_{Cover Image: Gregory Pryor and Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama, Ngalak Wonga (detail), 2025. Image Supplied.}

In Western Australia, distance can shape who gets to encounter contemporary art. A new three-year touring program is designed to narrow that gap, taking four exhibitions from Boorloo/Perth and the Kimberley into regional galleries across the state.

Announced by ART ON THE MOVE, the 2027-2029 program brings together artists and curators Sherry Quiambao, Zali Morgan, Jacky Cheng and Gregory Pryor. Their projects are formally and culturally distinct, yet each asks how identity is carried: through objects, language, ceremony, memory, land and relationships.

The exhibitions will travel through a state whose scale makes cultural access an enduring challenge. Early interest has come from venues in Bunbury, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Geraldton, Beverley, Esperance, Katanning and Manjimup, with the full itinerary to be confirmed.

For multidisciplinary artist Sherry Quiambao, material culture is inseparable from family history. Veiled in a Golden Hue draws on her mother’s migration from the Philippines to Australia, examining the aspirations and pressures that can gather around stability, success and belonging.

Across photography, video, sculpture and installation, portraits and staged still lifes sit beside symbolic domestic objects. The familiar becomes charged with inheritance, care and desire, revealing how everyday things can hold the emotional weight of migration.

Curated by Zali Morgan, It’s Always Been Always centres Blak women artists and their connections to Country, Community and Culture. Works by Amanda Bell, Harriette Bryant, Wendy Hubert, Yabini Kickett, Jazz Money, Kaylene Whiskey and the Iwantja Young Women’s Film Project move between tenderness and strength, joy and resistance.

The exhibition presents cultural continuity not as something static, but as generational work: nurturing stories, sustaining kinship and asserting sovereignty through contemporary practice.

Kimberley-based artist Jacky Cheng turns to Chinese divination practices in The Rite of Divination. Working with paper, fibre, textile and wood, Cheng explores how ritual and symbolic systems help people seek guidance and make meaning when certainty is elusive.

Born in Malaysia and of Chinese heritage, Cheng approaches ritual as a living form of cultural transmission – one that persists, adapts and travels across generations and places.

Gregory Pryor’s Huddle gathers 15 new paintings alongside collaborative works made with Wardandi and Koreng Noongar artist, writer and academic Dr Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama. The exhibition looks at vulnerability and collective strength through relationships with Country.

Painting, installation and mixed media open onto questions of environmental fragility, colonial histories and knowledge sharing. Storytelling emerges not simply as recollection, but as an active decolonising practice.

ART ON THE MOVE director Ricky Arnold says touring creates encounters between artists, artworks and audiences that might not otherwise occur. For regional communities, those encounters can extend beyond a gallery visit, opening space for conversation, learning and creative exchange.

That ambition sits within ART ON THE MOVE’s almost 40-year effort to make geography less of a barrier to cultural participation. The organisation’s wider touring slate also includes PICA’s boorda yeyi commission Under Waters and the Regional Arts Triennial exhibition Radical Futures.

For now, the 2027-2029 program reads as an invitation to think across distance. As these works move between communities, they will carry more than objects and images: they will carry questions about who we are, what we inherit and how we gather.

ART ON THE MOVE