The Broken Hill update
There's something about this place, it gets under your skin. And the art is FANTASTIC. Plus some musical treats.
Krystle Evans darn | Slag Heap Projects, Broken Hill
A soft fabric face greets me at the entrance to Krystle Evans’ exhibition darn, large round nose and silver eyes reminiscent of a koala. This figure, though, has pink hair and long slender arms with long, thin fingers. Her body is long and black, and she sits on a chintzy fabric background with her knees bent, legs apart. At once both human and spirit-like, she is a character from Aboriginal creation stories, re-imagined. Half soft sculpture, half wall hanging, Your guts, a bridge to other worlds (2025) moves with a slight breeze, lending it an even more lively appearance as I enter what appears to be a highly feminine space.
darn is the first exhibition in Slag Heap Projects’ 2025 program. The gallery was founded in 2024 by Hester Lyon, Asma d. Mather and Verity Nunan, in the aftermath of censorship and controversy in Broken Hill, previously covered in this newsletter. Slag Heap uses art as a tool to inquire into the complex cultural frictions that underpin, or more accurately, undermine, Broken Hill’s identity. The slag heap, or pile of mining refuse, overlooks the town like one giant and desiccated sleeping beast, while each morning and evening blasting below rumbles buildings reminding locals and blow-ins alike exactly why this sprawling inland city exists.
Krystle Evans is a Barkandji artist with familial ties to Far Western New South Wales. She knows this country having spent time in nearby Wilcannia as a child. For the last five years she has lived in Broken Hill where her practice focuses on soft sculpture from reclaimed materials.
Through the act of stitching, Evans imbues forgotten fabrics, threads and other cast-offs with a new life. Her works are explicitly feminine, their construction and the process of sourcing materials, lovingly restoring them a pride of place. Yet there is a sharp, almost sinister energy expressed in the cast of characters she has created which contrasts with the softness of the materials. It’s nanna-chic with a hard edge.
Sis #1 and Sis #2 exemplify a maternal force you do not want to mess with. A wool blanket, known for both warmth and prickliness, is the background on which Sis #1 bares her teeth, her floral fabric hair and delicate doily skirt neatly arranged as she leers at viewers from above head height. On the facing wall Sis #2, also with arms outstretched beyond the edges of a wool blanket, bares her teeth, her eyes composed of mismatching button and X embroidery.
Markers of femininity are repeated and then subsumed into new, otherworldly narratives. The most obvious are the bare breasts and dark skin of anthropological depictions of Aboriginal women and rock art creator beings. Your enduring curiosity (2025) is a hand quilted figure, hemmed with pink bailing twine, her breasts tipped with pink buttons, her vagina formed by a piece of found pink fabric. Lop-sided eyes and an orange triangular nose watch viewers taking in her raised hands and strands of delicately stitched hair. There is a playful, unfocused quality to this being, as though we have stumbled upon a ceremony for which we are not initiated.
Humor appears to be an important part of Evans’ approach to what are contentious themes and topics. Undomesticated female, sex and femininity (2025) is what you get when the unruly spirit being defies the angry grandma spirits (Sis #1 and Sis #2), she takes her leopard print dilly bag and curls her yellow, binder-twine locks, and heads to town. Evans imbues this character with a whimsy which balances some of the more serious matriarchs in the show. Here orange quandong seeds are nipples, adorning patterned fabric breasts. A little red embroidered smile says she is off to have some fun
.Similarly humorous is You and your big dick energy and me without any pockets (2025), which is one of a few works to feature multiple figures. Here an overtly male being, with embroidered pink penis, and a female figure carrying a dilly bag of feathers, face each other, white heads and black bodies curving and swaying in the breeze. Viewing the show before reading the artwork titles meant one round of laughs became two.
