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Pure gold: New UOW art exhibition celebrates 50 years of creativity on campus

It's a little-known fact that the University of Wollongong (UOW) has an art collection including more than 5,000 works.

The Illawarra Flame caught up with the two women entrusted with pulling together a remarkably diverse selection, which was launched this week as part of UOW's 50th anniversary celebrations in 2025.

Appropriately titled 50 Artists: 50 Years, the exhibition showcases works by 50 locally, nationally and internationally recognised artists, including distinguished alumni and staff. It celebrates UOW's creative legacy over the past five decades.

So how do you whittle down 5,000 works – which currently hang on the walls and occupy the spaces right across the campus – into a 'top 50' to be celebrated in UOW's golden anniversary year?

"With great difficulty?" said UOW's art collection manager and exhibition co-curator, Phillippa Webb. "We trawled through the entire database. We wanted to include works that tell stories and works that aren't always able to be seen. 

"It tells stories about connections with the campus and people with a passion for Wollongong."

Phillippa singled out a striking 1972 Coralie Barr portrait of former Wollongong. journalist and arts advocate Ethyl Hayton. Flamboyant and just a bit eccentric, Ethyl was one of the university's founding donors and helped raise 50,000 pounds to aid the establishment of the Wollongong University College.

While the exhibition is celebrating UOW's 50th birthday, the art collection is in its 40th year. "In the first decade, there wasn't a collection," Phillippa said.

But the institution more than made up for lost time in the decades that followed.

The 50 Artists: 50 Years exhibition also features a number of striking works by First Nations artists, the best known is an untitled 1990 painting by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, one of Australia's most significant contemporary artists.

"This was one of our earliest purchases in the 1990s when the quality of Indigenous art was only just being recognised and the artist was up and coming," Phillippa said. To be blunt, it was an absolute bargain, and over the years it has taken pride of place in the vice chancellor's office.

Artist and exhibition co-curator Dr Kim Williams is proud that her 1993 sculpture Trojan Horse/One Day has been included in the exhibition. This pair of works won the Howard Worner Sculpture Prize in 1993 when Kim was a Creative Arts undergraduate sculpture student at UOW. "Winning the $2000 prize was fantastic for an impoverished student – the money allowed me to go to the dentists, buy a tent, and visit my brother in Queensland."

Kim enjoyed the gruelling six-month process, selecting the 50 works for the public exhibition, which opened on Monday, 4 August.

"It wasn't about just selecting the best works, it was about choosing pieces that were important foundational works for the collection," Kim said. "It shows the genesis of this collection from the early days to works of national and international significance."

Works that caught my eye included local artist Ashley Frost's Headies Looking North (2024) in oil, his interpretation of a local headland near his home in Thirroul.

Ivan Englund was well-known in local art circles in the 1950s and 1960s. His Port Kembla Landscape (1962) was the earliest registered work in the University of Wollongong Art Collection and it was donated by Chemistry students in 1962 to the Wollongong College. An article featuring this work appeared in the July 1963 edition of the UOW student newspaper Tertangala, which discussed the controversy of abstract painting at that time.

The work of renowned Australian artist Tracey Moffatt is celebrated with her powerful photographic image, Job Hunt (1967) from the series Scarred for Life. Tracey's works have been exhibited around the world, exploring issues of race, gender, sexuality and identity. Her Scarred for Life series was put together while Tracey was in residence at Wollongong and the locations are all in the Illawarra.

50 Artists: 50 Years opened this week and continues at the UOW Art Gallery (Building 29) until 10 December. Entry is free.