Coffs Coast

Sunday 22 February 2026
WE ARE ALL CREATIVE: THINKING, MAKING AND SHARING THROUGH ART. PLUS LOCAL ARTIST Q&A
Presented by Gill Nicol
Time: 2:30pm
Venue: St John Paul College Theatre, 421 Hogbin Drive, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450

Gill will draw upon her 30 years of experience of working with art and creativity with all kinds of people, from early learning through to people with dementia. Her talk covers:
• thinking creatively and thinking for creativity
• tapping into your own creativity
• how the process of creating art engages both the body and the mind and supports our wellbeing and much more!

Gill Nicol’s career spans over 30 years, with a focus on contemporary art and audiences. She has held various roles, including Director of Audience Engagement at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) from 2015 to 2023. During her tenure, she was instrumental in embedding creative learning, access and inclusion, research and evaluation across the organization. After leaving the MCA, she became a consultant, offering training, mentoring, and consulting in contemporary art, visitor experience, interpretation, access and inclusion, audience engagement and development, and creativity and wellbeing. Her approach is characterized by care, kindness, empathy, and respect, and she currently coaches two artists based in the UK.

Monday 23 March 2026
THE BRILLIANCE OF BRUNEL – THE MAN WHO BUILT THE MODERN WORLD
Presented by Ian Swankie
Time: 6pm
Venue: St John Paul College Theatre, 421 Hogbin Drive, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450

British people and visitors to the UK still find themselves amongst the infrastructure created by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the 19th century. He changed the face of the British landscape with his ground breaking projects including railways, bridges, tunnels, ships, and grand buildings such as the magnificent Paddington Station. He merged art with engineering and science and was a pioneer and a revolutionary. And he was brilliant. We’ll look at the man, his background, his work, and his legacy.

A Londoner with a contagious enthusiasm for art and architecture, Ian is an official guide at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Guildhall Art Gallery and St Paul’s Cathedral. He is also a freelance London tour guide. Since 2012 he has led a popular weekly independent art lecture group in his home town of Richmond in West London. Ian is an Accredited Lecturer for The Arts Society and a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Art Scholars, one of the City of London’s famous livery companies.

Monday 27 April 2026
DOGS IN ART
Presented by Steven Miller
Time: 6pm
Venue: St John Paul College Theatre, 421 Hogbin Drive, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450

Steven Miller has published widely on art and his popular ‘Dogs in Australian Art’ is now into its third expanded edition. From colonial works through to contemporary installations, in this lecture he will show how dogs have truly been ‘the best friend’ to artists, not only as subjects, but also as companions and champions. As the artist Norman Lindsay confided to the poet Hugh MacRae, ‘one can lose most human beings with less disturbance than a dog’.

Steven Miller has worked in commercial and public galleries since the late 1980s and headed up the National Art Archive at the Art Gallery of NSW from 2009 to 2023.He has published widely on art.  He co-authored a book on Australia’s first blockbuster exhibition of modern European masters, that won the NSW Premier’s History Award. Among his other publications is Awakening: Four lives in art –exploring the creation of national identity through art published in 2015.

SPECIAL EVENT

Sunday 24 May 2026
HOW TO LOOK SLOWLY: IMPRESSIONISM AND POST-IMPRESSIONISM
Presented by Joanne Rhymer
Time: 10:30am
Venue: Yarrila Art Museum (YAM)

Can we ever really ‘know’ a painting fully? What might we gain if we look again – but slowly – at a familiar picture? Looking with a curious eye we discover how familiar paintings by Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh that we know well from reproductions were both extraordinary and pioneering. They made extraordinary contributions to the development of modern art, each through their own distinctive and experimental approaches to picture making.

Joanne Rhymer’s expertise in the history of Modern Art and the Politics of Representation has led to roles at the National Gallery, Tate Gallery, Wallace collection and other prestigious institutions in London and Cambridge. Specialising in 19th-century and early 20th-century French art, her interests include the visual skills involved in sustained looking at paintings.

