Featured Artist

This year’s guest artist for the RME Downlands Art Exhibition is Christine Porter, from Lismore, in northern NSW, and a perennial Toowoomba favourite.  She is well known for her artwork about the shearing sheds of western Queensland, as well as her more personal etchings.  2024 is a milestone year for Christine as she celebrates 40 years since her first shearing shed artwork.  In 1984, she made a small painting of the shearing shed at “Charlotte Plains”, near Cunnamulla, as a favour for her boss, who had grown up there.  Last year, Christine travelled to Cunnamulla to create a body of work of the “Charlotte Plains” shed as it is now. Downlands College is excited to present a selection from this series that describes the shed’s exterior and interior, the landscape, and more, all the while celebrating its history and this very special moment in Christine’s career. 

 

Revisiting that watershed-woolshed moment in Christine’s career, she can hardly credit the long-term impact of that simple request: “Would you make a painting of the shearing shed where I grew up, please?”  The family still proudly exhibited that work at the station museum at “Charlotte Plains”, now a popular tourist destination in South West Queensland.  Since that initial commission, she has made artwork about more than a hundred different shearing sheds from Far North Queensland to Tasmania, her travels taking her across Australia’s heartland.  She paints the architecturally significant and the workaday, the grand vistas and the small details, and much of what is in between.  Christine takes, as her starting point, the shed in front of her, ending with a portrait of an Australian icon in an industry that, even with land use and markets in flux, continues to maintain its integrity and importance to Australia and the world.