Residency report: Helena Pastor



A winter Gunyah residency, such a welcome break from the cold of Armidale. Although a mixed offering with the weather, the first few days were incredibly warm (for me) – almost tropical, and a wonderful treat. For the first three nights of my residency, my partner Dave was with me. On the second day, we headed off in the kayaks to One Tree Island, over near Soldiers Point (which I call Santorini because it looks like the Greek island of Santorini in the distance). I really enjoyed being on the water in the kayak, the sun hot on my body. When Dave and I arrived at the island, I stripped off to my bikini and went back into the water – which prompted a fisherman in a little dinghy to ask: ‘Are you crazy or what?’ When I answered, ‘I’m from Armidale!’, he laughed knowingly.



As a writer with a busy life, I always say I want ‘time alone’ but I think the Gunyah is a treat to be shared. A place to mix up time alone with time to socialise in the late afternoon and evening – which is why I’m coming back for a week next February with my writing group. I’m sure they’ll love the Gunyah as much as I do. But even though I felt the absence of others, I enjoyed the uninterrupted time to work and read and think. Like many visitors to the Gunyah, I loved the window seat in the loungeroom, where I sat each morning with my coffee and journal, marvelling at the paradise out the window. Ditto for the back verandah. I also loved the jetty – that feeling of being on a bridge to nowhere. Whenever I needed a break from my work, I’d wander down the path to the jetty. The surface of the water always so varied from the tides or the wind; my favourite was when the water was dusky blue and smooth as glass.



I love how I now have an ongoing connection with North Arm Cove, and how the residents and their dogs (particularly the two Border Collies on the walk to Heros Beach) are so friendly. I wanted to make it to a Coffee Morning at the North Arm Community Hall, but that’s for next time. Thanks to all who make the Gunyah possible – it really is a home away from home.



Helena Pastor
Gunyah residency report
August 2022

Residency report: Wendy Tsai

" . . . As asked by the artists, it is the open question of how, wherever I happen to chance, I am dappled by my elsewheres as I go, and how I might dapple them back In my passing . . . You just venture out again, and continue on your way. In search of little nothings. That way, you encounter ‘small epiphanies’. That is what the artist calls being taken by surprise by an unsuspected connection. A little joy of happenstance . . . "

Brian Massumi, Making To Place In the Artist’s Words, Refracted*


I came with little knowledge of how my 10 days at Gunyah would proceed. Having spent the last 18 months on a large scale mural project, yet to be installed, I knew I needed to ‘re-frame’ and find a new more experimental way of winding away from that work. I also wanted to let Gunyah inform me, to offer up its small epiphanies.

Gunyah wooed me into a stillness, a gifted patience that disarmed pretence. Initially, I played with a couple of representational drawings, imagining myself into a daily ritual, but the place required something more connected to the rhythms and patterns, the sounds and life of organic things. 

Wendy Tsai, Gunyah residency photos

I had brought a range of materials with the hope I might make some large ink brushwork, which by the second day seemed entirely appropriate to a new physical and gestural abstraction. I was finding a kind of new language to respond to North Arm Cove and the surrounding bush, water and seascapes. I was reminded of the work of Australian artist G.W. Bot who intuitively maps the landscape through a personal language of glyphs, and also of Franz Kline, the American abstract expressionist, 1940-60. These research diversions were delightful indulgences. I also read Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1972), which paralleled my navigation of human habitation and the native beauty of North Arm Cove. 

Wendy Tsai, drawings in the Gunyah studio

Wanting to work with the blackness of my brushstrokes, I collaged shapes cut from National Geographic magazines, later drawing into the shapes and brushstrokes to mimic some of the patterns which I found in the sand and water. On reflection, these collaged shapes reminded me of the shells and shapes found on the shore.

Wendy Tsai, Water Collage details, Gunyah residency 


Wendy Tsai, Glyphs detail, Gunyah residency 

We welcomed some arts friends for the weekend and explored more of the local beaches and inlets together. While I really needed another few weeks to develop the initial ideas and artworks, I’ve come home with lots to work with and a multitude of photographs.

