Art is as much a collaborative as a singular pursuit.

Colour City Creatives believe that their new exhibition is a chance to showcase their works created during the recent lockdowns and quarantine restrictions.

The pandemic however has not been easy for the group which was designed to allow local painters, sculptures, potters and weavers to work together and feed off each other’s creativity.

“This place was started for artists to work together – to be collaborative and supportive – a standing course for like-minded people,” Jolanta Nejman from the group explained.

Based out of the old rail-worker accommodation block in the south Orange “fork” for the Indian Pacific, the studio has provided a supportive environment for Colour City artists over more than a decade.

“Colour City Creatives is a unique art cooperative, self-run, not for profit, focused on art – the community we come from believes in supporting our members in their creative journey.

“We have been running since 2009 and lately are exhibiting in PoP uP venues due to COVID-19 space restrictions and ongoing renovations to our home, the Barracks building in the East Fork Railway Precinct,” she added.

Members include painters, potters, weavers, sculptors, digital artists, video artists, glass artists, book-makers, poets and photographers.

“What people used to be able to do is come here and work together; you’d be able to call someone else in and say, ‘This isn’t working, what do you think?’ and they’d say, ‘Oh try this,’ or, ‘That’s fine’,” Jolanta explained.

“It was not just technical ideas, it’s sometimes sharing work to see their response in their faces, sometimes, that was enough... COVID put a stop to that,” she added.

Jolanta said that their seemingly incongruous base in the Railway Precinct provides much inspiration for many of their members’ best work.

“It’s an old industrial area in a brick building near the Lachlan Valley Railway sheds. It’s the old barracks building that railway workers used to sleep in.

“But we see it as a creative ‘Bermuda Triangle’ between the three railway lines that border it,” she laughed.

The group now has exciting plans to redevelop their base in south Orange into a facility that everyone can enjoy and experience.

“We’re working on a DA (development application) now; our dream is not just artists working together, but the community together,” she said.

“It’s one of the oldest and biggest buildings of its type in Orange, and we’d like to expand its use,” she added.

The group’s new exhibition (see details below) represents their break-out from the last two, restricted years of working and exhibiting, with Jolanta believing in the vital importance of real-life exhibitions over online virtual shows.

“Seeing a painting on a LED screen is not the same as seeing it live. There’s light through it on-screen and you need the light to bounce off it,” she said.

“It’s like seeing the Mona Lisa on a television rather than seeing it in person.”

Their exhibition – originally conceived to complement one of our great annual food and wine events – shows how our world has changed since February 2020.

“It was designed to go with ‘Wine Week’ this year, but that was non-existent, it’s now being held over three months, it’s not a festival, just a series of events.”

She said that with major dislocations to much of our lives – from school to work to industry to our social lives – the creative fields have been mostly forgotten.

“Artists have been largely left out of the loop; we’re individuals not an industry, almost insignificant.”

She said while artists have suffered as much as other creative fields during the lockdowns, their work is a release from the humdrum and every day.

“The beauty of being an artist, is that you can create your own reality,” Jolanta concluded.