When curator and artist Dev Lengjel first arrived in the Byron region in the mid eighties, he wasn’t, he’s the first to admit, an arts expert. “I could tell a Picasso from a Pollock,” he says, laughing, “and I was an art appreciator, but that’s as far as it went.”

We’re sitting under a tree on a warm summer’s day talking about Lengjel’s interesting route to his latest job as manager of the Goldfields Kalgoorlie arts centre, which comes complete with its own 700-seat theatre.

His induction into the art world was not exactly conventional. As part of the Sanyassin movement (followers of the guru https://www.acheterviagrafr24.com/acheter-viagra-sans-ordonnance/ Osho), Lengjel, like many other devotees, spent large amounts of time at the ashram in Poona, India, and it was there that his creative spirit unleashed itself.

“The ashram had a big creative arts department,” he says. “I started working backstage and that led me into doing variety shows. I would think up themes, and create shows around certain subject matter such as rickshaws and dreams – in the end I’d directed seven of them, and they included anything up to 15 individual performances.”

His favourite show came about in a deep meditation. “I was actually at another ashram, and it was extremely hot there, and while I was meditating I was thinking to myself that it was so hot all I wanted to was to push an iceberg into a swimming pool,” he says. “I went back to the head of the creative arts department, and she wanted to know why I wanted to do this particular thing, so I went away and gave it some thought, and realised that the ice represented the ego and the water represented the ‘self’, and the ice melting into the water was a symbol of what we’re all looking for – to dissolve the ego into the liquid pool of the self.”

As well as performance art, Lengjel, who had always been a keen dancer, choreographed dances, worked with installation artists, and met arts people from all over the world.

Lengjel’s background wasn’t an obvious one for a budding arts person. His father was a fitter and turner, and his mother worked in sales in haberdashery. “I was born in Hamburg,” he says, “and we lived there until I was sixteen when we moved to Brisbane in 1974. I have a brother and a half-sister, and my brother came with us, but after a few years the family returned to Germany. My father had been unwell and couldn’t work, and my brother really never settled, but I’d discovered the delights of being a young man unfetered by conventions and I really didn’t want to go.”

Lengjel was in New Zealand at the tme, partying and working hard when he got a birthday card from his mother which simply said Happy Birthday. “I turned it over and there was a message from her telling me that they were going back to Germany and would love to see me, so I headed back to Brisbane and set about drinking all the savings I’d made working in New Zealand. I said to them that if I had the money I’d love to go with them, without really thinking that Dad would offer me the money – but he did, and so I went with them. The only problem was it was a one-way ticket, so I stayed there two months until I’d saved the fare back here, and came back on my own.”

Lengjel’s travels set him up early for his peripatetic lifestyle. As his interest in art began to unfold into a career for him as a curator and artist, and he concurrently undertook a posgraduate degree in museum studies and cultural heritage through Deakin University, his increasingly varied jobs included being invited by founding curator Priya Woolston to clean signs which eventually led to co-curating the Sculpture Show at the Northern Rivers Thursday Plantation, initiating with Priya Woolston and curating the sculpture show at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival, as well as co-ordinating the installation of two Artscapes and co-curating seven Swell Sculpture Festivals.

Dev Lengjel, centre with artist Ken Jonson, far left at the Sculpture Show.

“I’d had a great run in the Northern Rivers,” says Lengjel, “but then life changed around in a big way when I decided it was time for a change and I went to work as an arts activity in a refugee centre in Weipa, and then I managed the Wik and Kugu arts centre  on the Cape at Aurukun, which was an amazing experience.” That stint led to a job in Thailand working as a co-director of an arts residency in Chiang Mai, which was followed by some months in Berlin.

“After my time in Berlin I came back to Australia, and I was very keen to work again in the Indigenous art industry, so I started to apply for jobs, and I was delighted when the Kalgoorlie job came up,” he says. “I believe that it will be a great opportunity to put all the lessons I’ve learned about community engagement into practice. My vision is to create an arts centre that is accessible to every part of the community – particularly those groups that perhaps haven’t been engaged – school kids, the Indigenous population, the elderly.”

Dev Lengjel working with artists at the Wik and Kugu arts centre  on the Cape at Aurukun.

One thing that Lengjel has never been afraid to is to create confronting work. “I enjoy creating, or being involved with works that make a strong statement, or to take audiences on a journey of strong emotions,” he says, “but in the end I like to leave audiences with laughter. My experience has been if you finish the show with laughter the depth of the show will remain.”

He’s also someone who learned at an early age to trust his own artistic judgement. “My very first outing as an artist was at school when we all had to draw a house, and I put a window right next to the corner of my house. My teacher chastised me severely and told me I couldn’t do that. I was really deflated and humiliated – even as a child I wanted a house with a window on the corner. Then one day we went on a school excursion and we were walking through a suburb full of very wealthy houses, and we walked past a house which exactly had the window I’d drawn. I showed the teacher the house, and I remember even to this day this feeling of satisfaction that I was right – such a thing could exist.”

Dev Lengjel takes up his position of Manager of the Goldfields Kalgoorlie Arts Centre on January 19.