In my proposal, I mentioned wanting to slow down my observation to a frame by frame activity that resembles breathing. I think getting lost in the process of making became the breathing, the inhalation and exhalation of place.

I am very grateful for this wonderful opportunity and many thanks to Kath Fries and the board of Gunyah for making this special place available to artists.


Wendy Tsai
Gunyah residency report
July 2022


Wendy Tsai, Driftwood, Gunyah residency 


*Simryn Gill, Here art grows on trees, Australian Council for the Arts, for the 55th International Biennale de Venezia 2013








Upcoming artist-in-residence: Helena Pastor

Helena Pastor

Helena Pastor is a regional writer from Anaiwan Country, Armidale. Her writing has attracted two Australian Society of Authors’ Mentorships, along with residencies at Varuna Writers’ House, Bundanon and other awarded programs. She has completed two postgraduate degrees on Creative Nonfiction writing and her first book, Wild Boys: A Parent’s Story of Tough Love (UQP, 2015) is an intimate insight into reconnecting troubled teenagers with their families and communities. In 2020, she received a New England Writers’ Centre/Varuna Fellowship and Create NSW funding to develop her third book-length manuscript: ‘One Fork, One Knife, One Life’ – a memoir based around the wartime and migration experiences of her Dutch mother and their mother/daughter relationship. She is also a songwriter and enjoys collaborating with other artists. What you plan to do during your residency: I will be enjoying the natural beauty of The Gunyah and North Arm Cove, working on a second draft of ‘One Fork, One Knife, One Life’, writing about growing up in the Berry Bakery, and my family's long history with Seven Mile Beach National Park, NSW. 

Helena and her mother, Seven Mile Beach National Park, 1970



During my residency I will be enjoying the natural beauty of Gunyah and North Arm Cove, working on a second draft of ‘One Fork, One Knife, One Life’, writing about growing up in the Berry Bakery, and my family's long history with Seven Mile Beach National Park, NSW.

Berry Bakery, 1967


You can find out more about Helena and her work on her website: www.helenapastor.com



Upcoming artist-in-residence: Wendy Tsai



Using drawing as primary research process, Wendy Tsai re-forms the information gained through observation and intuition into personal narratives that interrogate meaning and given-ness. While attracted to and nourished by the natural environment surrounding her home on Dharug and Gundungurra Country, in the Blue Mountains, Wendy also recognises the devastating impact of climate change and human interference, allowing this disquiet to inform her work, through intimate reveries that are both tangible and ethereal. Relying on an embodied knowledge of place, Wendy has a ritual of walking to experience and adapt to the idiosyncrasies of the natural world. She also photographs, collects and manipulates digitally the images that hold specific memories of place. Her drawings are an attempt to ‘be in’ place through a peaceable communion grounded in the landscape. Wendy regularly at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Gallery. She also has work in collections in Tasmania and in the Kedumba Drawing Collection.

Wendy Tsai, Inside out #3, 2020, graphite on paper, 55 x 75cm


During my residency at Gunyah, I intend to rest from a hectic routine of family support, to walk, to sit, to reflect and process the stillness in the context of such beautiful natural surroundings. I would like to start the process of drawing and writing as a means of grounding myself in daily rituals and observations. I would also like to use video and film to experiment with the process of slowing the art-making into a frame-by-frame activity that resembles breathing.

Wendy Tsai, Inside out #2, 2020, graphite on paper, 55 x 75cm


You can see more of Wendy's work on her website wendytsai.com.au and instagram @wenrts


Wendy Tsai, McRaes #4, 2018, charcoal on paper, 76 x 89cm






Residency report: Blake Lawrence


It’s difficult to put words to the value and pleasure of my time spent at Gunyah on astounding Worimi country and waters. Once I slowed down I really felt the land open itself to my perceptions (and vice versa) and reveal so much beauty and rhythmic vitality, all around.



