Blue Fringe Arts
Blue Fringe Testimonials
I always look forward to entering the Blue Fringe Arts exhibition each year. As a sufferer of a mental Illness I find art is very rewarding. Being able to exhibit/show my work with others is also a great opportunity and raise awareness of mental illness, in a "non threatening" way to the public. Also as a professional fine artist I understand not everyone can hold their own art exhibition, so the Blue Fringe Arts Festival gives us another avenue to showcase our work.
from Donna Huntriss
I entered Blue Fringe Arts for the first time in 2006. Blue Fringe is for artists recovering from and living with mental illness. It was a way for me to reconnect with the outside world after experiencing schizophrenia and severe depression.
At first, I only took photos at my window, then walking outside, images on the ground. Finally I could look up at the sky, and nature surrounding me.
That sense of separation, isolation and deep emptiness had changed to allow me to engage in the world again. Art can be healing, creatively fulfilling and engaging. It can also be the opposite of those things. Without Blue Fringe Arts my journey to a state of relative well-being would not have been possible. I learned that creativity is essential to me and despite the fear of exposure on exhibiting, a powerful tool for change and growth.
Amy Cutler
To be shown in a gallery is hard enough for any artist to achieve, to be shown in a gallery when it is the last thing you think you can do, or even do, is even more difficult.
Blue Fringe gives everyone a chance to have the dignity and mutual joy of sharing their very personal visions with friends, family and their community, the freedom and the right to share their lives with us. For me, it has been a liberating experience, a step away from the stigma of mental illness and into acceptance.
Jan Brown who worked at the Schizophrenia Fellowship in the 1980's began mentoring me and encouraging me to enter art exhibitions and writing competitions. Some time later while I worked for Penrith Living Skills Centre I had the opportunity of encouraging others to exhibit their own artworks, poems and short stories in the Adrienne Brown Awards which came into existence in the early 1990's.
We also established the Voices magazine to publish people's work locally in the Blue Mountains and on the plains.
Soon after retiring from Living Skills in 2000 I became involved as a voluntary committee member of the Blue Fringe Arts Group where I enjoyed the friendly camaraderie and was able to mentor other artists and writers who had mental health issues. These people to my delight often came alive through their participation and through the encouragement and support they received.
Like me they found real hope and satisfaction by sharing their artwork and writings. With the development of the Varuna writing workshops in 2006 came a new kind of sharing of works, some lively conversation, and empowerment for many of the participants in very exciting ways. Blue Fringe has helped me gain personal strength, enabling me to take the wild initiative of engaging in two shared Art Exhibitions locally and to publish and to circulate several of my written works. Twenty years ago the prospect of developing my talents to this extent would have seemed impossible.
Except for that unfortunate personal tragedy of one talented young woman and the continual support of mentors and committee volunteers, hundreds of our struggling mental health participants would never had been validated, empowered or have been brave enough to exhibit or publish their fine works.
Col Jennings
Blue Fringe A poem
Mounting the collection
The feast is spread
The table cloth whipped of dust
The initials are gathered up
Perhaps fed little fingers of satisfaction
Even sated for the littlest of long times waiting
There are many fossilized states of mind
A year is a long time to the affected
But half a glass is better than
A fierce thirst I suppose
Stark strikes of colour
Hues warming the spot
Finesse salvaged
Plucked from the turbulent mill
Treading between the petals and the thorns
From out of pills shelved
Come in you lot
Come in from out of the cold
Winter blue gives way to October
When spring finally leaps the yard with confidence
If only a mustard seeds worth
And lends its warmth
To the hamlet that slept ten degrees deeper
Those weeks before.
Then there are those some that magic 5%
Whose tune pipes from early onto very late indeed?
Some years there is not even a season’s whimper
Not a peep at all
All voice is locked up
In surveys and reform
And one may think
What is the climate like on that other side of the coin?
Those whose powers wave a drum tap
In the wind of invisible flags
Are gathering up momentum
We hung the banners
At both ends of the town
From the blind corner
On the rough of high way
Where the driver’s sight might be caught
At that right moment, entering the bend
To the pedestrian stream
We claimed the fringe
For all to applaud
And made culture born again
Over ten years in the planning
And what seems like ten minutes in the lime light
Culture a little closer to its home coming
That primitive heart
A string plucked between the noble and the savage
And an odd tune is given sound.
Three rooms
Yes there is enough
Just enough room at the inn
Each and every work
That the child schemes up
Through well advanced years
Down to the smallest stone
That the fringe conceives
To present a myriad of worlds
Those mental huts, logs, ponds, pads
For those straying eyes in between
Maybe to watch for a shadows turn.
Garth Julian Tohmas
October Twenty Hundred And Eight (20-08)