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Sitting placidly on its haunches, a horse with cobalt blue flowers on its flanks is quietly surveying the scene in the artist’s studio. Another horse is emerging from the hands of artist Sue Fraser as she sculpts the clay into a uniquely spirited creature.

Fraser  lives and works on a 14 acre property on the Alstonville Plateau in the Northern Rivers. As she works quickly and spontaneously, each horse develops its own character.  “Each time I make one, the horse’s character just seems to come out by itself,” she says. “Sometimes it reminds me of one of my old horses or one of the thoroughbreds I have trained and ridden. When I’m decorating or glazing, I’m thinking of the work that horses have been put to – like the Chinese Tang dynasty Tribute horses.”

Sue Fraser on her Alstonville property with her horse William. Photo: Jacklyn Wagner.

Fraser grew up as the daughter of an entrepreneurial agriculturalist and horses and farm animals have been present in her life since childhood. Fraser’s father Pat Masters was the first person to import Landrace pigs into Australia and was one of the first farmers to grow lucerne on the North Coast as a pasture crop for hay and grazing. He also introduced Santa Gertrudis cattle to the sub-tropical climate of northern New South Wales – much to the consternation of the locals at the time.  The family moving house often as Fraser’s father chased his next agricultural dream, and horses became Fraser’s stability and passion as she gained skills in camp-drafting, show jumping and dressage.

Well into her fifties, Fraser was competing and judging in dressage until a freak fall from her horse left her with a shattered ankle. “I lost a whole year,” she says.  “I spent time in rehab followed by months of hobbling carefully around our place until the surgeon finally persuaded me to have my ankle fused.” It was during Fraser’s time out from riding that she realised  she would have to set herself some new goals and coincidentally fell into working with clay. “I’m the sort of person that has to be busy and use my hands,” Fraser says. “I love being out in the garden and digging. In fact, I’ve even dug up clay from our property to use in some of my ceramic work.” Within six years, she had completed both a Diploma at Lismore TAFE and a Fine Arts degree at Southern Cross University.

Artist Sue Fraser’s embossing stamps.  Photo: Louise Fulton

In 2005, Sue went to Jingdezhen in China as an artist-in-residence at Sanbao Ceramic Institute. The home of porcelain, the countryside around the city has been mined for centuries for its pure white clay and her time there piqued her interest in traditional Chinese ceramic forms and the association between women and horses in both Australian and Chinese society. She learned, for instance, that in the past, girls were bred for the Chinese concubine market and were called ‘thin horses’.   Back in the studio, she uses a wide variety of surface textures including Song dynasty style woodblock impressions and embossed lino cuts with Australian and Chinese patterning and some of her horses have tiny feet like the ‘lotus feet’ of Chinese concubines. She applies several glazes using broad gestural brush work. Balancing the more heavily glazed areas, Fraser incorporates cobalt blue clouds, water designs, flowers and textile patterns under clear glaze.

Her sculptures have won a number of awards including the Winton Outback Art Prize, a Thursday Plantation Sculpture Prize and Byron Bay Classic Acquisition prize. “It’s been a surprise to me winning prizes,” Fraser says. “I’m just doing what I love doing and people seem to connect with what I make.”

The artist’s hat near her handmade wood kiln. Photo: Louise Fulton

Outside the studio, a gas kiln sits amongst the trees which have grown massively over the past forty years since Sue and her husband Graeme bought the property. “There is also a bourry-box woodfire kiln up near the horse stables that we built a couple of years ago. I fire up it up each winter when the weather is cooler. We get enough fallen timber here for me not to need to buy any. The chimney puts out a big dragon’s tongue of fire when it gets to 1300 degrees – it’s pretty exciting when you’ve been stoking it for over 24 hours and it finally gets to the right temperature.”

Every day has its own rhythm. Early mornings are spent collecting manure from the stable and paddock which is spread onto the veggie patch and under the fruit trees. Sue then lets her Smoky Leghorn chooks out to scratch amongst the undergrowth. Her horse William, a quiet and unfussed Warmblood, gets a brushing followed by a workout on the arena or round yard. Fruit and vegetables are then collected to cook up later – often  into a delicious Bangladeshi curry, a nod to time spent working overseas during her twenties.

Sue Fraser at work in her home studio.  Photo: Louise Fulton

Later in the day Fraser  goes down to the studio to make her horse sculptures for exhibitions or commissions. For Fraser, working with clay involves the same sort of technical skills, creativity and respect for tradition she uses when training a horse. “It’s really given me a purpose since the accident,” she say. Each sculpture reflects her  bond with all things equestrian. “My art expresses my passion for horses. I can’t ever imagine not having a horse, even if I’m in my nineties. I’ll just have to get my granddaughter to ride him for me!”

Photos of Ceramics by Sue Fraser.  Other photos by Louise Fulton.

Sue Fraser’s most recent exhibition was at Haydon Hall Gallery at Murrurundi in the Upper Hunter during the ‘King of the Ranges’ Stockmans Challenge. For more information visit earthlyvisions or haydonhall

You can read more by Louise Fulton on her blog: loufulton

Or catch her instagram feed on @louise.fulton.studio

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