The exhibition is centered around a wrought iron bed, child size with a simple black frame. From the frame, which would usually support a delicate lace canopy, hover three plush spirits, at once Wandjina-like and doll-like. A fourth spirit rests on the pillow, their presence at the head of the bed creating a connection between sleep and the spirit realm. Where do we go while we sleep? Do these beings watch over us as we journey in dreamland? Where is the child whose bed is watched over by these spirits? Rather than a child’s room, perhaps I have walked into the spirits’ bedroom, and it is the child who is imaginary. Either way, maternal forces—both benevolent and possessing a latent violence—surround this bed, each artwork literally watching over it.
The four bed spirits have large eyes and long arms and fingers. They are three-dimensional while the other works are on fabric panels suspended from the ceiling. One is a mermaid, Holding my breath (2025), creating a connection with three two-dimensional mermaids facing the bed nearby. Evans has sewn together a spooky realm of girly matriarchs, colluding and colliding on their various contemporary missions of creation. Their stories, while narrated in stitch, are beguiling and from another time. Their ceremonies are soft but chaotic and like Evans’ stitches they are also purposeful, considered.
Evans is a master of found fabric. Pattern and line have been used skillfully here, nothing is overused or risks becoming decorative, it is all in service of creating these spirit-beings and their unwieldy, almost scathing, energy. The exhibition title darn suggests mending, making do and maternal care. It is also a swear word, encapsulating the dual qualities of many of the works and the importance of humor to the artist.
I am intrigued by what Evans will do next. There is a sense among these dense characters, of a quirky, very likely vengeful, force waiting to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting and highly deserving public.
Krystle Evans darn was on display at Slag Heap Projects, Broken Hill, until 17 May 2025.
Soaking up the scene
In addition to visual art, Broken Hill turned on the music while I visited. Coinciding with my visit was the opening of the Outback Sufi Conference, featuring Leeroy Johnson and Friends and Farhan Shah & SufiOz in a cross cultural concert dedicated to place and spirituality. Both acts I had seen before and was quite excited to see again, paired together within the context of the conference. Though I couldn’t attend the 3-day event of Sufi art, music, poetry, and spirituality reports were of a very special coming together of people from all over Australia and internationally.
I made a committment to see more live music this year, and so far the rewards have been great. Weddings contain special live music potential, especially if the matrimonial folk know a few musicians. Here are some highlights from Broken Hill and further afeild from 2025 so far.
Leeroy Johnson and Friends play the most beautiful music about this part of the country, especially Mutawintji, where Johnson is a custodian and guide. Here they are playing with Sydney Youth Orchestra.
On the night Leeroy Johnson’s friends included a paired-back gathering of local musicians but it was just as powerful as hearing them at the Palace Hotel or Sturt Park in the rain, as I had previously. Johnson released an album Leeroy Johnson and the Waterbag Band which is one of my favourites.
When she isn’t singing with Leeory Johnson, or managing her Bush Witch production company, or presenting Broken Hill’s Saturday Breakfast program for ABC Radio, Aimee Volkofsky is working on her own powerful songs. Volkofsky recently released a single from her forthcoming EP A Bird Can’t Help But Fly Home.
'This Town is Broken' is a kind of love song to Volkofsky’s home, Broken Hill, “a mining town full of lost souls looking for redemption, rest, or room to live life how they choose.” It’s beautiful and one to watch. Where can I order a copy?
Farhan Shah knows how to get the crowd clapping and then dancing, with mesmirising music. I first heard SufiOz at the 2024 Mildura Writers Festival, and knowing what we were in for was very keen to see how a Broken Hill audience would respond. (A not insiginificant number got into it!)
Skip to 4:45 for the beat drop.
Lastly, I need to mention another musical ensemble that I saw live a few weeks ago. The Seducephones are also an ecclectic mix, and like SufiOz, feature musicians from Adelaide and Melbourne. They were fantastic at the Cullulleraine Music Festival, here’s a clip of ‘Darkness’ from their recent albun Shake the Earth.
There’s nothing like live music (and a bit of a boogie) to rejuvenate the art writing muscles.
Have you seen some spectacular live acts this year? A live music/art cross over? I’m here for it (and so is the comment section)!
Nikita, thanks for writing about this great art and music.