The Barrel Room

Artist: Mike Emmett
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The Barrel Room

The Barrel Room at Sticks winery, converted into an art gallery.

I might be biased, but this is one of the coolest exhibitions I’ve had the great fortune to be part of. After a week of setting it up, it’s ready!

Included in the exhibition is work from 53 artists – painters, potters, photographers, printmakers, sculptors, and jewellers. The work is all good, but there are a couple of astonishing pieces no-one should miss. Jenny Reddin’s “Embers” is one of these. Anyone who has been close to a wildfire will know this work at first sight. It’s extraordinarily powerful.

The exhibition itself is the brainchild of Nicola Stairmand, who was given the brief “turn an industrial wine storage warehouse into a gallery for an exhibition”. Tough. In the end, with the assistance of Keith the forklift driver, we installed gallery hanging wires and hooks, and simply hung art on the barrels. They’re lit with $10 Ikea bedside lamps and compact fluoro spot globes. (Important, as there are 53 of them, and we can’t go popping fuses – the fluoro’s are warm, and only draw 7watts.)

The longest part for us was hanging the lights. There is one power point in the room, albeit a big one, so we had to make up our own power distribution to get power all over the place for lighting.

Sticks Winery
179 Glenview Road
Yarra Glen
10am til 4pm

Don’t miss it! Its only open as part of the Open Studios program until Sept 20.

The Barrel Room belongs to the following groups:

Melbourne & Victoria and Vineyards & Wineries