09/10/2026
NVAC Stringer Gallery is delighted to see our special Featured Artist Exhibition by the children of Eungai Preschool with their exhibition "Meeting Materials" on our Gallery walls.
At the opening morning tea NVAC members were so pleased to see so many of the Eungai Preschool children, their families and all of their wonderful staff enjoying the artworks on display. Favourite comments overheard by the members included how wonderful it was for the children's art to be shown at a real gallery and that the children have continued to express themselves through art, at home, outside of the school environment.
The Meeting Materials Exhibition runs until 28 November at the NVAC Stringer Gallery, in the Community Arts Centre, next to the Nambucca Library in Ridge Street. Wed - Fri 10am to 3pm; Sat 9:30 to 12 noon. Entry is free.
"Meeting Materials"
"At Eungai Preschool, art is not about teaching children what to make. We create the conditions in which children’s ideas, imagination and theories can meet materials.
Clay, paint, charcoal, colour, paper and found materials are not simply tools for producing something beautiful. They invite questions. They resist, change, combine, transform and surprise. It is always the material that asks the question. Through these encounters, children investigate ideas, test possibilities, solve
problems and make meaning. Their drawings, sculptures, colour studies and experiments are traces of that thinking — expressions of relationships, emotions, observations and developing understandings of the world.
The works in Meeting Materials are therefore not polished end-products or adult; directed replicas of a “right” way to make art. They are authentic parts of an ongoing process: moments in a sustained dialogue between children, ideas and materials.
Listening to children means attending not only to what they say, but also to what they communicate visually, physically and materially. Their art is a language.
By bringing this work into a public gallery, we invite our community to look differently at children’s creative practice and to recognise the depth of thought, research and learning held within it.
As members of our community, children's ideas matter. Their ways of seeing matter, and they have a right to be heard within our cultural and artistic spaces."
A big thanks to our NVAC volunteers who generously gave their time to help with hanging these works. An bigger thank you to our wonderful Colleen who has facilitated various visits to the Gallery by the children this year and was instrumental in hanging the works. A big shout out to all the dedicated staff at Eungai Preschool who helped with the visits, preparation, hanging and encouraging diversity, within art, in the children's curriculum.
