Tina Havelock Stevens

I am presently working towards a solo show Now is A Beginning at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) on Wiradyuri Country.

Bathurst has inspired the exhibition yet it’s not an exhibition about Bathurst. My mum grew up there. My grandparents and uncle had a farm there, which I frequented until they all slid off this mortal coil with the last out the gate in 1996. I was one of those ten-year-old kids that knew how to drive cars and ride motorbikes, perhaps an inkling into my later life doing art projects like drumming underwater and making documentaries in curious places. There’s certainly been some risk involved.

The show embraces magical thinking, place(s), architectural space, where you begin, the unknown, new narratives in a place once familiar, improvisation, social engagement, and sensory engagement.

In regard to process, I let much sit in my mind then go into production holus-bolus . . . I think about how works might fit together, the conversations between them. It’s about gentle energies, frequencies, and a quiet belief that the right things will coalesce. I’m conscious of the atmospheric quality I can have in the gallery with an immersive experiential lens.

In 2024 I finished Sonic Luminescence, a commissioned sound and light work for Muru Giligu, the new pedestrian link at Metro Martin Place, Sydney. I like creating experiential spaces where people can have their own thoughts. I often say it goes back to playing in bands, when you see the power in audience responses, and I think that runs deep in my veins. I have a love for the gentle epic.

Moving from the pedestrian link of Muru Giligu back into the gallery, I’ve taken the prominently featured colours with me. Rich oranges and ultramarine blues. I actually haven’t been the same since I made and exhibited a blue flocked drumkit last year. Yves Klein was right. The kit showed itself to be a pleasing magnet. I’m also now enjoying the ghost of Roy de Maistre, who was my grandfather’s uncle, as I feel a curious kinship with the loaded emotive resonances of how he perceived sound through colour.

One new work for BRAG will be an orange flocked drumkit called Orange Alert. The work references the nearby city of Orange but also the occurrence of a locust plague in Bathurst that I experienced as a child and the bigger picture, of course. Drums are my conduits for loaded spaces, either through improvised compositions or as non-playable sculptural objects.

There are quite a few new videos for the show and one, Spectral Peace, 2022-25, I consider a posthumous collaboration with mum. It’s possibly one of my best. It’s about a minute long. After mum died, we sold the family home and when it was emptied, I did a self-imposed residency over two weeks catching the light moving through the house. I was conceived in that house and had nursed mum out of there.

Most days I was wandering through the place between spikes of grief and adrenaline, so a few of the other works in the series have got my shadow in them as I absent mindedly entered the room or set up a second camera in shot. When I looked at the footage I thought “dammit” because of my messiness, but then realised I’d literally become ghost-like in a home I had always known. The unedited documentation feels accurate with my inaccuracy.

For Now is A Beginning at BRAG, there will be several publications and a public program including a performance trail. On the last weekend of the show, I’ll be playing with a host of other performers (including my long-time collaborator Liberty). Works will comprise video / film, photography, light installations, object-based works, sculpture, and sound. And there will be a limited-edition vinyl release of some recently unearthed skewy four-track pop songs I wrote back in 2001.

I’ll be premiering High Fashun, 2025, a new performance video featuring members of Compareo, a disability performance group from Bathurst. Compareo means “be visible, be present.” The location is a wild, colonial mansion that always intrigued me on the way to my uncle’s farm. My granny said “it had ghosts.” Built in the 1870s, Abercrombie House was perfect for riffing off European mansion fashion shoots. Social engagement with a Fellini edge. We all had a ball.

Exhibition
Now is A Beginning
12 April – June 22 2025
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025.
Images courtesy of the artist