By now we hope you have wandered past ACC on your daily walk and noticed the new art on our fence in the Alphington Neighbourhood Gallery.

If not, you should! The artist we are featuring this month is local Steph Briggs. The works on the fence include illustrations from a book that documented lots of familiar scenes from 2020, called ‘The year we stayed at home’. She also has some delicate sketches of houses from the neighbourhood and beyond (some done on commission if you are interested in documenting your own lovely house).

You can find out more about Steph here.

This community arts initiative is supported by Yarra City Council (thanks!).

Steph’s fur baby Leo is one of the stars of the exhibition.

Steph, Leo and Angus popped past on their lockdown walk to check it out.

Last year we made a little rhyming series of animated pictures (GIFS) with some funding from the Community Bank on Queens Parade … and then put them together with a voice over … and turned them into a poster that loads of locals collected from ACC on their daily neighbourhood walk.

It seems timely to pull them out again.

Here are the GIFS.

Here is the poster (we trust it is still gracing many a fridge or toilet door around the neighbourhood).

And here is the animation with voice overs if you’d like to watch it (it is pretty cute!).

Local artist Nicole Van Dijk’s show “Saviour” at the Gleeson Centre, Darebin Parklands was due to open this weekend, but has been postponed until the end of lockdown.

She has created a series of work focusing on the Parklands and the role it played during the 2020 lockdown.

“For me, and many others, natural, public space was our saviour during lockdown.”

The show includes original artworks, with prints and cards for sale. A percentage of the proceeds will be donated to the Darebin Parklands Association. Check it out - it looks amazing, and so familiar to us all!

After COVID, and a year of not running the ever popular Alphington Open Studios weekend in the last week of November, the artists involved are keen to get going again this year (scheduled for 28-28 November for anyone who likes to diarise such things), but are also rethinking the event somewhat and contemplating new possibilities… and as such they are seeking new artists to join in.

So, if you are:

• a local practising artist (2D or 3D artist or photographer) with a studio in Alphington and would like to have your address on the map,

• a practising artist who lives nearby in surrounding suburbs who would be interested to joining in, or

• a local emerging artist keen to join in a group exhibition over the weekend,

please email us here. And someone from ACC or an artist already participating in the Alphington Open Studios weekend will be in touch. Be brave. How exciting!

Fred Colla was one of the artists exhibiting at ACC as part of the Alphington Open Studios weekend in 2019