Monday 25 May 2026
NEW VISIONS: PARIS AND IMPRESSIONISM
Presented by Joanne Rhymer
Time: 6pm
Venue: St John Paul College Theatre, 421 Hogbin Drive, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450

During Napoleon III’s reign (1852–1870), Paris underwent an extraordinary transformation under Baron Haussmann’s direction. Several medieval neighbourhoods were cleared making way for wide boulevards, elegant apartment blocks, parks, and monumental public buildings that reshaped the city’s landscape and social fabric. This dynamic environment inspired the Impressionists, who were keen to capture the fleeting sensations of the modern capital. Discover how the radical techniques of artists like Manet, Renoir, and Caillebotte, along with a special focus on the women artists Morisot, Valadon and Cassatt, reflect the attractions and complexities of modern Parisian society.

Joanne Rhymer’s expertise in the history of Modern Art and the Politics of Representation has led to roles at the National Gallery, Tate Gallery, Wallace collection and other prestigious institutions in London and Cambridge. Specialising in 19th-century and early 20th-century French art, her interests include the visual skills involved in sustained looking at paintings.

Monday 22 June 2026
REIGNING MEN: FASHION IN MENSWEAR 1715 TO PRESENT
Presented by Professor Peter McNeil
Time: 6pm
Venue: St John Paul College Theatre, 421 Hogbin Drive, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450

Peter McNeil will walk you through the largest exhibition of men’s fashion yet assembled, curated by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2015 (then travelling to St Louis Museum of Art 2016; Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney 2018). Men didn’t ‘fade to grey’ over 300 years, but frequently burst forth in vibrant colour, striking cuts and even body modification. Chart the rise of wool versus silk for the rich. See the dramatic appearance of French Revolutionary dress. Discov-er military corsets and calf-plumpers for men. Learn how the new fashion for cigarette smoking led to new clothes. See male pleasure in dressing, across time and place. Learn how much of the collec-tion was created lovingly by a Swiss collector over 30 years. Expect to be surprised!

Dr Peter McNeil FAHA, is a Distinguished Professor of Design History, and a leading international scholar in the fields of design history, fashion studies and material culture. He was Foundation Professor of Fashion Studies in Sweden, and Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor, Helsinki. He has published widely, including Pretty Gentlemen on the 18th century’s Macaroni Men, and has worked with communities and museums around the world.

Monday 27 July 2026
IS THIS THE REAL LIFE? How Writers and Artists have Challenged our Perceptions of Reality
Presented by Mary Sharp
Time: 6pm
Venue: St John Paul College Theatre, 421 Hogbin Drive, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450

When Lucy goes through the wardrobe into Narnia, when Harry Potter opens his letter and when Nemo takes the red pill, they all discover that the worlds they thought they knew are only part of the truth. From Plato onwards, writers and artists have been inspired to push beyond the everyday and to create other worlds that inspire our imaginations. This lecture explores what these stories tell us about how we view our lives and what it is that we most desire.

Mary is an experienced broadcaster and teacher with particular expertise in literature and drama. She worked for many years for BBC Radio 4 producing some of its most popular programmes, including Start the Week and Woman’s Hour, before joining the senior management team as a Commissioning Editor. Mary has subsequently worked as a teacher and Director of Sixth Form at a leading girls’ grammar school. She now runs her own company ‘Opening Up Literature’ which offers literature courses for adults including studies of Shakespeare and Creative Writing. Her most popular course is ‘Telling Tales’, which explores how writers and artists have reinvented classical stories. She is a professional bridge teacher and lecturer.

Monday 31 August 2026
A PHOTOGRAPHIC ODYSSEY: SHACKLETON’S ENDURANCE EXPEDITION CAPTURED ON CAMERA
Presented by Mark Cottle
Time: 6pm
Venue: St John Paul College Theatre, 421 Hogbin Drive, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450

On Ernest Shackleton’s third Antarctic expedition in 1914, his ship, the Endurance, was trapped, eventually crushed in pack ice. After five months on the ice, the ship’s company rowed to remote Elephant Island. Shackleton then sailed with five companions over 800 miles to South Georgia, re-turning over three months later to rescue his stranded crew. Australian Frank Hurley was the expedition’s official photographer. His images capture with great artistry the amazing landscapes within which this remarkable human drama unfolded. This lecture illustrates Hurley’s great talent behind the lens, in the first flush of human contact when the Antarctic remained essentially ‘terra incognita’.

