss drawing of electronic circuits and their curious divinatory elements in 20th century radionics and their own work with electrodermal activity and audio synthesis.
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Sean O`Connell is an artist exploring the internal world of matter and the movement of electrical energy and force. He uses alternative photographic techniques, electronic circuitry, noise, energetic structures and experimental processes to visualise and sonify these spaces of interest. His work is concerned with the realms of both matter and electricity, exploring the ways they each transform, modulate, and inform one another`s nature through their interaction.
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Pia van Gelder is an electronic artist, researcher and historian at the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University. Their research investigates historical and contemporary conceptions of energy and how these shape our relationships with technologies, bodies and environments. Their scholarship has concentrated on the influence of esotericism on electronic instruments of the 20th century and their studio practice produces instruments for performance and installation contexts. Their current project *The Energies Artists Say* with co-editor Douglas Kahn, presents a methodology for understanding the polyvalence of energies in practices across the arts.
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Facture: Drawing Symposium 2025
Saturday 12 April 2025
Facture – The manner in which something is made
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Learn more about the speakers and symposium at the link in bio.
Mar 28
