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The Exquisite Familiar Regional

Presented by

Access2Arts in partnership with AGSA & MOD. Museum

A paint-splattered pink, yellow and purple background with a yellow circle on top featuring the illustration of a horse head, human torso and octopus tentacles.

Project details

Where:

Art Gallery of South Australia & MOD Museum

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Description

The Exquisite Familiar

Welcome to our exciting collaborative art project, The Exquisite Familiar.

In this interactive, immersive, multi-art form project, a group of disabled artists of varying ages, artistic genres, and skills, bring their ‘Exquisite Familiar’ visions to life and develop their digital capabilities with the support of artistic and technical staff. These artists use Exquisite Corpse-style art to explore and illustrate the barriers associated with disability through the lens of familiars.

Familiars can be found throughout history in folklore and are uncanny creatures who help and protect their owners. In The Exquisite Familiar project, these creatures take on the meaningful and communicative role of metaphors for access and inclusion for people living with a disability.

Our most recent iteration of the project is a regional version on Yorke Peninsula, with the artwork showing as part of Grounded festival, presented by Yorketown Progress Association and Access2Arts.

This will be followed by workshops for Yorke Peninsula artists in February 2026.

Yorke Peninsula artists can register here

You can also register your interest in our community workshops here

In December of 2022, we held an exhibition in The Studio at AGSA, which launched as a part of the International Day of People with Disabilities and drew many people in for the opening night. This digital exhibition showcased the amazing illustrations created in the first workshop of ‘The Exquisite Familiar’ project on continually changing screens, and visitors were able to be inspired by our artists’ works and then create their very own ‘Exquisite Familiar’ creature within the space.

At MOD., two technology-based workshops have been held in 2023, where the artists learned new ways to interact with their artworks on digital platforms, adding a new creative method to their artistic repertoire. The artists’ works have also (excitingly) been further digitised, with added techno tunes that were created in DJ TR!P’s MOD. workshop. The results of our ‘Exquisite’ artists playing around and experimenting with these accessible technological possibilities is now on display at MOD. in the next ‘Exquisite Familiar’ exhibition! It runs from Tuesday 4th of April until Saturday 13th of May in 2023 – make sure to check it out!

A schoolgirl in a darkly lit room facing a large, portrait screen containing colourful illustrations.