Born on the Isles of Scilly and educated at Truro School, Cornwall, and Birmingham University, Mark Cottle has enjoyed a career in education and training at home and abroad. He has lectured at Exeter College on Medieval and Tudor history, St Mark’s & St John’s University College, Plymouth, and at Bath University on Anglo Saxon and medieval England. Currently Mark runs two small companies providing training and study breaks. 

Monday 28 September 2026
ART OF THE JAPANESE GARDEN: FROM TRADITION TO MODERNITY
Presented by Marie Conte-Helm
Time: 6pm
Venue: St John Paul College Theatre, 421 Hogbin Drive, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450

This lecture introduces some of Japan’s most famous gardens and provides a context for under-standing the principles of Japanese garden design as it has evolved through the ages. The Japa-nese love of nature and the changing seasons has manifested itself in paintings and in the intimate and grand-scale gardens surrounding aristocratic palaces and Buddhist temples, as well as Zen-inspired dry landscape gardens with strikingly symbolic content. The lecture also draws upon wider examples to illustrate the distinctive qualities that the Japanese have brought to garden design, an approach successfully adapted to modern domestic settings and to Japanese gardens abroad.

Professor Conte-Helm is a long-established Lecturer of The Arts Society with a BA in History of Art and an MA in Asian Art. She has most recently served as Executive Director of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, as Visiting Professor at Northumbria University, and as a Member of the Board of Governors of the University for the Creative Arts. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She was Director General of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation from 1999-2011 and has held senior academic positions at various UK universities.

Monday 2 November 2026
LEE MILLER’S WAR
Presented by Antony Penrose
Time: 6pm
Venue: St John Paul College Theatre, 421 Hogbin Drive, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450

Lee Miller is thought to have been the only woman combat photographer with the allied infantry in Europe during the Second World War. This lecture presents her war photojournalism from shortly after D-Day in Normandy, through the Siege of St Malo, the liberation of Paris, fighting across Germany, the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau to the flames leaping from Hitler’s Berghof near Berchtesgaden that signalled the end of the war, and then the post war traumas of Austria and Hungary. The story is told through extensive use of Lee Miller’s own words, set to her photographs.

For the past 45 years, Antony has conserved and disseminated the work of his parents, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose. With his daughter Ami, he is the co-director of The Lee Miller Archives and The Penrose Collection at Farley Farm House in Sussex and has seen his parents’ work featured in major exhibitions at the V&A, National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial war Museum London, Manchester Art Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Whitworth. He has lectured at museums and universities around the world and made documentaries for television. Publications include The Lives of Lee Miller, Lee Miller’s War (editor), The Angel and the Fiend, The Home of the Surrealists, Roland Penrose the Friendly Surrealist and The Boy Who Bit Picasso. The movie titled ‘LEE’ starring Kate Winslet is based on his book The Lives of Lee Miller and for ten years he was heavily involved with its production and release.

SPECIAL EVENT

Sunday 22 November 2026
CREATURES AND CONCERTOS
Presented by Pieter de Vries
Time: 11am
Venue: To be confirmed

Pieter shares his techniques for capturing extraordinary images for David Attenborough and Na-tional Geographic. His talk also features an exquisite performance of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons – “Spring”. In this segment of his documentary, “Four”, he captures the essence of Japan’s Cherry Blos-som love story, offering a visually stunning musical experience.

Pieter de Vries ACS is a renowned documentary cinematographer whose incredible journey has taken him from the heights of the Space Shuttle to the depths of the North Atlantic. He has captured extraordinary moments around the world. Regarded as one of the leading documentary cinematographers, Pieter’s films have garnered numerous accolades, including Emmys and BAFTAs.

Note: Part of festival event in conjunction with Coffs Harbour Music Society and City of Coffs Harbour.