Multi-species anthropologist Deborah Bird-Rose speaks of these rhythms and vibrancies as shimmer (in a translation of Yolngu word bir’yun—a brilliance or shimmering). It was such a pleasure to behold the shimmer of the area in the Australasian Gannets soaring and diving along Jimmy’s beach, a single watchful Sacred Kingfisher in the mangroves of Pindimar, the stoic Spangled Drongos in Hawks Nest, the total orchestra of birdlife moving with the tides along the Tea Gardens foreshore and of course the dolphins (and squid!) from the solitude of the Gunyah jetty.



During my time at Gunyah (with shimmer in mind) I completed a costume for presentation at the Powerhouse Museum, and re-purposed a large textile for an upcoming show. I read deeper into Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter, and felt my sense of self, place and time collapse and expand. It was also so nice to have time and space to do really simple parts of my practice that are the first to disappear when things get busy—to sketch, to play, to dance. 




I will really hold onto the things I’ve learned and experienced here at Gunyah. Immense gratitude to the Gunyah team, and of course to this vibrant country—Worimi, Worimi, Worimi.


Blake Lawrence
Gunyah residency report
June 2022



Residency report: Claire Albrecht and Sarah Pearce


Despite a very rainy and windy first few days, we settled into Gunyah like it was home. We made friends with a trapped microbat, explored all the various nooks and crannies of the house, and learned the personality of the wood fire (eventually).



While we intended to write poems about the body's relationship with nature, we felt like we were somewhat closed off in our warm, dry house/cave, and it took us some time to come up with a collaborative approach to writing about our experience.



Finally, on Friday 13, on the last night of lashing rain and wind, we sat in front of the fire, drank wine, and wrote 'Australian gothic' poems inspired by the water, the isolation, and the infamous poets' holiday on Lake Geneva where Frankenstein was written. Reading them out to each other was spine-tinglingly delicious, and excitingly outside of our normal ouvres.



We took inspiration from the (very difficult) puzzle that we worked on during our down time. Turning those gothic poems about and mixing them up with a poem by Lord Byron, we came up with some truly wild collaborative work that we will continue to pursue after finishing the residency.


Claire Albrecht and Sarah Pearce
Gunyah residency report
May 2022

Blake Lawrence: upcoming artist-in-residence

Blake Lawrence, performance at Hellfire Club, photo Chantel Bann

Blake Lawrence is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in expanded realms of photography and performance. They make work informed by the material histories, icons and ecologies of drag performance and queer culture in Australia, and where they coalesce with photographic practice in documentation and archiving. They are devoted to responsibility and genealogy outside of biology, inhabiting queer history and design in the present, absence and residue, care, sex and pleasure in a practice-based research.

Borne from Yaegl Land and Waters in Northern NSW, Lawrence currently lives and works on Gadigal Land in Sydney. They are currently undertaking a Doctorate in Philosophy (Design) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). They completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Sydney College of The Arts, and Honours In Design (Photography) at UTS. They have exhibited locally and interstate, at Granville Centre Art Gallery, Firstdraft, Airspace Projects, C3 Contemporary, Blindside, Seventh Gallery, The Walls, Verge and more. They have presented live work at the Sydney Biennale, Brisbane’s Spring Hill Reservoirs, the Art Gallery of NSW and Newcastle’s This Is Not Art. As Canoe they have performed drag at Club Kooky, Tropical Fruits, Falls Festival, Groovin The Moo, Sydney Mardi Gras and more.

Blake Lawrence, performance at Naughty Noodle Fun House, photo Lisa Haymes 

During my residency at Gunyah, I plan to commence material explorations for my PhD research project Flaming Galahs (working title), continuing my critical investigation into relationships between design in Australian drag communities (fashion, jewellery, object, performance, etc) and local ecology and geography. I also intend to continue some writing projects, and immerse myself in bushwalking, birdwatching and scuba diving in the local area.

Blake Lawrence, A Cathartic Action, 2016

You can find out more about Blake's practice on their website blakealanlawrence.com and instagram @blakelawrence

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