SEVENTH Gallery

03/06/2026

02/06/2026

Making Space is a project by OFFICE, investigating the evolving needs and challenges for creatives across the City of Yarra. The project is grounded in listening to the creative sector through a series of interviews with creative practitioners and a public forum.

The public forum is a chance to hear from the wider creative community about why they make work in the City of Yarra and the barriers to continuing to create in the area. There will be a short panel discussion to start the event then a facilitated discussion to hear from the broader creative sector. The outcomes of this work will be a series of publicly available recommendations on how the creative sector could be better supported to make and show work in the City of Yarra.

Panel and Public Forum
Wednesday 03 June
6pm - 7:30pm
35 Emma St, Collingwood

Panel
Arie Rain Glory
Tracy Burgess
Abigail Gilmore
Lucie Loy

02/06/2026

Following the involuntary removal of an Australian Blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon) to make way for power lines in her garden, Kym Maxwell turned the act of uprooting into a durational encounter with the mycorrhizal networks below ground. Where the logic of infrastructure saw only an obstacle to be removed, Kym found a dense, interconnected world beneath. A root system more complex and beautiful than anticipated, one that continued to generate new growth from each severed point.

29/05/2026

When power lines required a tree be removed from her garden, Kym Maxwell went underground.

Kym found a dense, interconnected world beneath. A mycorrhizal network more complex and beautiful than anticipated, continuing to generate new growth from every severed point. This became the grounds for a body of work about extraction, the materials of modernity and monocultural collapse, and ideas of a Monad (the source from which all other things flow).

In Strange Powers, Kym’s sculptures and drawings follow these ideas outward, from the garden, to the oil field, to the structures of power that shape both. A large drawing traces the ecology and science of the oil industry through one manmade crisis after another, reading resource exploitation through what Kym calls petro-masculinity.

Strange Powers brings this work into conversation with installations by Nicholas Burridge and Leon Rice-Whetton. On now at Seventh Gallery, Collingwood.

This project is supported by the City of Yarra.
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28/05/2026

The Río Tinto river in southwestern Spain runs red. Whether that’s geology or industrial ruin is still contested. Scientists, corporations, and communities still can’t agree on why and the answer determines everything.

Nicholas Burridge’s installation in Strange Powers inhabits this dispute. Swipe to read.

Strange Powers, with work by Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, and Leon Rice-Whetton is currently showing at our space in Collingwood. Come and visit if your in the neighbourhood.

20/05/2026

20/05/2026

Strange Powers, with work by Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, and Leon Rice-Whetton is currently showing at our space in Collingwood.

Pictured here is Nicholas Burridge’s installation, which enters the Río Tinto Mining Basin in southwestern Spain, where the river runs red. A network of electrical cables and junction boxes house vignettes of this other worldly place; photographic works printed in the river’s hyper-acidic waters, stories of scientists working in the field and a sample from Tasmania, the regions geologic twin. At the core of the work is a question that scientists, corporations, and communities still contest. Is the river’s extreme acidity a natural phenomenon, the ancient metabolic signature of subterranean organisms feeding on one of the world’s largest sulphide ore deposits? Or is it primarily the consequence of mining, and in particular the industrial devastation that followed 1873, when the British-owned Río Tinto Company Limited took control and scaled extraction? The answer determines everything. What the river is, who is responsible for it, and what, if anything, should be done. Nic does not attempt to resolve this. His work inhabits the contradiction, making visible a matter that is, all at once, geology, microbiology, industrial ruin, and living system.

This project is supported by the City of Yarra.

 

Pics courtesy of

12/05/2026

Strange Powers, with work by Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, and Leon Rice-Whetton.

We are open regular hours this week - Wed-Sat, 12-6pm. If your in the neighbourhood come see the show 😄

Pics courtesy of

12/05/2026

The City of Yarra’s Draft Budget 2026/27 is open for community feedback until midnight this Sunday 17 May. Seventh is submitting feedback. Here’s what we’re focusing on, and why we think you should submit too.

The Arts, Culture and Venues budget has been cut. Down $58,000 in cash, and around $161,000 in real terms once rising costs are factored in. Council’s own revenue goes up every year - by 2.75% in 2026/27. The arts budget is going down. That’s a choice.

It’s not a budget with no money. Total expenditure is rising from $236m to $253m - a $17m increase overall. This is a budget that has decided arts and culture can absorb a cut while other things grow.

The four named arts initiatives in this budget are all festivals and events. Nothing for artist-run spaces. Nothing for studios. Nothing for organisations trying to stay in Yarra.

Room to Create (Council’s program for affordable creative workspace) appears as a listed key service with no dollar amount, no named initiative, no performance indicator. It was established in 2013 with a $1 million target. Twelve years on, it sits at around $255,000. The Strategy that anchors it expires this year, with no announced successor.

Meanwhile, NFP organisations are being charged 3 to 5 times more than commercial hirers in percentage terms to use Council venues. Richmond Theatrette NFP day rate is up 47%. Large community space NFP hourly rate is up 37%. Commercial hirers are protected. The “concession” is shrinking.

The cultural sector doesn’t collapse. It contracts, quietly, sustained by the love and labour of the people inside it, until the conditions that made it vital no longer exist.

Yarra can choose to be different. We think you should ask them to.

Submit your feedback - yoursayyarra.com.au/draft-budget-202627

If you’re short on time but share our concerns - DM us and we’ll send you some key points or a template you can use for your submission.

11/05/2026

Thanks to everyone who came to the opening of Strange Powers - the second iteration of Matter and Spirit, an exhibition series exploring material transformation as structuring force: shaping landscapes, infrastructures, and forms through ongoing processes of extraction, decay, circulation, and renewal.

In Strange Powers, Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, and Leon Rice-Whetton look to the network (electrical, mycorrhizal, logistical) as material condition and active force.

Strange Powers is open until 13 June.